The Doctrine of Ministry in Martin Luther and the Lutheran Confessions

ROBERT KOLB

The fundamental appeal of Luther’s Reformation sprang from its effective address of the crisis in pastoral care which plagued the Western church at the end of the Middle Ages. During the fifteenth century European Christians had become increasingly active in expressing their piety in traditional ways. At the same time many had found increasing frustration because the old system of caring for Christian “souls” did not seem to be working. Priests had failed to be good pastors. ¹ Luther was propelled to center stage in the Western church by events that arose out of his deep personal concern for what the abuse of the indulgence trade was doing to the piety of the parishioners of Wittenberg. His was a Reformation, a revolution, of pastoral care.

THE PASTORAL OFFICE, THE PRIESTHOOD OF ALL BELIEVERS,

AND LUTHER’S EVANGELICAL BREAKTHROUGH

As Luther had grown up, he had been taught that the sacrament of ordination bestowed upon the priest the power to dictate and to dominate in God’s church, both over God’s dealing with believers and over the life of the believers themselves. Like the pagan shaman who was his ideological ancestor, such a priest was given a special quality that enabled him to do things no others could do. His standing before God gave him special standing over his parishioners; his power to dispense God’s grace gave him special power over them. It was little wonder then that a sensitive spirit like Luther’s was terrified at the thought of assuming such power in his first celebration of the mass. ² During the course of the development of his own understanding of the way God works in the world, in the late 1510s, Luther came to see that the power of God is expressed through the Word, not through priests who had attained a special spiritual status. By 1520 Luther had come to see that God’s Word places in believers’ mouths a power to serve one another, a power that has nothing to do with dictating or dominating. ³

In order to understand the way Luther defined this power to serve up the Word of God to fellow believers and to serve one another through the Word, we must recognize that his teaching regarding the public ministry of the Word rested on two presuppositions. The first is that the believer lives in two distinct but inseparable relationships, one with God, the other with other human creatures. In 1535 Luther called attention to the importance of this distinction of the two kinds of righteousness by labelling it “our theology.” ⁴ The “vertical” relationship —with God— is fundamentally a relationship that God establishes through the Word of God’s promise, to which believers react with trust. The “horizontal” relationship —with other human creatures— is fundamentally a relationship defined by the design that God has written into the human nature, a design that demands conformity with certain external standards of performance if human life is to be experienced as God wills it to be experienced. God’s Word of gospel establishes the first relationship; God’s Word of law regulates the second. All believers are equal in God’s sight: there is no “respect of persons” (Acts 10:34, KJV), no Jew nor Greek, no slave nor free, no male nor female (Gal. 3:28). But, Luther taught, in the horizontal sphere God has structured the human life to be lived in three situations: home (family and economic activities), the political realm, and the church. All people are given “offices” or responsibilities in each of these situations, and Christians recognize that these responsibilities are actually callings or vocations from God.

In so describing God’s design for human life Luther broke through the medieval understanding of the relationship of the sacred and profane. Therefore he taught that, even though the offices of spouse or parent or public official do not have the same eternal impact as does the office of pastor, the pastor’s calling to the office and responsibility of preaching the Word possesses no spiritual superiority or special holiness. This means that the activities of the pastoral office contribute nothing to its holder’s standing before God (the vertical dimension of life). The pastor exercises the same office that Christ exercised as his occupational vocation on earth, but that does not confer on the pastor a more godly nature or status; like all sinners pastors stand worthy before God only because of the forgiveness of sins bestowed through Jesus Christ. ⁵

The second presupposition that Luther bequeathed to his followers served as a basis for their understanding of the pastoral office: that God accomplishes the restoration of the vertical relationship in the believer’s life, the relationship of faith or trust in God, through God’s Word of promise. Luther presupposed that God works his saving will through this Word, which takes form in or is conveyed by selected elements of the created order: through the human flesh of Jesus of Nazareth, the incarnate second son of the Trinity; through human language, fundamentally in the Scriptures and derivatively in every written and oral address of the biblical message to human hearers; through elements of water and of bread--body and wine--blood, which are joined to the Word of forgiveness

and life; through believers, who apply the Word to the lives of other human creatures. That Word, Luther presumed, comes to believers in preaching, in baptism, in absolution, in the Lord’s Supper, and in the mutual conversation and consolation of Christians with one another (SA 3:4, BC 310). God created all reality by saying, “Let there be..., and God re-creates sinners into faithful children through the Word of forgiveness. God’s Word of law always confronts the sinner with accusation and condemnation, in addition to whatever else it may do; the Word of gospel bestows forgiveness and new life.

Luther combatted both a magical kind of understanding of the way God works with human creatures, so prominent in popular late medieval Christianity, and the dismissal of external instruments of God’s power, in Word and Sacrament, as promoted by spiritualists and Anabaptists, the heirs of the schismatic medieval tradition. Instead, Luther insisted that God acts in and through the Word in its various forms. ⁶ The papal party insisted on an ontological view of the ministry and a defense of the established system of doing things; both gutted the dynamic power of a ministry set to alter people’s lives through the energy of the gospel. The “radical” reformers’ neoplatonic world view refused to permit the possibility that God, who is spirit, could design a world in which selected elements of the created order could effectively convey God’s love and power. Luther dismissed both views, and in doing so formulated an understanding of the pastoral office to match.

