Imagine you lived in a country where being a Christian is illegal. If you were exposed you would be subject to imprisonment, torture, or death. How would you live faithfully?
But what if the persecution of Christians in your land was more subtle? What if you were granted freedom to worship and confess Christ, but only within certain carefully defined limits? And what if these limits were designed to choke off Christ’s Church, like a siege chokes off a city?
This second form of persecution is probably more destructive to the Church than the first when Christians submit to it. When Christians maintain their freedom in Christ and continue to confess their Lord, the Church survives, even under persecution. But where Christians believe that they serve Christ by the permission of the powers of this earth, the visible Church grows sick or dies. The authority by which Christians confess Christ, teach all that Christ has commanded us, and make disciples of all nations, does not come from the state or society; it comes from the Son of God, who overcame the world and now reigns at the right hand of God. When Christians do not stand firm in the freedom with which Christ has made us free, we do not stand at all.
You don’t actually need to imagine living under the second kind of persecution. You are living under it right now in the United States.
In our country, the Church is pressured to refrain from teaching the whole counsel of God’s Word when it contradicts the informal, but still real, American religion. I term this attempt to place the Christian Church on a reservation The American Interim. To get a clearer perspective on this veiled persecution of Christianity in the United States, let us revisit an earlier experience of this type of persecution in the years following the death of Martin Luther.
The Augsburg Interim
A few months after Luther’s death in February 1546, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V entered an agreement with the Pope to prepare for war against the Lutheran principalities in Germany. On April 24th, 1547, he crushed the armies of the Lutheran Schmalkaldic League and imprisoned the Elector of Saxony John Frederick, replacing him with his cousin Maurice. Shortly thereafter he issued a program known as the Augsburg Interim, which spelled out the terms under which the Lutheran Churches would be compelled to live while the Council of Trent determined the future of the churches under the Pope.
The Augsburg Interim permitted Lutheran pastors to be married and distribute both the body and blood of Christ in the Lord’s Supper. But nearly every other change made by the Reformation was rolled back. Lutheran pastors were required to teach a version of the doctrine of justification that contradicted the Scriptures and teach that the Mass was a meritorious sacrifice.
In Saxony the new elector, together with Melanchthon and the other theologians in Wittenberg, tried to work out a compromise. They crafted a different Interim for Saxony which they claimed would preserve the Lutheran doctrine, while submitting to some of the Emperor’s ceremonial demands, viewing these as adiaphora, matters neither commanded and forbidden by God.
Both the Augsburg Interim and this compromise Leipzig Interim in Saxony were rejected by faithful Lutherans. Many of these Lutherans, who had been deposed from their pulpits, or fled from lands under the Emperor’s control, found a home in the city of Magdeburg, where the city council refused to obey the Emperor. The theologians and pastors of the city published The Magdeburg Confession, in which they confessed the pure doctrine of God’s Word, showed that any compromise on adiaphora during a time of persecution was unfaithful, and laid out the duty of lesser magistrate to resist, with force if necessary, government orders that attempted to suppress the Word of God. The Magdeburgers’ insistence that during a time of confession Christians must refuse to submit on matters of adiaphora later became a part of the Lutheran Confessions in Article X of the Formula of Concord.
Charles laid siege to Magdeburg, but was repelled. A little while later Elector Maurice turned on his former benefactor, defeating him in battle, which resulted in the treaties of Passau and Augsburg, in which the Emperor allowed each region of Germany to follow the religion of its ruler, without interference.
The American Interim
In our day the Christian Church lives under another kind of interim. The pastors in the sixteenth century who refused to submit to the Augsburg Interim faced much more severe penalties than we do—imprisonment, banishment, and death. They also were given an explicit list of doctrines and ceremonies to which they were required to conform. The “interim” in our day is informal and shadowy. The cost of resisting it is far less severe—loss of a good name, perhaps the loss of a job, perhaps even of a spouse and children. But it is real nevertheless, and serves the same purpose as the Augsburg Interim; like it, our interim seeks to subjugate Christ’s Church to another authority besides her Lord. I term this informal religious settlement of our time: The American Interim.
