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Shumlin looks to Windham County for education ideas
BRATTLEBORO -- When Gov. Peter Shumlin devoted most of his second inaugural address Thursday to education, business and education leaders around Windham County nodded their heads in approval as Shumlin talked about the ways he wanted to strengthen the state's education system from pre-kindergarten through to college.
Not only did they support what Shumlin was saying, but they also recognized many of the programs the Governor wants to spread throughout the state as those that have deep roots in Southeastern Vermont.
Shumlin made his case by following every student's schooling from pre-k to elementary and secondary school and then right on to college, talking about ways the state can improve the experience every step of the way.
And just about every initiative he proposed has been tested here in Windham County.
"There is a lot of innovative work being done around Windham County and there is no reason we can't replicate these programs all over the state," Shumlin said. "These are programs that should be available in every school in Vermont."
During his speech Thursday Shumlin said he wanted to double the amount of money Vermont spends on childcare.
He also said his administration would support schools that work to develop preschool programs, including providing start-up costs to help schools get more preschool children enrolled.
Vermont has allowed public schools to work with private childcare centers to have more young children involved in high quality programs, and Windham Southeast Superintendent Ron Stahley said that work, which has been going on in Windham County for almost 10 years, should be available in every corner of the state.
"This district has been a leader in supporting early education," said Stahley. "It was great to hear the governor talk about all of these plans."
Stahley said that while it was exciting to have the governor focus almost exclusively on education, questions remain about the funding, and he was looking forward to working with state leaders to have more of Vermont's children enrolled in early education programs.
"The pre-k partnerships we started have broadened our ability to reach more pre-school students," he said. "Early intervention is the key to helping close the achievement gap. Any expansion of that is helpful."
Kim Friedman of Newfane who has been working on early childhood issues since 1999, said early education advocates have been waiting to hear a speech like the one Shumlin gave Thursday.
"Those of us in the early childhood community have been waiting a very long time to hear leadership like this from the governor's office," said Friedman, who now does early childhood consulting work for the Agency of Human Services. "The governor wants to make sure every child has the foundation he or she needs and he is calling on all of us to work together to make it a reality."
Under Vermont law, children can attend a private child care center and public education money follows that child.
Through years of developing such programs around WIndham County, Friedman said that most administrators, parents and early educators agree that the program is successful and important, but it is always a struggle to finance more classrooms.
She said the governor's speech went a long way to assure those in the early education community that it was going to be a priority for Shumlin to find the money to increase the number of pre-k classrooms around the state.
Shumlin also said he wanted to double the amount of funding spent on dual enrollment programs at Vermont's high schools, which allow high school students to take college level courses in high school
Colleges and high schools around the state have such programs, but a model developed at Brattleboro Union High School that helps accredit high school teachers so they can teach college level courses within the high school should be extended across the state, Shumlin said Friday.
"When I mentioned the dual enrollment programs I thought about the work that is being done at BUHS," Shumlin said. "This is not expensive. It is something we can start right away to help more kids get beyond high school."
Tom Yahn, who is the director of the Windham Regional Collegiate High School, met with Shumlin earlier this year to talk about the work BUHS has been doing to offer more options to its students.
The Windham Regional Collegiate High School has been able to work with both public and private colleges in the area and Yahn said the governor recognized that the same structure would work all over the state.
"This helps kids who might not have considered going to college, and it gives kids who are going to college a way to get credits and save money for when they do move on," Yahn said. "It's a model that will work in every high school in the state."
During his inaugural address Shumlin also called on business leaders to work closer with the educational system at all levels, and during an interview Friday he said the downtown campus planned for the Brooks House is a perfect example of linking the state college system with business to better strengthen both institutions.
"The downtown campus is going to be an innovation center," said Shumlin.
He mentioned Brattleboro's own G.S Precision in his speech as an example of a business that is having trouble filling highly skilled positions.
He said as colleges find out what kind of workers businesses need they will be more able to provide the training to make sure Vermont college graduates are ready to meet those demands when they graduate.
Brattleboro Development Credit Corporation Executive Director Jeff Lewis helped lead a meeting in Brattleboro Friday with business leaders and representatives from the state college system.
BDCC has been an important player in helping coordinate the conversation between the business community and the state colleges.
Lewis also said he listened to Shumlin's speech Thursday with the recognition that some of the work under way in the region could help spur business growth and more educational opportunities across Vermont.
"There is a lot of interesting work going on," Lewis said. "We need to develop a more capable workforce across the state. We don't have enough qualified workers and the work we have been doing addresses that. We are aware of what we are doing and we hope he is looking at us."
Howard Weiss-Tisman can be reached at 802-254-2311, ext. 279, or email@example.com. You can follow him on Twitter @HowardReformer.