Nineteenth- and twentieth-century discussions of Luther’s understanding of the ministry have often been framed by questions about power in the church which Luther was not answering. Since the French Revolution Western Christians have shared the general cultural concern about personal “rights.” Thus they have wanted to determine where the line between clerical and lay ~rights and power lies. That question indeed commanded the attention of the medieval church although the context for posing it changed with the coming of the modern era. Luther conceived of the entire relationship between clergy and laity differently. He ignored questions related to dominance and dictation by one or the other, questions of who controlled whom and what in the church. Instead, he pursued the definition of the power to serve, both God and one another, within the assembly of God’s people, through God’s Word.

We neither can nor ought to give the name of priest to those who are in charge of Word and sacrament among the people. The reason they have been called priests is either because of the custom of the heathen people or as a vestige of the Jewish nation. The result is greatly injurious to the church. According to the New Testament Scriptures better names would be ministers, deacons, bishops, stewards, presbyters.... Paul’s frequent use of the word “stewardship” or “household,” “ministry,” “minister,” “servant,” “one serving with the gospel,” etc. emphasizes that it is not the estate, or order, or any authority or dignity that he wants to uphold, but only the office and the function. ⁷

It is indeed true that there are “ambiguities in Luther’s terms priest, estate, office/offices, public/private” and “ministry, Gemeinde, and person” which make more difficult the task of assessing Luther’s doctrine of the pastoral office. 8 But it is indeed clear that he, like his colleague Philip Melanchthon, understood “ministry” as a “verbal noun” (a term borrowed from Peter Fraenkel). Melanchthon -and Luther- regarded the medieval term for the office of the ministry, “ministerium,” as a word that describes both the thing and the action that constitutes the thing and gives it its purpose -in the case of ministerium, serving. The Reformers in no way, denied that God had instituted a specific office for conveying the power of the Word into the lives of sinners, but they emphasized that the pastor who filled that office did so by serving in a specific way, as the agent of God’s forgiving and re-creating Word. Luther regarded the office without such serving as an empty shell and husk, a shadow of God’s design, consumed by its holder’s lust for personal power to replace the emptiness that comes when service no longer fills the framework of office. Thus, Luther believed, pastors truly maintain and defend their office not by insisting on their prerogatives as officeholders but simply by practicing and exercising their office with genuine care for and willing service to their people through exercising the power of God’s Word as God had designed its use among the people.

For Luther this office of the pastoral ministry was simply designed to serve. It was designed to serve by loosing the power of God’s Word, the power to forgive sins and give new life. It was designed to serve the church, which is the priesthood of all believers. The concept of the universal priesthood, which appeared in Luther’s writings very early in his public career, is often played off against his concept of the public ministry, but such games misunderstand Luther’s distinction of the two spheres of relationship and his concept of mutual service in and through God’s Word. These misunderstandings often fail to recognize the different agendas or questions that Luther addressed with each concept.

In his treatises of 1520, which issued his program for reform, Luther attacked the medieval conception of papal and priestly power. In his To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation, he condemned the papal use of “three walls” to keep Christendom in subjection to itself. Those three walls consisted of the papal claims to temporal power over earthly rulers, to the sole right to interpret Scripture, and to the sole right to call a council. ¹⁰ In The Babylonian Captivity of the Church he criticized the abuse of the Lord’s Supper which made it an instrument of priestly tyranny over God’s people. The priests had used the sacrament “to set up a seed bed of implacable discord, by which clergy and laymen should be separated from each other farther than heaven from earth, to the incredible injury of the grace of baptism and to the confusion of our fellowship in the gospel.” He continued by defining the proper office of the ministry: “The duty of a priest is to preach, and if he does not preach, he is as much a priest

as a picture of a man is a man.... It is the ministry of the Word that makes the priest and the bishop.” Hellmut Lieberg has summarized three distortions that lay beneath this medieval conception of the priesthood, as Luther set them forth. First, it made the priests into agents who could render satisfaction to God, and thus control God’s grace, through their role in the mass. Second, it made them agents of works-righteousness as they enforced God’s law and attained grace through regulating the performance of its demands. Third, it made the priests superior to the laity by virtue of their priestly place in a hierarchy. 12 Each of these three distortions betrayed the oppressive nature of the medieval priesthood, which tried to dominate and dictate to both God and believers. It manipulated God’s grace through the sacrifice of the mass and through the works performed and prescribed by the priestly caste. It exacted obedience beyond the demands of God’s law. It exacted obeisance and obsequiousness beyond human propriety from God’s people.

Luther addressed this perversion of the biblical concept of the ministry of the Word by responding to two questions. The first asked how God had designed the means by which to restore the vertical relationship through the Word, in the horizontal sphere; the answer was through the ministry of Word. The second asked whether service as “priests” gave some believers a higher status before God, in the vertical sphere; the answer announced that all believers are equally priests before God. In To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation Luther stated, “All Christians truly are of the spiritual estate, and there is no difference among them except of office. Paul says in 1 Cor. 12:[12-13] that we are all one body, yet every member has its own work by which it serves the others.” 13 In his The Freedom of a Christian, written the same year, Luther commented on I Pet. 2:9,

Hence all of us who believe in Christ are priests and kings.... Not only are we the freest of kings, we are also priests forever which is far more excellent than being kings, for as priests we are worthy to appear before God to pray for others and to teach one another divine things. These are the functions of priests, and they cannot be granted to any unbeliever. Thus Christ has made it possible for us, provided we believe in him, to be not only his brethren, co-heirs, and fellow-kings, but also his fellow priests. Therefore we may boldly come into the presence of God in the spirit of faith [Heb. 10:19, 22] and cry “Abba Father!” pray for one another, and do all things which we see done foreshadowed in the outer and visible works of priests. 14