The Christian Churches in the United States have accepted the somewhat nebulous terms of this Interim in the same way that the churches in Saxony accepted the Leipzig Interim: they have attempted to preserve themselves from the most egregious errors while giving the impression that there is not a fundamental disagreement between this civic religion and Christianity.
The Formula of Concord (SD X 5) explains very helpfully what was at stake in the Leipzig Interim, and what we are experiencing in our present American Interim.
“ …such ceremonies should not be reckoned among the genuine free adiaphora, or matters of indifference, as make a show or feign the appearance, as though our religion and that of the Papists were not far apart, thus to avoid persecution, or as though the latter were not at least highly offensive to us; or when such ceremonies are designed for the purpose, and required and received in this sense, as though by and through them both contrary religions were reconciled and became one body; or when a reentering into the Papacy and a departure from the pure doctrine of the Gospel and true religion should occur or gradually follow therefrom [when there is danger lest we seem to have reentered the Papacy, and to have departed, or to be on the point of departing gradually, from the pure doctrine of the Gospel].”
The proscriptions of the Augsburg Interim aimed to neuter the Lutheran Church, cause it to bend the knee before the Pope, and make it appear that Lutherans and Rome were reunited. Little by little, the Lutheran Church would have died and been replaced by the Papacy again.
And this is exactly what our American Interim not only aims at, but has actually accomplished in large part. The difference is that the Augsburg Interim aimed at the absorption of the Lutheran Church into the false church of the Pope, while the American Interim aims to swallow up the Christian Church into the religion of liberal democracy.
The False Religion of Liberal Democracy
Liberal democracy arose out of the Enlightenment, the eighteenth-century movement that opposed the hierarchical and Christian Europe that existed before it. Enlightenment philosophers believed that human nature and reason were not corrupted by original sin. As a result, people were able to come to the knowledge of God and His will through the use of reason alone. They rejected essential Christian doctrine concerning the Holy Trinity and the atonement as contrary to reason. And since they believed unaided reason was able to determine who God was and how to please Him, there was no need for rebirth by the Holy Spirit, mediated through the Word and Sacrament, dispensed by the ministers of the Church. Neither was there a need for a hereditary nobility to govern depraved human beings with the sword. Instead, the Enlightenment claimed that since human beings are not corrupt, they are able to govern themselves and know God apart from a ruling class and the ministry of the Church. They are equal, not merely in their shared humanity and redemption by Christ, but equal in an almost absolute sense.
In An Admonition to Peace: A Reply to the Twelve Articles of the Peasants of Swabia, Luther wrote: “This article [that Christian liberty means that no lord has a right to own his serfs] would make all men equal and turn the spiritual kingdom of Christ into a worldly, external kingdom; and that is impossible. A worldly kingdom cannot exist without an inequality of persons, some being free, some imprisoned, some lords, some subjects, etc.” (AE 46:39).
If humanity had retained the image and knowledge of God, there would be no need of rulers and subjects and other inequalities. People would naturally give to others the love and honor due them, without compulsion. But since human beings are totally corrupted by sin, God instituted ordered inequalities to preserve life and order in this world. Without these inequalities of property, honor, and authority, there could be no peace among fallen men. But the Enlightenment distorted the proper understanding of human equality into an idol that obliterates the distinctions God has established among men.
The root of the American Interim is the unspoken requirement that the Christian Church, following the principles of the Enlightenment, keep silent about anything in the Scripture that teaches that human beings are fallen and that God has not made them equal. “Conservative” Christian Churches often do this in exactly the way the Leipzig Interim did: they attempt to avoid the most radical results of the American religion’s worship of the false god Equality while signaling that they agree with its fundamental doctrines. Consider how common it is in the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod to find women reading the Scripture lessons in the Divine Service or distributing the blood of Christ, thereby exercising spiritual authority over the men in the congregation. While we have partly kept the Lord’s order for the ministry in prohibiting women from entering it, our tendency to signal our agreement with the concerns of feminism perfectly illustrates how the American Interim works in practice.
