Orthodoxy, Part IV:
Orthodoxy and the New World

When I started writing about orthodoxy, I was looking forward to sharing about the New World’s impact on how Christians define orthodoxy. In the Old World any major shift in the political and religious world required challenging centuries’-long traditions, values, and norms. Effecting change took more than reformation; it took revolution—that is, re-evolution. Change meant tearing down everything of the past and starting over as if brand new and building from nothing; or building from the chaos of bits and pieces that remained of the past. Reformations failed or succeeded chiefly because the past was or was not completely removed; sometimes reformations simply reordered the principles of the past, be they political, economic, or religious.

Martin Luther’s religious Reformation had been attempted previously and met with disastrous results for those reformers and their followers. Luther survived the turmoil of the sixteenth-century Reformation only because the political structure of the time benefited from the political upheaval caused by the Reformation. Between Duke Fredrick and Luther there was enough political resistance and personal loyalty to maintain some level of stability. The Peasants’ Revolt and the brutal response of the nobility became a clear indicator of how truly fragile was that stability. After Fredrick’s and Luther’s deaths, it was only a matter of years before the fragile peace erupted into full-blown revolution, which lasted 30 years without resolving the crisis. The peace that was established simply reordered the political hierarchy, both allowing and mandating that each territorial ruler choose between religious allegiance to Rome’s Pope or Luther’s religious principles, collected and expressed in the Book of Concord. Those were the only two official options given. How those options were enforced varied greatly, ranging between absolute adherence to the official decision to almost complete tolerance. In England the official choice changed from Catholic to Protestant without any tolerance and resulted in several disastrous successive revolutions.

Concurrent to the upheaval in Europe was the European discovery of the so-called New World. In the New World there were no traditional territories held to the European traditions, and there were abundant natural resources to fuel the re-evolution of the Old World.

Part of the socio-economic re-evolution at the beginning of the modern era was the shift from a mostly agrarian subsistence economy to a monetary economy. Goods and services procurement shifted from being a landowner/barter-based exchange system to a system based on money. Previous revolutions had destabilized the agrarian base of the economy, causing the entire civilization to collapse. Following the fall of the Roman Empire, the first centuries of the medieval period were truly the “dark ages,” because everyone was reduced to subsistence farming; and the higher functions of culture, such as literacy and the arts and sciences, had to be put aside and in some places were totally lost. When 100 percent of a person’s time and effort was required to store the food and supplies necessary to live until the next harvest, there was no time to learn to read and write As civilization recovered during the Renaissance, the higher functions of culture were rediscovered and began to flourish freely in the monetary economy. Court artisans and scientists now became independent or university artisans and scientists who supported themselves monetarily. The limiting factor of the Renaissance was money. Money was made from metals, and there was only so much metal available. New wealth came from the copper, silver, and gold mines. The Old World had depleted its mining resources. What the New World offered was resources, particularly the mines that fueled the Old World’s economy. This new money fueled and expanded the economy, which could then invest in the development of farming technologies and in all the arts and sciences. This new economy triggered the next two revolutions. First came the technological revolution which provided the science that started the industrial revolution, and those revolutions together created the modern era.

The influence of the New World’s resources supported the rediscovery of the lost higher functions of culture. The rediscovery of literature included the rediscovery of Greek and Hebrew writings of the ancient church fathers, and even study of the scriptures in the ancient languages. Luther’s rediscovery of the gospel is tied directly to his study of scripture in the ancient languages, as a religious professor in a state-supported university. The emphasis is on rediscovery because Luther’s work rediscovered what was first taught as the gospel of Jesus Christ. Remember … orthodoxy means “first teaching.” What Luther started continued for the next 200 years as more ancient documents were discovered and as the understanding of ancient languages continued to be developed.

The New World also provided a land that was not held captive to the religious definitions of the Old World. Created and financed as commercial adventures, many of the first colonies were founded by people who came to the New World seeking freedom to define and create religious communities. Colonial religious groups varied from the Puritans, who wanted to create a closed, highly disciplined faith community; to Quakers under the leadership of William Penn, who founded Philadelphia proposing religious tolerance; to the settlers of Maryland, which was founded to be a specific Catholic community. Many colonial communities brought the faith of their homelands, such as New Sweden’s Lutherans along the Delaware River, or the Anglicans of the Hudson’s Bay Colony. Through the mix and mess of the colonial formation, the New World was to achieve in less that 300 years what Europe wouldn’t accomplish for another 100 years: religious tolerance. Although more successful at some times than other times, the New World developed a sense of religious tolerance that was based upon personal responsibility and community accountability. This created the possibility that each successive wave of immigration brought its own definition of orthodoxy. Within the Lutheran traditions, orthodoxy was defined at the time of immigration often based upon the current theology of the homeland at the time of immigration. Two major exceptions to that rule exist today. The Wisconsin Synod Lutherans reacted to the modernization or adaptation to the scientific methods of its religious principles in the American setting and formulated a definition of orthodoxy of self-identity in its current setting in 1850 and have not allowed any redefinition since then. The Lutheran Church Missouri Synod reacted to the developing scientific method of theology in Germany and in 1847 its founders immigrated to the New World seeking freedom from religious persecution and the freedom to define orthodoxy prior to the influence of the scientific methods of theology. The vast majority of Lutherans in modern America, about twice the combined size of the two exception synods — and most Lutherans worldwide — have adapted and employed the modern scientific methods of theological study and have continued to define Lutheran orthodoxy as biblical and confessional. Because Lutheran theology is first biblical and second confessional, the most fundamental teachings are identical. The process of how those teachings are presented and administered varies greatly.

There is also a new challenge to the basic understanding of orthodoxy…the modern crisis of the authority of the word of God. But that is for the next newsletter.

See you in Church
Pastor Tim