At the same time, however, Luther was also ready to answer the question regarding how God uses the Word to establish a saving relationship with humankind. The answer to that question entails not only how the Word itself functions but through whom it functions publicly: “Although we are all equally priests, we cannot all publicly minister and teach.” In rejecting “so great a display of power and so terrible a tyranny that no heathen empire or other earthly power can be compared with it,” 15 the tyranny of the papally dominated

and directed sacerdotal system of the medieval church, Luther did not reject the office of the public ministry. For he viewed it as a gift from God in the horizontal sphere of human relationships, a special position to which some are called to make possible the formal and public use of God’s saving Word. “A Priest is not identical with Presbyter or Minister --for one is born to be priest, one becomes a minister,” he could write three years later. Although, in words that demonstrate the ambiguity of his use of these terms, Luther could write, “the first office [that is, function], that of the ministry of the Word, therefore, is common to all Christians,” he insisted that the formal exercise of any sharing of the Word be invested in those who are called to such a public ministry through the election by a congregation. 16

For Luther did indeed believe that the entire church had been given the Word to proclaim. But for the sake of good order, and because God’s design for the structure of the church includes leadership, and because God had given the people a variety of gifts, some were to be designated and called by the rest to exercise this formal position as first servants of the church, pastors for the flock. 17 There can be no doubt where Luther saw the focus of all the activities of these called pastors. He listed their functions:

to teach, to preach and proclaim the Word of God, to baptize, to consecrate or administer the Eucharist, to bind and loose sins, to pray for others, to sacrifice, and to judge all doctrine and spirits. Certainly these are splendid and royal duties. But the first and foremost of all on which everything else depends, is the teaching of the Word of God. For we teach with the Word, we baptize with the Word, we sacrifice with the Word, we judge all things by the Word. 18

Because for Luther the pastoral ministry was so completely focused on care for God’s people through the Word, he could reject the medieval view of an indelible character that was bestowed for life upon the recipient of ordination. God called pastors to serve, and when they no longer served, by serving up the Word, they should no longer occupy the office of the Word. “In this view of ministry, the so-called ‘indelible character’ vanishes and the perpetuity of the office is shown to be fictitious. A minister may be deposed if he proves unfaithful. 19

For no magical power was attached to this office or position. God had created it to serve the whole body of believers, of the priests of God. Those priests, Luther believed, should call —or at least have a part in calling -those who would serve God by serving them through the stewardship of the Word in their midst and for their sake. The power of the priesthood over the pastor did not exist for Luther; priests have only the power to support the ministry of the Word through encouragement and prayer. The power of the ministry over the priesthood did not exist for Luther. Pastors have only the power to bring death to sinners and life to God’s children through the Word. Luther’s chief concern in his understanding of both the public ministry and the priesthood of all believers

was the same as the chief concern of every aspect of his teaching: that sinners might be brought to repentance and life in and through the gospel of Jesus Christ.

THE OFFICE OF THE MINISTRY IN THE BOOK OF CONCORD

Luther’s followers caught that central concern, and so it is no wonder that the defining documents of the Lutheran church, the Lutheran confessions, can be viewed not only as confessions of the faith or as introductions to the Christian life, but also as guidelines for the effective pastoral care of believers. Only with a very narrow definition of the pastoral office can it be said that “there is surprisingly little about the office of the ministry in the Confessions, and where they do treat of it, the discussion of the subject is almost always incidental to the main theme.” 20 Indeed, any Lutheran discussion of the pastoral office must be a part of the larger treatment of the plan of God to save the people through the action of the means of grace. But with that in mind we can read the BC as a handbook for that office.

The Book of Concord reiterates Luther’s critique of the abuses of the office of the public ministry in the medieval church. His own preface to the Smalcald Articles voiced the complaint that “neither the bishops nor the canons care how the poor people live or die.... Those people cannot hear Christ speak to them as the true shepherd speaking to his sheep” (SA preface, BC 290). Likewise, Melanchthon not only attacked public offenses against morality among the clergy, such as performing the Mass for money (Ap 12.15-16, BC 184) or living licentiously (Ap 23.44, BC 245); he also criticized the abuse of the confessional, where the priest should have been comforting consciences and exercising the most significant power of God, the forgiveness of sins. Instead, clergy too often were making “tragic spectacles” by fighting with one another over jurisdiction to conduct confession and were also subjecting the laity to a legalistic checkpoint system as they exacted penance from their parishioners (Ap 11. 8 BC 181). The Wittenberg movement intended to do things differently. In responding to the papal party’s criticism of the CA treatment of confession and absolution, Melanchthon rejoiced that “we have so explained and extolled the blessing of absolution and the power of the keys that many troubled consciences have received consolation from our teaching.” Such pastoral care had encouraged many devout people and had brought Luther the praise of all good people “since it discloses a sure and firm consolation for the conscience,” in contrast to previous pastoral practice (Ap 11.2, BC 181).

That pastoral practice tied public ministry inextricably to the Word. When titles were applied to the first seven articles of the CA, the title “the office of the ministry” (German) or “the ministry of the church” (Latin) was chosen for its fifth article, which followed and flowed from the central teaching of the document, as expressed in its fourth article, its treatment of justification through

faith in Christ. This title was accurate in one sense and yet, at least at first glance, seems deceptive. For the article indeed begins by stating “to obtain such faith God instituted the office of the ministry,” but it defines the “office of the ministry” with the phrase “that is, [through it God] provided the Gospel and the sacraments,” the means or instruments by which he bestows the Holy Spirit, who effects faith “when and where he pleases, in those who hear the Gospel” (CA 5.1, 2, BC 31). The public ministry of the church is inextricably linked with God’s tools for creating faith, for re‑creating human creatures as God’s children —the means of grace, Word, and sacrament. The pastoral office is the Holy Spirit’s instrument by which the power of God’s gospel is conveyed to people; the means of grace are the instruments that the pastor uses to apply God’s power to his chosen children. Pastor and Word are like horse and carriage: the church does not have one without the other.

