There is plenty of uneasiness to go around in the church today. Debates about worship stretching back to the first “worship war” between Cain and Abel continue to erupt. With all the vigor of a drowning victim, some grab for yet another program that will pull an allegedly sinking church out from under the billows of apathy and numerical decline. Others would seek renewal in ecclesiastical restructuring. Tired of the ordinariness of a Lutheranism that seems stale if not decadent, some would look for solutions elsewhere: Roman Catholicism, Orthodoxy, Anglicanism, Fundamentalism or Evangelicalism. Justification by faith alone is held to be too prosaic, too impotent to fuel a vibrant worship life, an energetic evangelistic concern, or an authentic moral life. So subtly there is a shift away from the center in the hope of something better. To those who are so tempted, the words of Hans Joachim Iwand serve as a prophetic call to repentance and faith: “An evangelical church that views the teaching of righteousness as self-evident – but about which no one should trouble himself further because other issues are more important – has in principle robbed itself of the central solution by which other questions are illuminated. Such a church will become increasingly splintered and worn down. If we take the article of justification out of the center very soon we will not know why we are evangelical Christians or should remain so. As a result, we will strive for the unity of the church and will sacrifice the purity of the gospel; we will have more confidence in church organization and church government and will promise more on the basis of the reform of Christian authority and church training than either can deliver. If we lose our center, we will be in danger of being tolerant where we should be radical and radical where we should be tolerant. In short, the standards will be lowered and along with them everything that is necessary and correct in the reforms that we sing about will become incomprehensible” (Hans Joachim Iwand, The Righteousness of Faith According to Luther, Wipf & Stock, 2008, p.16).

Iwand wrote these words in 1941. They ring true for us in 2008. Theological education, the formation of servants of the church, must keep anchored in the center: Christ Jesus crucified for the justification of the ungodly. It is only the word of His cross that will renew and enliven the church. We have not only a theology of the cross but an ecclesiology of the cross.

-Prof. John T. Pless