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The Lutheran churches, originally in Germany but quickly spreading to Scandinavia, did not wish to be called after their founder. He had seen his work as an evangelical (i.e., Gospel-centred) reform within the Western Catholic church. The name Lutheran came from opponents of Luther and his reforms, but the epithet eventually came to be turned into a badge of honour among partisans of the reformer's interpretation.Still, many of the leaders attempted to adopt other terms such as "Evangelical," which has subsequently become part of the official name of the church in various nations and territories. Others preferred, and prefer, to be called The Church of the Augsburg Confession, a title that recalls the Lutheran document presented by evangelicals to the Unlike the Roman Catholic Church, however, Lutheranism is not a single entity. It is organized in autonomous regional or national churches, such as the Church of Sweden or the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Mecklenburg, Ger. Globally, there are some 140 such Lutheran church bodies; 138 of these are loosely joined in the Lutheran World Federation, which was established in 1947. At the beginning of the 21st century, there were more than 65 million Lutherans worldwide, making Lutheranism the second largest Protestant denomination, after the Baptist churches.
The term Lutheran, which appeared as early as 1519, was coined by Luther's opponents. The self-designation of Luther's followers was "evangelical"—that is, centred on the Gospel. After the Diet of Speyer in 1529, when German rulers sympathetic to Luther's cause voiced a protest against the diet's Catholic majority, which had overturned a decree of 1526, Luther's followers came to be known as Protestants. However, because both evangelical and Protestant proved to be overly broad designations (before long they also included the Reformed churches), eventually the name Evangelical Lutheran became standard. Another name occasionally used is Churches of the Augsburg Confession, which recalls the Lutheran statement of faith presented to the German emperor at the Diet of Augsburg in 1530. In the 20th century many have chosen to speak of their church as an "evangelical Catholic" movement, yet "Lutheran" they became and remain.
For several decades after 1530 this oldest and largest Protestant body hardly broke the European geographic bounds that were set for it. It was a negligible force in Presbyterian Scotland, Anglican England, the Reformed Lowlands and Switzerland, or in Catholic France, Spain, and Italy. There were early Lutheran movements in central Europe, as in Hungary, where the Reformed came to dominate in 1543, and in Transylvania. But Lutheranism prospered most in the many territories that were eventually to make up modern Germany and then the northern lands: Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Iceland.
From this significant but well-defined territory, Lutheranism moved with substantial numbers into North America after the 1740s and in the 19th century from European and North American bases into much of the rest of the world. Still, most of its theological, intellectual, cultural, and political expression as well as the major trends in its development are best measured from northern Europe and especially from the German territories that it shared with Reformed and Roman Catholic Christians.
Lutherans claim to see their movement centred in the understanding that, thanks to the saving activity of God in Jesus Christ, they are themselves "justified by grace through faith." Early Lutherans invoked this theme against both Catholic and Reformed Christianity, both of which, though on differing grounds, they professed to see stressing salvation in part through good works or moral earnestness. This would be an endeavour to help the believer make a claim upon God and thus, thought Lutherans, would deprive Christians of the security of faith and would arrogate to human beings activities that belonged only to God. In Lutheranism the bond between God and the redeemed was entirely at God's initiative and through God's grace. The believer trusts this God. With most other Protestants, Lutherans based their teachings not on churchly authority but on the divinely inspired Bible.HistoryThe post-Reformation in GermanyA generation after Luther the churches and territories that followed him theologically took part in a diet that produced the Peace of Augsburg (1555). This action accepted the
United States several nomenclatures have been used, all of which, with the exception of the Evangelical Catholic Church, include the term Lutheran in their titles (e.g., the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod).
In the 16th century, Lutheranism became formally established in various principalities by being declared the official religion of the region by the relevant governmental authority. As early as the 1520s German principalities and cities adopted Lutheranism, and they were later followed by Sweden and the other Scandinavian countries. Later, Lutheran notions found their way to Hungary and Transylvania. Lutheranism arrived in North America in the middle of the 17th century in the areas of present-day Delaware and southern Pennsylvania. In the 18th century and increasingly in the 19th, European and North American Lutherans undertook missions throughout the globe, leading to the establishment of indigenous Lutheran churches in many countries. Beginning in the 20th century, ecumenical initiatives affected both Lutheranism and its relation to other Christian faiths.
Theologically, Lutheranism embraces the standard affirmations of classic Protestantism—the repudiation of papal and ecclesiastical authority in favour of the Bible (sola Scriptura), the rejection of five of the traditional seven sacraments affirmed by the Catholic Church, and the insistence that human reconciliation with God is effected solely by divine grace (sola gratia), which is appropriated solely by faith (sola fide), in contrast to the notion of a convergence of human effort and divine grace in the process of salvation.
In 1517, when Martin Luther probed the church practices surrounding indulgences (the full or partial grant of the remission of the penalties of sin) with his Ninety-five Theses (the various propositions that Luther wished to debate—posted, according to tradition, on the church doors in Wittenberg), he had no intention of breaking from the Catholic Church, assuming that his call for theological and ecclesiastical reform would be heard. Instead, a fierce controversy ensued. Luther and his followers were subsequently excommunicated, which confronted them with the alternative of yielding to the ecclesiastical dictum or finding new ways to live their faith. Since the advocates of reform received the protection of governmental authorities in many places, new forms of church life began to emerge in the late 1520s.
Because they were excommunicated and their churches outlawed, Luther, his followers, and their princely supporters were under threat of military action by Catholic forces, and in 1546 Emperor Charles V felt powerful enough to wage war against the major Lutheran territories and cities. While victorious in the ensuing War of Schmalkald, Charles overreached himself by adding political goals to his objective of dismantling Lutheran reforms. At the Diet of Augsburg in 1555, he was forced to concede formal recognition to the Lutheran churches in the Holy Roman Empire.