The pastor is the servant of God’s command and of God’s people’s needs, according to Melanchthon. He believed that in the exercise of their calling to preach the Word and administer the sacraments pastors “do not represent their own persons but the person of Christ, because of the church’s call.... When they offer the Word of Christ or the sacraments, they do so in Christ’s place and stead” (Ap 7.28, BC 173; cf. Ap 7.47, BC 177). They should not confuse themselves with their Lord, but they should understand that they function because the Lord has called and commissioned them to do the task of conveying the benefits of his incarnation. Servants both of their congregations and of the congregations’ Lord do not find themselves, however, caught between the two; for they serve God’s purposes by obeying God, and they serve their people’s requirements by the divine help of God’s Word to them. God’s purposes are always congruent with the people’s need, but the people’s demands are not always congruent with God’s command. The pastor serves them first and foremost by serving up bitter pill of repentance and then the banquet of God’s feast of forgiveness.

As for Luther, so also for Melanchthon and the authors of the Formula of Concord (FC), the pastoral ministry exists as the channel through which the Word does its work in the public arena; it exists to lead, guide, and serve the entire congregation of God’s people in exercising God’s callings to live in the Word and out of its power. Melanchthon defined the basic functions of the minister of the Word thus: “The gospel requires of those who preside over the churches that they preach the gospel, remit sins, administer the sacraments, and in addition, exercise jurisdiction, that is, excommunicate those who are guilty of notorious crimes, and absolve those who repent” (Tr 60, BC 330). In the CA he had used a similar definition of the functions of the pastoral office in discussing “the power of bishops” (CA 28, BC 81-94). “Our teachers assert that according to the Gospel the power of the keys or the power of bishops is a power and command of God to preach the Gospel, to forgive and retain sins

and to administer and distribute the sacraments” (CA 28.5, BC 81; German), Melanchthon wrote, and he supported that simple definition by citing John 20:21-23. He believed that God had ordained the public ministry, the office of the bishop, to preach the Gospel, forgive sins, judge doctrine and condemn doctrine that is contrary to the Gospel, and exclude from the Christian community the ungodly whose wicked conduct is manifest. All this is to be done not by human power but by God’s Word alone” (CA 28.21, BC 84; German). The pastoral ministry, from which Melanchthon refused to distinguish any special role for the bishop, is the means by which God gives “eternal righteousness, the Holy Spirit, and eternal life” (CA 28.8-9, BC 82; German). This meant a rejection of the medieval model of clerical leadership, which Melanchthon understood to be that of a priest who presided over the sacrifice of the Aass in order to obtain grace for Christian people. The Wittenbergers taught, in contrast, that pastors deliver what God has already established through the death and resurrection of Jesus, the forgiveness that the Word and sacraments convey (Ap 13.7-10, BC 212).

Melanchthon was delighted to report that this model was working. With joy cited the example of the evangelical churches that he had represented at Augsburg, writing in the Apology that the Lord’s Supper was used by “many in our circles” every Lord’s day, after the people had been instructed, examined, and absolved. In the same circles pastors had been instructing and examining the youth publicly, and the preaching of the gospel, which is “the chief worship of God,” was heard regularly (Ap 15.40-42, BC 220).

The prime responsibility of the evangelical pastor, according to Melanchthon, is to convey the gospel of forgiveness in Jesus Christ to his people. Pastors are not responsible for converting anyone. They are not responsible for maintaining anyone’s faith. The Holy Spirit does that through the Word. The pastor’s task is to apply God’s Word faithfully and aptly to God’s people. David Chytraeus, Melanchthon’s disciple, drove that point home when, in preparing the FC’s article on the human will, he wrote, “On the one hand, it is true that both the preacher’s planting and watering and the hearer’s running and willing would be in vain, and no conversion would follow if there were not added the power and operation of the Holy Spirit, who through the Word preached and heard illuminates and converts hearts so that men believe this Word and give their assent to it. On the other hand, neither the preacher nor the hearer should question this grace and operation of the Holy Spirit.” At that point Chytraeus picked up the words of his colleague, Jacob Andreae:

[The preacher and hearer] should be certain that, when the Word of God is preached, pure and unalloyed according to God’s command and will, and when the people diligently and earnestly listen to it and meditate on it, God is certainly present with his grace and gives what man is unable by his own powers to take or to give. We should not and cannot pass judgment on the Holy Spirit’s presence,

operations, and gifts merely on the basis of our feeling, how and when we perceive it in our hearts. On the contrary, because the Holy Spirit’s activity often is hidden, and happens under cover of great weakness, we should be certain, because of and on the basis of his promise, that the Word which is heard and preached in an office and work of the Holy Spirit, whereby he assuredly is potent and active in our hearts (2 Cor. 2:14ff.). (FC, SD 2.55-56, BC 531-32)

Chytraeus and Andreae were giving their readers in the pastoral office both a message of law and of gospel in this passage. They were reminding the pastors of their obligation to work hard to present God’s Word accurately and aptly, effectively and clearly. At the same time they were reassuring these pastors that their work serves as the Spirit’s instrument, and that the Spirit is both in control of the course of the Word and ready to forgive the preacher who errs in applying it.