The Demands of the American Interim
An obvious example of the way the American Interim has been accepted by the churches is in our unwillingness or inability to distinguish between more grave and less grave sins.
Traditional Lutheran dogmatics recognizes that some sins are more grave than others, as our Lord told Pontius Pilate: “He who delivered me over to you has the greater sin” (John 19:11). In the past, Lutherans would point out the gravity of certain sins, such as sodomy, in order to restrain people from doing them and to drive grave sinners to repentance. Now it is common to hear pastors and laypeople affirm that “all sins are equal before God.”
It is true that all sins are damnable if not forgiven. It is also true that true repentance does not weigh out the relative gravity of each sin of which we are aware, but contritely confesses “I know that there is nothing good in me, that is, in my flesh” (Rom. 7). But as the Smalcald Articles (SA III.III.43) puts it: Where sin rules a person the Holy Spirit has departed. St. John says, “The one who is born of God does not sin,” not meaning that there is no sin in a Christian, but that a Christian mortifies the sinful desires of his flesh rather than give way to them and live in them (1 John 3:9). Scripture also testifies that some sins are so grave that they cry to heaven for judgment (Gen. 4:10, 18:20–21; Jam. 5:4; Rev. 6:10), and that graver sins are punished more severely in eternity (Luke 12:47).
The tendency to declare all sin absolutely equal has the effect of minimizing all sin. Instead of recognizing our sin as very serious so that we find comfort in Christ alone, which the Small Catechism teaches is a reason a Christian goes to the Holy Supper, when Christians say “Oh well, we’re all sinners” they frequently imply “therefore none of our sins are that serious.” This tendency is an unwitting response to the pressure of the American Interim to affirm the fundamental goodness and equality of men.
Another way the American Interim shows itself in the churches is their response to the rise of feminism in the United States.
Scripture teaches that while men and women are equally human, they have different callings and are not equal in authority or gifts. Wives are called “the weaker vessel” in 1 Peter 3:7 and are prohibited from having authority over men, since the woman was created second and also was deceived by the serpent (1 Tim. 2: 13-14). Moreover the Scriptures teach that the primary calling of a woman is to serve her husband as a helpmeet and bear children (Titus 2:4-5, 1 Tim. 2:15).
Yet the churches said little in response to the feminist push to remove women from their primary calling as mothers and keepers of the home and, beginning with the Episcopal Church in 1930, abandoned nearly two millennia of Christian opposition to contraception. In the sixties and seventies, liberal protestant churches began to ordain women; they no longer knew how to distinguish the worship of Equality from Christianity. More conservative churches continued to prohibit women from holding the ministry of the Word and Sacrament, yet capitulated to feminism’s demand for “equality” in nearly every other respect, in order to make it appear that Christianity is not fundamentally opposed to the worship of Equality.
For example, when Congress was debating the question of women assuming combat roles in the military, conservative churches were unable to bring themselves to confess that it is contrary to the order of creation for women to fight battles and die on behalf of men. More importantly, with the rise of legal contraception and the push for the full equality of women in the workplace, conservative churches gradually gave up what had been universal Christian teaching until the twentieth century, that contraception is contrary to God’s blessing and command that human beings “be fruitful and multiply” and that the primary calling of a woman is to be a mother and helpmeet to her husband.
A final example of the churches’ submission to the American Interim regards the inequality of the nations.
The American Interim expects us to say that nations are nothing more than political fictions, with no real basis in anything besides custom. If there is any evidence that the nations are unequal—morally, intellectually, culturally—this is said to be the result of oppression or bigotry.
The Scriptures do not speak this way. While they recognize that God created from one man all the nations of the earth, they also teach that the division of humanity into nations is His work, that the nations were separated in order that each one might find God. “And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, that they should seek God, and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him” (Acts 17:26-27).