The Peace of Augsburg marked an important turning point in the history of Lutheranism. After a generation of struggle against Roman Catholic and imperial authorities, Lutherans gained legal recognition through the establishment of the principle cuius regio, eius religio, which meant that whoever governed a region the ruler of a principality determined its religion. It was a far remove from the modern policy of separation of church and state, for which the reformers could have taken little credit. Instead there developed what is often called "territorialism" in confessional life. Where once there had been one empire and one church, there now were numerous nations or principalities, each with its own official church.
The confessional church on territorial grounds compromised the very nature of a confession, which was to have been a freely accepted creedal statement. When a ruler chose to take his people into Lutheranism, they had to follow or suffer penalty, no matter what their deepest convictions. Yet if they had to accept territorial conformity, they were free to change the character of its faith through time. Lutheranism passed through numerous phases and appeared to be quite different in each.
Conventionally Lutheranism has been seen as having passed through a series of rather clearly defined stages, with movements of thought and practice termed Orthodoxy, Pietism, the Enlightenment, and the like. This convention points to complex realities with sufficient accuracy and thus serves well for understanding the complex movement after more than four and a half centuries.
Orthodoxy came to dominate first. Whatever the ordinary people who rejected Catholic "work-righteousness" and were attentive to "grace" and "faith" were thinking, their pastoral and professorial leaders—and, for that matter, their princes, for politics was much involved in the new definition—grappled with orthodoxy in doctrine and practice. They did so perhaps out of a Germanic love for order and precision and more clearly because the first generation of Lutherans had left them with a rather unstable mix with which they had to deal.
One strand, most faithful to Luther himself, was more ready to live with the risky faith and the paradoxes that coloured his preaching and life, but it then converted the experience of such faith into rather rigid doctrine. In the second generation these "Gnesio-Lutherans" or "Genuine Lutherans," who gathered at centres like the university at Jena, followed impulses to bring order and precision to bear on the thought and the creeds they had inherited. In the eyes of many historians this party lost much of the drama and dynamic of Luther's witness. But it was also a belligerent faction, one that brought passion to its claims on orthodoxy.
Its opponents were called Philippists, after Philipp Melanchthon, the chief scholar at Luther's side and the author of the Augsburg Confession itself. Melanchthon was a humanist with a pacific outlook, who appeared to be a compromiser, as did his intellectual heirs, in the eyes of the Gnesio-Lutherans. They accused Philippists of "synergism," the contention that human beings could cooperate in the work of salvation. They also saw Reformed tinges in the Philippists' doctrine of the Lord's Supper.
By 1577 leaders of the Lutheran parties had agreed on a statement called the Formula of Concord and in 1580 sealed the Lutheran confessions in the Book of Concord, which has been respected ever since and holds varying degrees of authority in Lutheran churches. In the century following, Lutheran scholars, led typically by Johann Gerhard, wrote the multivolumed Loci Theologici, code names for books that stressed a proper doctrine or place for all Christian teachings. Scholastic in style, these books of dogma characteristically began with arguments proving the existence of God and the full authority of the verbally inerrant Bible.
From then on, the Lutheran churches in these principalities were free to develop unhindered by political and military threats.
Although their legal existence was assured, the Lutheran churches in Germany nonetheless found themselves in turmoil. A series of theological controversies over the authentic understanding of Luther's thought—some had already erupted during Luther's own lifetime—began to divide Lutheran theologians and churches with increasing intensity. Most of them pertained to topics on which Luther and his Wittenberg colleague Philipp Melanchthon had disagreed or on which Luther's theological views were not altogether clear. Dominating the Lutheran agenda between 1548 and 1577, the disputes concerned how to resolve matters that were neither approved nor strictly forbidden by Scripture, whether the doctrine of faith absolved Christians from following the moral law set out in the Hebrew Scriptures, and matters connected with justification and human participation in salvation.
The two factions involved in these debates were the Philippists, followers of Melanchthon, and the Gnesio-Lutherans (Genuine Lutherans), led by Matthias Flacius Illyricus, a forceful and uncompromising theologian who accused the Philippists of "synergism," the notion that humans cooperated in their salvation. Flacius and the other Gnesio-Lutherans also saw in the Philippists' understanding of the Lord's Supper the influence of Calvinism, which stressed the real but spiritual presence of Christ in the sacrament.
With the aid of theologians Jakob Andreae and Martin Chemnitz, Lutheran political authorities, notably the elector of Saxony, forced compromises on the disputed points of theology. Andreae and Chemnitz prompted a group of Lutheran theologians to draft a document entitled Formula of Concord in 1576 and 1577. Approved by German Lutheran political and religious leaders, it was incorporated, together with several other confessions—the three ancient ecumenical creeds (the Apostles Creed, the Nicene Creed, and the Athanasian Creed), the Augsburg Confession, the Apology of the Augsburg Confession, Luther's tract on papal power, his Schmalkaldic Articles, and his Small and Large Catechisms—into the Book of Concord in 1580.