The prime responsibility of the evangelical pastor is to convey the gospel of forgiveness in Jesus Christ to Christ’s people. Many other tasks have fallen to pastors throughout the history of the church, and pastors continually face the possibility of distraction from their prime task by important but secondary activities. Onto the pastor’s desk in a modern congregation fall all sorts of administrative tasks and requests for services related to the entire range of human living. Furthermore, the preaching of the gospel presumes the proclamation of God’s accusing law, and it presumes instruction in the practice of Christian piety, as Melanchthon indicated in offering a list of the subjects on which evangelical pastors should preach: 1) “penitence and the fear of God” —the accusing force of the law; 2) “faith in Christ, the righteousness of faith, comfort for the conscience through faith” —the means God uses to justify, the gospel; 3) and the goal of such preaching, the exercise of the forgiven life, restored to truly human living —“the exercise of faith, prayer and our assurance that it is efficacious and is heard, the cross, respect for rulers and for all civil ordinances, the distinction between the kingdom of Christ (or the spiritual kingdom) and political affairs, marriage, the education and instruction of children, chastity, and all the works of love” (Ap 15.43, BC 221).

Nonetheless, pastors must always confront and reject the temptation to subvert their ministries by confusing the task to which the pastoral office commits them with other duties and responsibilities foisted on them by their own desire to “be more than just a preacher of forgiveness” or by the desires of others to have the pastor “do something practical, too.” In their day Melanchthon and Luther were forced to evaluate the way in which the German bishops conducted their public duties. In the time of Charlemagne, when good lieutenants were hard for an emperor to find, secular powers and duties had been appended to the spiritual responsibilities of the office of bishop. The prince-bishops of the Holy Roman Empire had become more prince than bishop, to the great detriment of their episcopal functions.

Therefore, in Art. 28 of the CA Melanchthon dwelt at great length not only on the definition of the bishop’s calling but also on the confusion and the damage done to his pastoral function by his having to fill a formal political role in secular society. Melanchthon followed up his fundamental definition of the office of Word as the instrument of God’s forgiveness, mediated through Word and sacrament, by observing, “the two authorities, the spiritual and the temporal, are not to be mingled or confused, for the spiritual power has its commission to preach the Gospel and administer the sacraments. Hence it should not invade the function of the other, should not set up and depose kings, should not annul temporal laws or undermine obedience to government, should not make or prescribe to the temporal power laws concerning worldly matters” (CA 28.12-14 BC 83). Melanchthon was willing to grant the bishops of the church the exercise of such a secular role in theory: “In cases where bishops possess temporal authority and the sword, they possess it not as bishops by divine right, but by human, imperial right, bestowed by Roman emperors and kings for the temporal administration of their lands. Such authority has nothing at all to do with the office of the Gospel” (CA 28.19-20, BC 83-84; German) [in the Latin: “This, however, is a function other than the ministry of the Gospel”]. As a matter of fact, the adherents of the CA found unworkable Melanchthon’s theoretical granting of the possibility that the ministers of the gospel could also function as officers of the state. In the places where they replaced medieval bishops with evangelical holders of the office, they entrusted the former bishops’ political responsibilities to secular administrators. In our day and age the absence of a cultural sense of the sacred tempts church and society alike to want to summon preachers of the gospel to secular tasks of all sorts. For every culture needs to have some sense of the sacred and transcendent, of the moral and ethical, even if it strives for a valueless public square. Pastors cannot avoid the necessity of addressing cultural questions to which the law of God speaks, and they cannot avoid having the world hear what they say. But they should beware of the maelstrom of society’s swirling surges, of the tar baby of cultural involvement for its own sake or on its own terms. For the gospel of which they are servant stands as a rock of offense to every cultural system and every religion which a society devises for itself. Pastors stand as the confessors of the church, demarking its existence from that of the state and society that surround it. Chytraeus was writing against the background of the controversy over the decision of Melanchthon and his colleagues at the University of Wittenberg to try to save the evangelical faith through compromise in the face of political persecution (after the imperial victory of the armies of Charles V over the Lutheran princes in 1548), as he urged, “especially the ministers of the Word, as leaders of the community of God, are obligated to confess openly, not only by words but also through their deeds and actions, the true doctrine and all that pertains to it, according to the Word of God” (FC, SD 10.10, BC 612).

“NOT BY HUMAN POWER BUT BY GOD’S WORD ALONE”

Such confession is a part of their call, of their calling, of their office. The prime function of the evangelical pastor is to convey the gospel of forgiveness in Jesus Christ to Christ’s people. But “ministry” denotes not only a function but also an official position, an institution, which God designed to give leadership to the community of his people. Melanchthon presumed that Christ had established an office that would serve believers by carrying out the functions of absolving and of proclaiming the love of God in Christ. In his confessional writings he did not attempt to define the relationship between the priesthood of all believers and the pastoral office. He presumed that God calls all believers to be priests in their baptisms and that God has designed the public ministry and the leadership that is supplied through the pastoral office as a sine qua non of the church’s life. 21 It is not true that in a congregation where pastoral leadership is strong, the exercise of the priesthood of all believers will probably be weak, or that strong exercise of the royal priesthood will weaken the pastor. Good priests and good pastors reinforce each other in the tasks that God has assigned to each. Speaking of the universal priesthood and the office of preaching Norman Nagel comments, “Each is the peculiar gift it is, and as gift for each other. They are the gifts of the Lord Jesus, and this is called in question when they are played off against each other. To do that we have to take them into our hands, to adjust or improve them according to some notion of ours.” 21

Although some of Luther’s followers over the centuries have fallen into bitter disputes over the forms of the ministry and the governance of the church, by comparison with other confessional traditions Lutherans have been notoriously indifferent to questions of church polity. The silence of the Lutheran confessions on specific forms for the exercise of the public ministry may have contributed to the ambiguity and even indifference of many of Luther’s heirs to such questions.