Meanwhile all the nations have an inheritance given to them by God—spiritual, moral, and material. Egyptians could not become citizens in Israel until the fourth generation, but Moabites and Ammonites were forbidden from ever being admitted to the nation, since their ancestors had hired Balaam to curse Israel (Deut. 23:3-6). Different nations have different inheritances from their fathers because of their sins. They also have different inheritances in terms of territory: “When the Most High gave to the nations their inheritance, when He divided mankind, He fixed the borders of the people according to the sons of God” (Deut. 32:8).
This is not to argue that no one can ever leave one nation and join another or that national identities do not shift over the course of history. But if the Church speaks and acts as if nations do not exist, and the people of different nations are interchangeable, it is not speaking according to the Word of God, but in submission to the American Interim.
Naming the Interim
Naming the American Interim and recognizing it as a yoke of slavery for the Church is necessary if we are to begin to resist it.
If the only resistance to the Augsburg Interim had been the compromise Interim confected by the theologians in Wittenberg, the Lutheran Church would have perished before the sixteenth century was over. Christ’s Church does not survive because earthly power gives it a license to exist. She lives because our Lord has destroyed the one who holds the power of death, the devil, and gives her life from heaven through His Word. When the visible Church accepts a yoke of slavery to gain the right to exist from the world, it ceases to be the Church of Christ.
The visible Church’s present submission to the American Interim is strangling her. Why did we lose so many of those who were baptized in the LCMS during the Baby Boom and Generation X?
Is it possible that it was because we had been emphasizing our essential agreement with the claims of the Enlightenment regarding Equality? Just as the Formula of Concord predicted would happen under the Augsburg and Leipzig Interims, have we not for years been signaling that there was essential agreement between the American religion and Christianity? If as a result our members were more committed to Equality than to the truth of the Scripture, it is small wonder that so many of them left. What need does a person who is basically noble, free, and equal have of a God who died a slave’s death for the forgiveness of sins? Is it possible that the Enlightenment’s rejection of original sin has found its way into our churches as well? When the government declared church services “non-essential,” why did so many of our churches and pastors confess with their actions that they agreed? Whatever our Confessions say, our actions indicated that we agreed with the Enlightenment that men do not need the Holy Spirit working through the Word and Sacrament to give us new birth and preserve us in the knowledge of God. We behaved as if men were not fallen and could get by without the Divine Service.
If we would see renewal in our churches and the salvation of our neighbors, we must begin with repentance of our sin in believing that the Church’s security and growth comes through editing the Word of God, leaving out those portions that most sharply contradict the idolatry of our country and neighbors. The Church’s security comes from our Lord, who has overcome the world, and the Church is built solely on His Word in everything that it teaches, as all our hymns remind us.
I know my faith is founded
On Jesus Christ, my God and Lord;
And this my faith confessing,
Unmoved I stand on His sure Word.
Our reason cannot fathom
The truth of God profound;
Who trusts in human wisdom
Relies on shifting ground.
God’s Word is all-sufficient,
It makes divinely sure;
And trusting in its wisdom,
My faith shall rest secure.
(LSB 587 st. 1)
The Church’s freedom does not consist in being inoffensive to the world, so that our government and neighbors see us as no threat. The freedom Christ gives is the freedom of a conscience cleansed from sin by His blood. This leads to the freedom to confess His Word, even if it costs goods, fame, child and wife. This freedom always brings with it the devil’s hatred and the holy Cross. Suffering for opposing the world’s idols is not a mark of bad character or the foolish desire to be a martyr. It is a sign that we are free in Christ. And when a church willingly bears the cross, the mark of freedom, the result is blessing and salvation for many. That is the way the message of the Gospel advances and bears fruit in the world. Faithful witness to the cross of Jesus is faithful carrying of the cross He gives us.
And for Your Gospel let us dare
To sacrifice all treasure;
Teach us to bear Your blessèd cross,
To find in You all pleasure.
O grant us steadfastness
In joy and distress,
Lest we, Lord, You forsake.
Let us by grace partake
Of endless joy and gladness.
(LSB 746 st. 4)