The Book of Concord embodied the confessional identity of German Lutheranism. It reflected a development that was paralleled in other Christian traditions of the time, each of which jealously guarded its own identity in opposition to other traditions. The particular "Lutheran" identity encompassed not only theology but also liturgy, music, law, and piety. This process of identity formation in the late 16th century is known as confessionalization.
Theological Orthodoxy, which shaped Lutheranism from the late 16th to the late 17th century, has been much maligned as an overly intellectualized Christianity that showed little concern for practical piety. This one-sided perspective (there was much concern for personal piety in orthodoxy) nonetheless demonstrates the importance of the practice among 17th-century Lutheran theologians of defining Christianity in terms of doctrine. Lutheran thinkers utilized categories from Aristotelian philosophy and logic to articulate Christian theology, leading to ever-subtler analyses of argument and counterargument. The tension between reason and revelation, prominent in Luther, was replaced by the insistence on the harmony of the two, with revelation representing the ultimate truth. Dogmatic claims were safeguarded through an emphasis on the divine inspiration of Scripture, a concern that eventually led Lutheran theologians (even as their Reformed counterparts) to formulate the notion of the verbally inerrant Bible, a pivotal point of orthodox theology.
During the period of orthodox dominance, some Lutheran theologians argued that Christianity was not so much a system of doctrine as a guide for practical Christian living. Foremost among them was Johann Arndt (1555–1621), whose devotional writings were extremely popular in the 17th century. Arndt's major work, The Four Books of True Christianity (1605–09), was a guide to the meditative and devotional life. Arndt has been called the father of Pietism because of his influence on those who later developed the movement. The Pietist movement was also shaped by English theologians William Perkins, William Ames, and Richard Baxter.
Pietism had its beginnings in 1675, when the Frankfurt pastor Philipp Jakob Spener published his book Pious Desires, in which he called for greater commitment to Christian living and a fundamental reform of theological education. Stressing the religion of the heart and the piety of the individual, the movement cultivated "small churches within the larger church" for prayer, Bible reading, moral scrutiny, and works of charity.Philipp Jakob Spener, a leader among the Pietists, wanted to remain orthodox but nonetheless engaged in criticism of what Pietists saw to be the barren larger Lutheran church of which they remained a part.
Pietism downplayed doctrinal definition and led to movements that helped make up the 18th-century German Enlightenment. The tendency of Pietism was to minimize supernatural and miraculous elements in Christianity and to stress reason and morality. Although ordinary worshipers seem to have been sustained by the Scriptures, hymns, and liturgies that retained these elements, scholars of Lutheranism initiated radical theological traditions that have characterized German universities ever since.
In the 19th century the Enlightenment lived on in more romantic forms that gave a greater place to emotions. Some of these were philosophically idealistic, some Germanically nationalistic. At least two schools should be singled out. One, in the tradition of G.W.F. Hegel, saw Christian development against a huge screen of "thesis" and "antithesis," and under the great historian F.C. Baur at Tübingen posed Hebraic versus Hellenic, Catholic versus Protestant motifs and movements. This school began to cast doubt on fact and event in history and soon began to speak in terms of biblical myth. Out of it issued radical movements that led to theological extremism, as found in D.F. Strauss's Life of Jesus Critically Examined, an essay on the impossibility of writing a life of Jesus.
The second school, in a Neo-Kantian spirit, stressed biblical fact and event and issued in a quest for the historical Jesus. Under Albrecht Ritschl a number of Lutheran and Reformed theologians developed a theology that stressed morality and the will. Out of their efforts came the well-known late 19th-century German liberal theology with its devotion to Jesus as teacher and doer of good.
Thus a kind of intellectual schism emerged among 19th-century German Lutherans; one school pioneered in the application of historical methods to biblical studies, developing what came to be known as higher criticism of the Bible, while the other, in a conservative reaction, established more pietistic training centres for the clergy.
Events on the political level also caused schism. Frederick William III's successful efforts to form a Prussian Union church with the Reformed in 1817, while at first meeting with approval, soon prompted a critical reaction. Dissension came partly over Frederick William's new church order, according to which the territorial regent was placed into the position of chief bishop of the church, not because he was the head of state but because he was the person of highest status in the congregation. This decision was in violation of the Lutheran tradition regarding the relationship of church and state, and "confessionalists," who that year celebrated the third centenary of the Lutheran Reformation, promoted "back to Luther" movements. Some Lutherans refused to become part of the Union and formed the "Old Lutheran" church; others chose emigration.
Much of Lutheranism, however, remained obedient to the civil order, perpetuating a tradition begun by Luther himself. After the break with Rome, Luther had remained closely tied to the growth of German nationalism and welcomed the protection of German princes. Many of these became, in effect, "prince-bishops," with considerable church power. The Lutheran churches came to be established by law and supported by taxes in Scandinavia and in many parts of Germany. Further, Luther had a fear of anarchy and a predisposition to grant considerable power to the state as an instrument of order. While he himself was "civilly disobedient" in the face of the emperor in the 1520s, neither his theological vision nor his personal inclination led him to endorse revolution or radical critique of the state. Lutheranism, therefore, was generally obedient to the civil order, and its clergymen were often cast in roles that made them seem to be lower-level civil servants.