Nonetheless, there is no question that the Reformers were convinced that it was God’s will that there be an office that bears God-given responsibility for the public exercise of absolution and the public proclamation of the gospel. The observation that “the office of the ministry is the process of the gospel” is not false 21 but neither is it the entire truth. God knows fallen human nature too well simply to entrust the gospel to going with the flow. Therefore, he has structured the responsibility and constituted the function of public proclamation in the office of the pastoral ministry. No external form --no bishops or consistories or vows or regulations-- can ensure the proper proclamation of the gospel. Nothing can preserve the gospel but its faithful proclamation; only the gospel itself can guarantee the gospel. But by ordaining the public ministry, the Wittenbergers believed, God had left less to chance the conduct of the functions of the gospel, preaching forgiveness, administering the sacraments, pronouncing absolution. Therefore, Melanchthon insisted that pastors be “properly called”

(CA 14, BC 36); “the church has the command to appoint ministers: to this we must subscribe wholeheartedly, for we know that God approves this ministry and is present in it” (Ap 13.12, BC 211). (It is precisely for this reason that Melanchthon could label ordination into the pastoral office a sacrament-because “the ministry of the Word has God’s command and glorious promises: ‘The Gospel is the power of God for salvation to everyone who has faith [Rom. 1: 16]’ again, ‘My Word that goes forth from my mouth shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and prosper in the thing for which I sent it’ [Isa. 55: 11]” (Ap 13.11-13, BC 212-13). Although Melanchthon used the term “sacrament” more freely than his successors felt comfortable doing, his point must still be noted.) But he did not offer specific details regarding the shape of the institution of the pastoral office.

Hermann Sasse caught the spirit of the Wittenbergers when he observed that “the church is correctly ordered in the sense of Lutheran teaching when it is so constituted as to offer the office of the ministry a maximum of possibilities to accomplish its service of the proclamation of the pure gospel and of the proper administration of the sacraments in the name and according to the commission of the Lord of the church and when it preserves a maximum of possibilities for the congregation which Jesus Christ himself has called through the Word and the sacraments to live its life in the world and to carry out its service for human creatures. . . . 1124 Edmund Schlink concludes on the basis of Sasse’s judgment that the confessional position on the public ministry therefore means that, “liberated by the Gospel for service to the Gospel, ‘man’ establishes ordinances in the church for examinations, ordinations, and installations, for the relationship of congregation, pastor and church administration for the unfolding of the functions of the one spiritual office in various offices arranged by the church, for the cooperation of the voice of the universal priesthood of believers in the activities of church administration, etc.” 25

The call to the pastoral office was certainly no matter of indifference to Luther. Rather, he took great comfort in the fact that God had called him through the church to teach God’s Word. For by virtue of the call pastors can know that they have not established themselves in office: they neither need nor can depend on themselves or directly themselves in the conduct of the office. Wilhelm Maurer has observed in commenting on CA Art. 14, “Because God himself is at work in the ministry of the Word, no one can be self-called; only God —even if through human means— can call to this service.” 26 Pastors themselves need to know that they do not stand alone, that they have not entered into this activity of preaching the gospel on their own or by their own volition. That means then that they do not decide whether- but only how-to proclaim the Word of the Lord. “To fear no one and to set forth the truth freely and openly is not a test of the pastor’s courage; it is a matter of office and command. Those who preach should not wear out and let themselves be chased into a corner, nor should they

become impatient and creep away to the wilderness.” 27 Pastors may also rely on the fact that God has designated them to be his servants in those moments when they must overcome doubt about their capacity to stand against the cultural forces that want to gut or silence their message. They must take comfort in their calls when their exercise of the public ministry is questioned and mocked. And when the criticism has the ring of the truth about it, and refuge is available only in the gospel that forgives also the pastor’s failure to exercise God’s calling well, then they must also stand firmly upon God’s expressed desire that even such a sinner as this serve his gospel, too. As Christians, pastors, too, experience that the whole of their lives is the fife of repentance.

Not only pastors need to know that they carry out the functions of their office because God has called them to do so. Their people need to know that, too. Maurer quotes Luther that “the office of comfort,” as he calls it, “is weak if not authorized and is not pleasing and satisfying to God above all.”

It is Luther’s personal interest in salvation that lies behind his great concern with the saving activity of the office; his insistence on proper calling cannot be based solely on his opposition to the Anabaptists and spiritualists. Clearly, personal possession of the Spirit is not what constitutes a call; the office is not personal but is based on the Spirit and on Christ.... In comforting and teaching, the pastor does not own the Spirit; the pastor is merely a steward. “If that were not so, everything would be up in the air. I would have to be rebaptized tomorrow, because I would not know whether the person who baptized me was trustworthy.... But that is what you must know for sure -that he has the authority to baptize, to preach, and to absolve.” As soon as he moves from office to- person he becomes unreliable. 28

