This morning I was chatting with the SMP vicar I am supervising and a book recommendation popped into my head. I went to my shelf and couldn’t find it. I know I have it, but I can’t find it. Such is life when your kids art adorns your selves and the order you initially put your books in has gradually shifted over into chaos the last few years. That happens. 

When I was still at a student, no matter the place or degree I was working toward, I used to love hanging out in the library when I had time to kill just walking the stacks. I wouldn’t look for something in particular but I would always seem to find something worth looking at. It happens less often in my own library because of the chaos but also because I typically know what I’m looking for when I peruse my shelves even if I can’t find it. 

Yesterday, to my delight, I found something on my shelves I wasn’t looking for. It was, to be fair, in a book I was using to help prep for a class I am teaching in my district on the Lutheran Confessions, it just wasn’t in the section I was using for that prep work. I was using Volume 1 of Hermann Sasse’s We Confess Anthology, the volume on Jesus Christ, because we are looking at the Ecumenical Creeds which anchor the opening of Book of Concord. 

Thumbing through Volume Three on the Church I came across a piece by Sasse called “Congregation and Ministry (1949).” There seems to be a fair bit of discussion in the LCMS right now over the office of the public ministry and the people who are gathered to receive what the office gives. Put differently, there is a fair bit of debate right now over the roles and relationships between clergy and laity, between pastors and people, between the divinely institute office of the ministry and the divinely instituted congregation of the priesthood of all believers. I decided to go down the rabbit hole and read the piece I found that I wasn’t looking for. 

Sasse’s trademarks are all apparent throughout the essay, a commitment to the scriptures and confessions is evident in every paragraph, as is his grasp of the broader ecclesiastical and historical realities at play. He makes explicit how Lutherans, unlike Rome, the Reformed, or virtually any other church body, does not see a divinely mandated structure for the church. We can function with a episcopal polity, a congregational one, or even a presbyterial one. There are pros and cons, but none of them are divinely mandated. Polity is truly an area of adiaphora, things that are indifferent but not inconsequential.

What is not adiaphora is the fact that God has decided to give the keys to both clergy and laity. Sasse rightly explores how in Matthew 16 and John 20, Christ gives the keys of binding and loosing sin directly to the apostles and in Matthew 18 gives the keys to the whole church. A further point he makes, however, is that even in Matthew 16 and John 20, the apostles do not merely represent clergy only, they are also representative of the whole church. In other words, any arguments about who holds the keys, about who has the duty and responsibility to bind and loose has to hold in tension the fact that Christ gave the keys to the clergy and the congregation. 

He also brought up the old break between Löhe and Walther. Read the history if you want, but the short version is one side upheld the clergy side of the divide and the other the congregational side—Löhe the former, Walther the latter. Sasse points out how they both failed to see that these sides of the debate, about who really has the responsibility, about who exists for whom, often fail to account for the fact that clergy and congregation cannot be played off each other. 

And yet, this is what happens when we say laity shouldn’t read the lessons. This is what happens when we treat clergy like hired hands. We are playing the office established by Christ against the congregation established by Christ and are ignoring that both have the keys by divine right. That office, by the way, isn’t the guy who occupies it. The office, as our Lutheran Confessions summarize rightly, is the preaching/teaching of the Gospel and the administration of the sacraments. It is the delivery of Christ’s gifts—not the deliverer. That’s why we can’t pit clergy against congregation, because they exist one for the other, because, to borrow from Norman Nagel, Christ has gifts to give and he wants to use people to give them to people. The office of the Holy Ministry is occupied, properly speaking, by Christ. He calls men and puts them to work within and under him for the sake of the people he has called to himself and entrusted with the same keys he entrusted to those office holders. 

Sasse, of course, put it far better than I could. The paragraphs that follow are what I found that I wasn’t looking for. Would that we who argue today over church and ministry remember not just Walther or Löhe (even if we are committed in the LCMS to Walther’s understanding in opposition to Löhe’s), but Sasse’s words below. 

“The future may involve forms which we today do not know about, bu which the Lord of the church is preparing amid thousandfold suffering of contemporary Christianity. He is His body’s savior even when we see only dissolution. Still true are Luther’s great words about God’s way in history: “By putting to death He makes alive” (occiedendo vivicat). This faith in what God is doing does not exclude our responsibility but rather includes it. This means renouncing everything that is destructive of the genuine holy ministry instituted by Christ and the genuine congregation instituted by Him, everything that makes of what Christ has instituted a place for exercising our lust for power, whether clerical or congregational. The office of the holy ministry is not lord over the congregation (2 Cor. 1:24); the congregation is not lord over the office of the holy ministry (Gal. 1). Both are under Him who alone is Lord; in Him they are one.”

Hermann Sasse, “Ministry and Congregation (July 1949), in We Confess The Church, Volume 3 (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1986), 82–83.