Lutheranism was carried rather quickly from Germany to Bohemia and Austria, Poland and Hungary (where it remained a minority party), and then to the Scandinavian nations. There much of the proselytizing impulse came through universities, especially when scholars from north European schools studied in Germany and carried Lutheran ideas back north. Already in the 1520s and 1530s Denmark made its move to Lutheranism under the influence of its successive kings. A former monk, Hans Tausen, who became a convinced Lutheran, was the major theological influence.
Norway was in many ways a dependency of Denmark when about 1525 King Frederick I encouraged Lutheran preaching in Bergen. Norway followed Denmark into the orbit of Augsburg Confessionalism, as did Iceland, by importing Lutheranism from Denmark. Sweden's political restlessness similarly led that emerging nation to turn Lutheran under King Gustav I Vasa after 1523. Olaus Petri, a student at Wittenberg during the years of Luther's reform, brought conviction and passion to the task of spreading Lutheran ideas in Sweden. Although the King and Petri or his reformer colleagues often were in conflict, Petri's reformation ideas prospered. In Finland, Michael Agricola, still another former Wittenberg student, translated the New Testament and books of worship and helped Finland make a transition to Lutheranism before his death in 1557.
Scandinavian universities and churches generally followed developments parallel to those in Germany, albeit with a special accent on 19th-century Pietist revivals in Norway and Sweden that would make their impact through immigration to America. The major drama of Scandinavian Lutheranism occurred in 19th-century Denmark. There N.F.S. Grundtvig represented a romantic "folk-church movement," and Hans Martensen a kind of official church idealism. Søren Kierkegaard issued a devastating critique of both in the name of an existentialist encounter with Jesus, bypassing established and, he thought, dead Christendom.
American Lutheranism inherited both the Orthodox Confessionalism and the Pietism of the Continent. Enlightenment rationalism, however, was rarely advocated. The Lutherans began to go in large numbers to New York, the Carolinas, and especially Pennsylvania in the 1740s, where they were often gathered by the Lutheran patriarch Henry Melchior Muhlenberg. Many who went to America were poor, and some arrived as exiles or protesters against imposed conformity. Handicapped by their relatively late arrival and the fact that they spoke languages other than English and tended to live in rural enclaves, they had less impact on politics and culture than might be assumed, given the record of their counterparts in Europe.
Because Lutherans came from many nations, spoke many different languages, were propelled by a variety of motives, and were guided by leaders either unaware of or competitive with one another (as, for instance, "Pietists" versus "Confessionalists"), they tended to be isolated. As they became aware of one another, they became contentious. In the mid-19th century, for instance, a shaping influence was Samuel S. Schmucker, a Gettysburg (Pennsylvania) Seminary professor, who advocated Americanization and cooperation with the Reformed evangelical churches. Partly in reaction, the more Lutheran Confessional-minded Charles Porterfield Krauth, also at Gettysburg, stressed Lutheran distinctiveness. More militant in his defense of 17th-century orthodoxy was the great shaper of the Missouri Synod, Carl F.W. Walther, who was president of both the synod and its principal seminary, Concordia, at St. Louis. Walther advocated a policy that forbade Lutherans from communing or praying together if their synods were not in complete doctrinal agreement with one another.
The majority of American Lutherans were of German descent and were often suspect in the Anglo-Saxon milieu. They did not, in the main, support Prohibition and other Protestant social causes. Some retained the German language and were, generally falsely, suspected of German loyalties during World War I. In response they set out to prove themselves superpatriots and after the war they became more Americanized than before.
Through two centuries American Lutherans gathered about 8,000,000 Christians into scores of church bodies. In the 20th century, especially after 1918, they had a tendency to merge, and 5,500,000 of them united three bodies to become the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) in 1988. The largest non-ELCA group was the 2,500,000-member Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod, which saw trends toward liberalism and ecumenical expression in the larger body that it did not welcome. Canadian Lutheranism, about 300,000 strong, is divided chiefly into two bodies parallel to the ELCA and the Missouri Synod in the United States and is strongest in Ontario and the Western provinces.
In the United States the ELCA constituency is chiefly northern. One large wing thrives in and around the states where Lutheranism first arrived: Pennsylvania, New York, Virginia, and the Carolinas. Another resulted from 19th-century immigrations from Scandinavia and Germany to the upper Midwest, with Minnesota having the largest number. The Missouri Synod has less strength in the East and is strongest also in the upper Midwest and around the Great Lakes. After World War II, partly through population mobility and partly through conscious efforts to found new congregations, Lutheranism came to be more of a national presence.
Lutherans in America developed an extensive network of seminaries, beginning at Gettysburg and Philadelphia, when it was seen that they could not depend upon clergy sent by agencies in Germany and Scandinavia. Most Lutheran groups founded colleges of their own, many of which remain strong church-related liberal arts institutions. The Missouri Synod and a smaller and still more isolated Wisconsin Synod established a flourishing network of parochial elementary and, in some cases, high schools. Originally these were shaped by a defensive mentality bent on sheltering the young from public school life. In more recent decades the schools have tended to attract non-Lutheran constituencies and to see themselves less as competition than as complements to public schools.