In addition to their concern that the public ministry of the church be defined as a ministry of forgiveness through Word and sacrament, Luther and Melanchthon were concerned to define it in such a way that no minister of the Word exercise tyrannous power over other ministers of the Word. To that end Melanchthon began his argument in the Tr by insisting that the papacy erred by claiming primacy over other bishops by divine right. God had not so instituted and shaped the public ministry, and the papacy’s arrogation of such power to itself was a mark of its Antichristian nature (Tr 39-59, BC 327-30). “In Luke 22:24-27 Christ expressly forbids lordship among the apostles.... Christ ... taught [the apostles] that no one should have lordship or superiority among them but that the apostles should be sent forth as equals and exercise the ministry of the Gospel in common.” To exercise power within the church in the manner of secular rulers was expressly forbidden by Christ, who had sent out his disciples “as equals, without discrimination” (John 20:21), Melanchthon argued. Paul, too, “makes ministers equal and teaches that the church is above the ministers. Therefore he does not attribute to Peter superiority or authority over the church or the other ministers” (1 Cor. 3:4-8, 1 Cor. 3:21, 22). Melanchthon continued, “This is to say that neither Peter nor the other ministers should assume lordship

or authority over the church, nor burden the church with traditions, nor let anybody’s authority count for more than the Word, nor set the authority of Cephas over against the authority of other apostles” (Tr 7-9, 11, BC 320-21). This does not mean that Luther and Melanchthon rejected any role for overseers among the pastors of the church, nor did they reject the possibility of those who would serve as preachers or deacons alongside the pastors. From occasional statements of Luther’s, Maurer concludes that the reformer regarded both the office of bishop and the office of deacon as “derived from the pastoral office” and thus designed to “serve the truth and effectiveness of the gospel.” 29 That gospel united overseers and assistants with the pastors in one office, in which some had different tasks but all had one assignment, as Melanchthon summarized it: “Christ gave the apostles only spiritual power, that is, the command to preach the Gospel, proclaim the forgiveness of sins ‘ administer the sacraments, and excommunicate the godless without physical violence” (Tr 31, BC 325).

To carry out this ministry of the Word pastors must use the Word themselves, the Reformers believed. Luther admonished the readers of his Large Catechism, focusing on pastors who would pick up the book, “Now that pastors are free from the useless, bothersome babbling of the [canonical] Seven Hours [the prescribed communal devotional program of the cloister], it would be fine if every morning, noon, and evening they would read, instead, at least a page or two from the Catechism, the Prayer Book, the New Testament, or something else from the Bible, and would pray the Lord’s Prayer for themselves and their parishioners. In this way they might show honor and gratitude to the Gospel” (LC Preface, 3, BC 358). For, as he stated a bit later, “Not only do we need God’s Word daily as we need our daily bread; we also must use it daily against the daily, incessant attacks and ambushes of the devil with his thousand arts” (LC Preface, 13, BC 360). Luther did not merely study God’s Word for a lecture or a sermon; he lived with it, used it, imbibed it, immersed his entire thinking and planning in it. This review of the Word for Luther was based upon the summary of the Scriptures in the catechism, which the believer should read and teach, learn, meditate upon, and ponder (LC Preface, 19, BC 361; cf. SC, Preface, 6, BC 359).

In the Table of Responsibilities Luther laid out his expectations of those who hold the pastoral office with the words of I Tim. 3:2‑6: the pastor should be “temperate, sensible, dignified, hospitable, an apt teacher, no drunkard, not violent but gentle, not quarrelsome, and no lover of money.” That prescription holds the mirror of the law up to ministers of the Word in every generation of the church’s history.

As the same time the Lutheran confessions apply the gospel to pastors as well. Melanchthon reacted to the criticism exchanged between pastors and people by observing, “Perfection (that is, the integrity of the church) is preserved when the strong bear with the weak, when the people put the best construction on

the faults of their clergy, when the bishops take into account the weakness of the people” (Ap 4.233, BC 140). Luther’s admonition to all Christians to seek the peace that Christ offers in absolution applies to pastors as well as lay people. The highest art of the confessor is to know the passages of Scripture with which to comfort and to strengthen the faith of those whose consciences are heavily burdened or who are distressed and sorely tried (SC 5:29). But often confessors cannot apply their own medicine to themselves and must flee to another to hear the peace of Christ. “If you are poor and miserable, then go and make use of the healing medicine” (LC, Confession, 26, BC 460) is advice that Luther would give to pastors, too.

Lutheran pastors are called to be ready always to apply the salve of Christ’s blood to aching consciences and distressed minds. They are called and given the responsibility of applying the healing and life-restoring power of the gospel of Jesus Christ to lives broken by the proclamation and impact of God’s law. Temptations stand on every hand inviting pastors at the end of the twentieth century to abandon the model for ministry set forth by the authors of the BC. The world tempts us to play its games and to serve as business managers, as social directors, as the “cheapest shrinks” in town. Within the church arise temptations to organize and to institute and use power in the world’s way. Inevitably the law must govern the relationships of people within the institutional life of the church. But pastors must remember that their call has to do with the gospel. Whatever other duties they must or may assume, their people count on them to do what God has designed their calling to do, “preach the Gospel, forgive sins, judge doctrine and condemn doctrine that is contrary to the Gospel, and exclude from the Christian community the ungodly whose wicked conduct is manifest ... not by human power but by God’s Word alone” (CA 28.21, BC 84; German).

NOTES

1. On late medieval piety, see Bernd Moeller, “Piety in Germany Around 1500,” in The Reformation in Medieval Perspective, ed. Steven E. Ozment (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1971), 50-75. Ozment depicts the crisis of pastoral care (without using the term) in his The Reformation in the Cities: The Appeal of Protestantism to Sixteenth‑Century Germany and Switzerland (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975).

2. James M. Kittelson, Luther the Reformer: The Story of the Man and His Career (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1986), 53-55; Martin Brecht, Martin Luther: His Road to Reformation, 1483-1521, trans. James L. Schaaf (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985), 70-76.

