It is possible to go so overboard about “faith” about believing – like Pentecostals do, some Baptists do, and some Lutherans too, then you end up having faith in faith, worshipping faith. The same is true of liturgy. You can go so overboard about liturgics that you worship worship. Can you so overboard about the Bible that you worship it? Would that necessarily be wrong?
If you’re going to read this blog with profit and maybe see it as “prophetic” you have to read this issue of Lutheran Concerns Association’s Lutheran Clarion. It’s available here https://www.lutheranclarion.org/images/NewsletterMar2025.pdf in full color. There are two articles one on textual criticism and one on Narrative Criticism.
The sainted Pastor Sullivan (d. 2017) always told me that it’s impossible for today’s laymen to understand the controversy around Biblical interpretation the way they did in in the 70s. No one is coming out and saying Jonah wasn’t really swallowed by a whale; Sodom and Gomorrah didn’t happen, etc. The controversy is just too subtle for laymen today. After sitting in and with laymen in a Confessional Lutheran Pastor’s Bible class for 30 months, I’m here to tell you Saint Bryan was wrong.
You can understand these articles and I believe you will see the issues today are every bit as threatening to Biblical, Confessional Lutheranism as those of the 60s and 70s were. The one on textual criticism will show you that the emphasis on all the new variants discovered in other Greek texts has the effect Revelation’s 5th trumpet predicted: “And the fifth angel sounded, and I saw a star from heaven which had fallen to the earth; and the key of the bottomless pit was given to him. 2 And he opened the bottomless pit; and smoke went up out of the pit, like the smoke of a great furnace; and the sun and the air were darkened by the smoke of the pit” (9:1-2). The talk of so many variants has the effect of blotting out the bright light of Scripture. No longer with the Psalmist will you say, “The unfolding of Thy words gives light; It gives understanding to the simple” Psalm 119:130 (NASB77).
When then seminary professor Dr. Jeffery Kloha suggested in the future, seminary students would have the Greek Text on a digital device that would be constantly updating, I knew the jig was up. The Bible has been “Davinci Coded” in real life. From then on I vowed to go no further with Greek Text updates than USB IV/NA27. I reasoned that if Walter Maier could teach me in 1979 reading then NA25 while he was reading a 1950’s Greek Text, and if Dr. John Drickamer, (I’ve found the best Concordia System guys of my generation were influenced by this college professor.) could say he could leave the house and pick up either the Nestle Alland Greek or the Textus Receptus (the Greek text the KJV is based on.) and be equally comfortable, then I could too.
The paper on Narrative Criticism is important because that is what is used in several of the volumes in the Concordia Commentary Series which though not finished yet will be the controlling exposition of Scripture probably through my grandkid’s generation. And you’ve heard me quote the Rev. Dr. Ken Schurb before saying to me in 1999: “Those from either seminary who have been taught using Voelz’s What does this mean? I can’t understand when they’re speaking about when interpreting a text.” Search “Voelz” on my blog and there are several posts about this. Read this Christian News blog for clear, trenchant review of Voelz’s theology https://christiannewsmissouri.com/2025/10/14/thoughts-on-voelz-and-his-legacy/.
But what about “worshipping the word”? Can you? Should you? Must you? Scaer in his memoirs Surviving the Storms refers to the 20th’s century’s most prominent Reformed theologian, Karl Barth, saying, “the most important theological phrase was the children’s song ‘Jesus loves me, this I know; For the Bible tells me so’ allows no place to the historical context in which the revelation is made. Inspiration replaces incarnation as the foundation of theology.” He goes on to say “some Missouri-Synod theologians…may have already absorbed Protestant fundamentalism into their theologies” (81).
Apart from the inspired Word who can know anything about the incarnation? If you don’t prioritize revelation over incarnation, you’re going to be wrong about the latter. I’ve said time and again that the things of God are always attacked from their human side. This goes for the inscripturated Word (Bible), the in-Breaded Word (Communion), and the incarnate Word (Jesus). Do some reading of the theologians who walked out of the LCMS in 1974. What they started saying about the inscripturated Word, they ended up saying about the incarnate Word.
Historically the Church has made distinctions in the Scripture. The Gospel Book containing the four Gospels was giving pride of place. The books spoken against by some in the early church were not be used as the “seat of the doctrine”. Even the Apocrypha could be read for its history, but not as Rome declared it to be the Word of God.
Not faith, not liturgy are described in the same terms as God. The Bible is. We don’t tremble at believing or liturgizing; we do at the Word (Is. 66:2). Faith eventually gives way to sight and liturgy eventually melds with day to day life in heaven, but not a jot or title of the Word ever passes away.
I just don’t get the theologians who want to, or maybe don’t want to but just do, put stumbling blocks before the simple faith that the Church has lived, suffered, died, and risen again on: God’s Word is a light and lamp (Psalm 119:105). If the text of the OT, not as close to the original as the NT, was good enough for Jesus to quote three times to Satan, well that’s good enough for me. If all the Godhead dwells bodily in Christ, if the Word is made flesh and tabernacles among us in the Man Jesus, then it is a smaller miracle indeed if the Word of God is inscripturated in the Bible. If the preeminent theological Dr. Robert Preus can declare – loudly and emphatically for him – in class that the English translation before you is the inspired Word of God that Paul speaks to Timothy about, that’s good enough for me.[i]
Every Christian dies a martyr’s death in the sense that the Devil, the World, and your Flesh are begging you, threatening you, challenging you to give up the Word made Flesh which you can only know, has only been revealed to you through the written Word. Are you going to stand like Jesus did on “Thus says the Lord” or be so confused, so troubled about what textual critics and narrative critics say may or may not be that you end up like Thomas Aquinas on his deathbed clinging to the Scriptures saying, “I believe what’s in this Book!”[ii] That is not a confession of faith but doubt. From such may the good Lord preserve us. In my opinion, and I want to be wrong, the Good Ship LCMS is sunk in it already.
[i] I can see the possible discovery of secular Koine Greek documents that could shed light on hapax legomena words. These are words only appearing once in the NT. This site says there are only about 25 that are completely unknown in other literature as well: https://www.gotquestions.org/hapax-legomenon.html .
[ii] See “Coach or First Class”, October 27, 2008 blog: https://www.pastorharris.com/2008/10/27/coach-or-first-class/