In the 20th century, after the moral collapse of World War I, Lutherans along with the continental Reformed reacted against the humanistic liberalism that they felt failed to do justice to the radical difference between the divine and the human. There was a revival of biblical theology, often on existentialist grounds, as in the work of Rudolf Bultmann at Marburg, Ger. Historians like Karl Holl helped inaugurate a Luther renaissance. In Sweden Gustaf Aulen and Anders Nygren inspired theological revivals that stressed certain profound motifs in Christian and Lutheran thought.
To its shame, much of Lutheranism was silent or even concurrent when Hitler came to power and provided some intellectuals and some pastors for Nazi Church ("German Christian") leadership. At the same time, some of the neo-orthodox Lutherans joined with the Reformed in 1934 to establish a Confessing Church. In Martin Niemöller and Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Germany, Kaj Munk in Denmark, and Bishop Eivind Berggrav in Norway, it brought forth anti-Nazi heroes and, in some cases, martyrs.
"Mission fields" around the world—established in the 19th century from the Continent and from North America chiefly in the first half of the 20th century—later became younger churches. After the middle of the 20th century many of these showed a vitality that was disappearing or had gone from churches in Europe. In South West Africa/Namibia and elsewhere in Africa thousands gathered to worship and to use their churchly vision for meeting their political problems. Thus in South West Africa/Namibia, a territory under the domain of South Africa, Lutheran church members participated in the leadership of revolutionary organizations, contributing to the establishment of an independent Namibia in 1990. The Lutheran Christians thus developed a pattern different from the characteristic Lutheran one of passivity in politics or conservatism in the face of change.
In its northern homelands Lutheranism was anything but an expanding force after the mid-20th century. Yet, through the Lutheran World Federation and countless vital agencies and institutions, Lutherans continued to find ways of expressing the faith they had heard Martin Luther proclaim. They also took responsible parts in the formal ecumenical movement of the century in their endeavour to stress both their "evangelical" and their "catholic" sides.
The official teaching of the Lutheran churches is that of the Book of Concord (1580), which contains the three ancient creeds (Apostles', Nicene, and Athanasian), the Augsburg Confession, the Apology of the Augsburg Confession, Luther's Schmalkaldic Articles, Luther's Small and Large Catechism, Melanchthon's "Treatise on the Power and Primacy of the Pope," and the Formula of Concord. Of these Lutheran symbols only the Augsburg Confession and Luther's Small Catechism are accepted by all Lutheran churches. No general confessions of faith were adopted after 1580 by the Lutheran churches, although other doctrinal statements have served a confessional purpose for particular churches.
Partly because of the circumstances of its composition and partly because the Reformers understood their work to be a restoration of Christianity amidst contemporary corruptions, the Augsburg Confession emphasizes the continuity of the Lutheran teaching with the ancient Christian Church.
The teaching centres in the Gospel, or "justification": the doctrine that men Although Spener gave no thought to leaving the Lutheran Church, he was deeply aggrieved by what he considered the ignorance of the clergy and the church's lack of spiritual vitality.
Spener's notions were institutionalized in the town of Halle, Ger., by August Hermann Francke, who established the Frankesche Stiftungen ("Francke Foundations") schools as well as an orphanage, a printing press, and similar establishments. These Halle Foundations, still in existence today, put into practice Pietist beliefs regarding sanctified living, practical education, and concern for the neighbour in need. The Pietists' emphasis on education in particular influenced the development of the Enlightenment in Germany.
In the 18th century, the European Enlightenment, embracing the insights of the modern scientific revolution, challenged traditional Christian assumptions concerning miracles, the fulfillment of prophecy, and divine revelation. Lutheran philosophers and theologians, such as Christian Wolff (1679–1754) and Johann Salomo Semler (1725–91), defended the notion of the harmony of reason and revelation. In contrast to medieval scholasticism, which advocated the use of reason but emphasized the primacy of revelation, Lutheran theology subordinated revelation and declared reason to be the key to understanding the will of God. This sentiment, known as Neology, dominated Lutheranism in the second half of the 18th century. As a result, liberal and conservative wings began to form in the 19th century, a division that has continued into the 21st century. In this way Lutheranism mirrored developments in other Christian churches, both Roman Catholic and Protestant. Regardless of denominational differences, the real division increasingly was between those who embraced the new notions of the Enlightenment—that Christianity was in effect natural religion—and those who rejected those notions. For those influenced by the Enlightenment, traditional theological disputes, such as those between Lutherans and the Reformed churches, ceased to be fundamentally important.
It was against this background that King Frederick William III of Prussia in 1817 directed that the Lutheran and Reformed churches in Prussia use an identical order of worship. The Prussian ruling house had been Calvinist since the early 17th century; its subjects were Lutheran, even though the territorial enlargement of Prussia after the Napoleonic Wars had added a substantial Reformed populace. Frederick William, a devout individual, was convinced that no substantive theological differences separated the two churches. Moreover, Prussia had undergone a comprehensive administrative realignment that greatly centralized the government, and the king sought the same for the Lutheran and Reformed churches. While some accepted the king's dictum, others fiercely opposed the merger and found themselves suppressed and even persecuted. When the opponents were finally allowed to emigrate to the United States in the 1840s, they established the conservative Lutheran synods of Missouri and Buffalo. Continuing opposition eventually led Frederick William IV to declare in 1852 that the union of Lutherans and Reformed was not doctrinal but only administrative. Nevertheless, most Prussian regional churches had by then adopted a uniform church order, taking the name Churches of the Prussian Union.