3. Treatments of Luther’s doctrine of the pastoral office and related topics include Jan Aarts, Die Lehre Martin Luthers uber das Amt in der Kirche, Eine genetisch-systematische Untersuchung seiner Schriften von 1512 bis 1525 (Helsinki: Luther-Agricola-Gesellschaft, 1972); Wilhelm Brunotte, Das geistliche Amt bei Luther (Berlin: Lutherisches Verlagshaus, 1959); Hellmut Lieberg, Amt und Ordination bei Luther und Melanchthon (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1962). See also Paul Althaus, The Theology of Martin Luther, trans. Robert C. Schultz (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1966), 323-32; B. A. Gerrish, “Priesthood and Ministry in the Theology of Luther,” Church History 34 (1965): 404-22; Lowell C. Green, “Change in Luther’s Doctrine of the Ministry,” The Lutheran Quarterly 18 (1966): 173-83; Robert H. Fischer, “Another Look at Luther’s Doctrine of the Ministry,” The Lutheran Quarterly 18 (1966): 260-7 1; David P. Daniel, “A Spiritual Condominium: Luther’s Views on Priesthood and Ministry with Some Structural Implications,” Concordia Journal 14 (1988): 266-82.

4. Lectures on Galatians (15 35), LW 26:7, chaps. 1-4 with a summary of the distinction on 4-12. It shapes the entire commentary on Galatians which was given in lecture, 15 3 132, and published in 1535. His earliest statement of what he called the “two kinds of righteousness” was presented in two tracts issued in 1519, one of which is available in English: “Two Kind of Righteousness, 1519,” in LW 31: 293-306.

5. The best overview of Luther’s thought in this regard is found in Gustaf Wingren, Luther an Vocation, trans. Carl C. Rasmussen (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press, 1957). See Luther’s “Confession concerning Christ’s Supper, 1528,” in LW 37: esp. 364-65, which served as background for the writing of the CA. On the use of Luther’s concept of the two governments and the three estates in the CA and the AP, see Robert Kolb, “God Calling, ‘Take Care of My People’: Luther’s Concept of Vocation in the Augsburg Confession and Its Apology,” Concordia Journal 8, no. 1 (1982): 4-11, and Wilhelm Maurer, Historical Commentary an the Augsburg Confession, trans. H. George Anderson (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1986), 85-97. See also Edmund Schlinck, Theoloz, of the Lutheran Confessions, trans. Paul F. Koehneke and Herbert J. A. Bournan (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press, 1961), 230; Willard D. Allbeck, Studies in the Lutheran Confessions (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1968), 71; and Daniel, “Spiritual Condominium.”

6. Leif Grane, The Augsburg Confession: A Commentary, trans. John H. Rasmussen (Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House, 1987), 72-73.

7. “Concerning the Ministry” (1523) vol. 40 (Church and Ministry II), vol. 40 of LW, ed. Conrad Bergendoff (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press, 1958), 35.

8. Fischer, “Luther’s Doctrine of the Ministry,” 268; he refers to a wider discussion of some of the problems involved with these terms in Gerrish, “Priesthood and Ministry,” 416-20. The problems lie not so much in Luther’s own ambiguousness, though that is not to be denied, but more in the rich meaning of the German word Amt, which embraces both functions of service to the people appropriate to each of society’s many offices, and the official positions that take shape in institutional form to ensure the proper carrying out of those functions; see Deutsches Worterbuch, ed. Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm, (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1854), 1:280-81.

9. According to this interpretation, words such as “doctrine,” “tradition,” and also “confession” involved not only the content of what was taught, handed down, or confessed, but also the action involved in the respective process. See Peter Fraenkel, “Revelation and Tradition: Notes on Some Aspects of Doctrinal Continuity in the Theology of Philip Melanchthon,” Studia Theologica 13 (1959): 97-133, esp. 116-18.

10. LW 44:126-36.

11. LW 36:112, 115.

12. Lieberg, Amt und Ordination, 24-39.

13. LW 44:127.

14. LW 31:354-55. On the individualistic interpretation of Luther’s understanding of the priesthood of all believers, see B. A. Gerrish’s necessary rejoinder, “Priesthood and Ministry,” 410-11.

15. Ibid., 356.

16. LW 40:18-22, 40-44. On the importance of the distinction between public and private exercise of the power of the Word for Luther, see Brunotte, Das geistliche Amt, 56-59.

17. Lieberg, Amt und Ordination, 69-103, treats these concepts in detail.

18. LW 40:21.

19. Ibid., 35.

20. Edgar M. Carlson, “The Doctrine of the Ministry in the Confessions,” The Lutheran Quarterly 15 (1963): 118.

21. See the discussions of these issues in Schlink, Lutheran Confessions, 243-54, and Holsten Fagerberg, A New Look at the Lutheran Confiessions, 1529-1537, trans. Gene J. Lund (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1972), 226-36.

22. Norman E. Nagel, “The Office of the Holy Ministry in the Confessions,” Concordia Journal 14 (1988): 285 (283-99).

23. Friedrich Mildenberger, Theology of the Lutheran Confessions, trans. Erwin L. Lueker, ed. Robert C. Schultz (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1986), 119.

24. Hermann Sasse, Kirchenregiment und weltliche Obrigkeit nach lutherischer Lehre (Munich: Kaiser, 1935), 60, cited partially in Schlink, Lutheran Confessions, 252.

25. Ibid.

26. Maurer, Augsburg Confession, 190-91.

27. Ibid., 199.

28. Ibid., 191-192.

29. Ibid., 195.