In the 19th century Lutheran theology in Germany was bitterly divided between three schools—a liberal school, represented by Heinrich Eberhard Gottlob Paulus (1761–1851); a traditional-confessional school, represented by Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg (1802–69) and Claus Harms (1778–1855); and a mediating school, which included August Neander (1789–1850) but was chiefly influenced by Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher (1768–1834). Later in the century Albrecht Ritschl (1822–89) sought to forge a synthesis between the Christian faith and modernity, one that did not fit into any particular theological school, but he was bitterly attacked by both liberals and conservatives, the supernaturalists and the rationalists.
The surprising vigour of the Lutheran traditionalists, called Old Lutherans, was related to the religious awakening that swept through Germany in the middle of the century. Allied with the Old Lutherans were the New Lutherans, who sought to revive ancient liturgical traditions and to combine fidelity to the Lutheran confessions with an emphasis on the importance of the sacraments and the church. Old and New Lutherans dominated the Lutheran churches and theology from the 1840s to the 1870s.
In the 16th century, Lutheran ideas moved into Bohemia, Poland, and Hungary and Transylvania. Although they were well received by clergy and laity alike, the lack of support by governmental authorities prevented the formation of new churches. Eventually the Lutheran congregations in these lands succumbed to an increasingly dynamic and resurgent Catholicism.
Traveling merchants and students introduced Lutheran notions to Scandinavia, which was precariously united under the Danish crown. A conflict between the Danish king Christian II and the Swedish nobility in the second decade of the 16th century led to the emergence of Gustav Eriksson Vasa, who secured Swedish independence and was eventually elected king of Sweden and Finland. From the outset, Gustav Vasa sought to diminish the political and financial power of the Catholic Church in Sweden, and he supported Lutheran preaching and publications. At his behest, the diet at Västerås in 1527 confiscated the property of the church, removed the immunity of the clergy from civil courts, and declared that only the pure Word of God should be preached. Subsequent legislative measures at first curtailed and then ended Catholicism in Sweden.
In 1528 Gustav Vasa helped to secure the consecration of three Swedish bishops of Lutheran commitment, thus ensuring the formal apostolic succession of the Swedish episcopate. Among them was Laurentius Petri, who became the first Lutheran archbishop of Uppsala in 1531, and his brother Olaus Petri, who had absorbed Luther's ideas while studying in Wittenberg. Both brought deep Protestant convictions—which Gustav Vasa lacked—to the task of popularizing Lutheranism in Sweden. Although Olaus Petri was often in conflict with the king, he and his reformer colleagues eventually carried the day. The Reformation in Finland was the work of Michael Agricola, another former Wittenberg student and later bishop of Abo, who translated the New Testament into Finnish.
By the 17th century Lutheran Sweden had become a significant political power in Europe. Neutral in the Thirty Years' War when it broke out in 1618, King Gustav II Adolf, the "lion of the north," entered the war on the side of the struggling German Protestant states in 1630. Gustav II Adolf's military victories, especially at Lützen, where he died on the battlefield, ensured that the Thirty Years' War would not bring ruin to Protestantism. The Peace of Westphalia (1648) gave Catholic, Reformed, and Lutheran Christians equal political and religious rights in the Empire. Subsequently, the course of Lutheranism in Scandinavia followed that of Lutheranism in German lands. Pietist sentiment, meanwhile, made an enormous impact on 19th-century Norway and Sweden.
When Lutheranism was established in small communities in present-day New York and Delaware in the 17th century, it was heir both to orthodox Lutheran confessionalism and to Pietism. The first large wave of Lutheran immigrants arrived in the 1740s, with settlements in New York, the Carolinas, and Pennsylvania. Henry Melchior Muhlenberg, a German immigrant pastor, established Lutheran congregations and schools indefatigably, especially in Pennsylvania. In the 19th century, Scandinavian Lutherans settled on the prairies of the American Midwest, establishing synods that retained the forms of the church life of their native countries.
As immigrants of different national and ethnic backgrounds encountered American society and each other, conflicts inevitably developed. Samuel S. Schmucker, professor at the Lutheran seminary at Gettysburg, advocated adjusting to American ways, by such means as adopting English hymns and cooperating with the Reformed churches. In contrast, Charles Porterfield Krauth, a graduate of the seminary at Gettysburg, emphasized Lutheran distinctiveness. When a new wave of German immigrants arrived in the middle of the 19th century, they brought with them the conservative confessional Lutheran orientation dominant in Germany at the time. Establishing the German Evangelical Lutheran Synod of Missouri, Ohio, and Other States in 1847, these immigrants clung not only to German language and culture but also to a conservative theology.
As did all Protestant churches, Lutheran church bodies in Europe and North America joined the great 19th-century effort to evangelize the peoples of Africa and Asia. Missions had been undertaken in the 18th century but lacked the organization and enthusiasm that characterized the 19th-century endeavour. The new missionary commitment found expression in the establishment of numerous missionary societies, such as those of Berlin (1824), Denmark (1821), and Leipzig (1836). Lutheran missionaries concentrated on the East Indies, New Guinea, and South West Africa (now Namibia). Eventually, new Lutheran churches were formed in all parts of the world. By the middle of the 20th century, many of these churches showed a vitality and growth that seemed to be missing from the traditional Lutheran churches of Europe.
As Lutheran evangelization proceeded in Africa and Asia, the Lutheran churches in Europe in the 19th century also engaged in what they called "inner mission," the effort to tend to the physical and spiritual needs of the poor and downtrodden, especially those who had been marginalized by the Industrial Revolution. Johann Hinrich Wichern (1808–81) was the great organizer of this work in Germany. Under his aegis, the inner mission movement established local branches throughout Germany. Although the Lutheran churches thus ameliorated some of the excesses of the Industrial Revolution, they did not adequately address the vast demographic and social changes it had caused. The common people, therefore, became increasingly alienated from the church, which they perceived as being allied with the state and with the socially conservative establishment.
At the beginning of the 20th century, European Lutheranism remained divided between liberal and conservative wings. It was also marked by varying degrees of loyalty toward the 16th-century Lutheran confessions. The experience of World War I, which was widely understood by theologians as demonstrating the bankruptcy of optimistic theological liberalism, triggered both a conservative reaction and an interest in interconfessional cooperation. Most Lutheran theologians followed the general reorientation of Protestant theology away from liberalism and toward a synthesis between religion and culture, theology and philosophy, and faith and science. Known as "dialectic theology" in Europe and "neoorthodoxy" in North America, this movement emphasized the "otherness" of God and the pivotal importance of the Word of God. The key theologian of neoorthodoxy was the Reformed theologian Karl Barth of Germany and Switzerland. As Barth's theological premises, which related all divine revelation to Jesus Christ, became increasingly clear, however, Lutheran theologians such as Werner Elert and Paul Althaus developed an analogous conservative Lutheran perspective based on a traditional understanding of Martin Luther's thought.
The end of World War I also brought the disestablishment of the Lutheran churches as state churches in Germany. The constitution of the Weimar Republic provided for the separation of church and state, though it granted Roman Catholic and Lutheran churches continued modest privileges. Unhappiness with the Weimar Republic, along with the political conservativeness of most Lutheran leaders and Luther's concept of the orders of creation (see below Church and state), contributed to the acceptance of Nazi notions by many Lutherans when Adolf Hitler became German chancellor in January 1933.
The ensuing crisis in the Lutheran churches in Germany arose as a result of the efforts of one pro-Nazi church, the German Christians (Deutsche Christen), to obtain control of the Lutheran regional synods in Germany. The German Christians propounded a Christianity devoid of any Jewish influence (they rejected the Old Testament and declared Jesus to have been Aryan); they also advocated a single, centralized Protestant church in Germany, an objective that contradicted the long-standing tradition of autonomous regional synods but was subtly supported by the Nazi government.
In 1934 Lutheran church leaders and theologians joined Reformed leaders to form the Pastors' Emergency League, out of which came the Barmen Declaration (see Barmen, Synod of). This statement affirmed traditional Protestant doctrine and led to the formation of the Confessing Church (Bekennende Kirche), which comprised pastors and congregations loyal to traditional confessional standards. The remainder of the decade was marked by continued theological and political confrontation between the confessionally minded camp and the German Christians. This controversy, known as the German Church Struggle, led a minority of Lutheran church leaders, such as Martin Niemöller, a decorated World War I submarine captain, to question the legitimacy of the Nazi regime; some, including the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, even became active in the anti-Nazi opposition.
By the middle of the 20th century, European Lutheranism continued to enjoy privileged status in several traditionally Lutheran countries (Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Germany). Regular church attendance, however, was declining, and more and more people formally left the church. The number of church members declined slowly during the first three decades of the century, dwindled dramatically in Germany during Nazi rule, and continued to decline through the rest of the century.
Several important mergers of various American Lutheran churches took place in the 20th century. The first two occurred in 1917, when three Norwegian synods formed the Norwegian Lutheran Church of America (NLCA), and in 1918, when three German-language synods formed the United Lutheran Church in America (ULCA). In 1930 the Joint Synod of Ohio, the Evangelical Lutheran Synod of Iowa, and the Buffalo Synod formed the American Lutheran Church (German). In 1960 the American Lutheran Church (German) merged with the United Evangelical Lutheran Church (Danish) and the Evangelical Lutheran Church (Norwegian) to form the American Lutheran Church (ALC). The Lutheran Free Church (Norwegian), which had initially dropped out of merger negotiations, joined the ALC in 1963. Two years after the formation of the ALC, in a parallel development, the ULCA joined with the Augustana Evangelical Lutheran Church (Swedish), the Finnish Evangelical Lutheran Church, and the American Evangelical Lutheran Church (Danish) to establish the Lutheran Church in America (LCA). The Missouri and Wisconsin synods chose not to engage in merger negotiations because of the more liberal stance of the other Lutheran bodies.
In 1988 the ALC and the LCA—the former prominent in the Midwest, the latter on the east coast—together with the smaller Association of Evangelical Lutheran Churches, merged to form the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA). This made the ELCA, with more than 5 million members, the largest Lutheran church body in North America. The 2.5-million-member Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod remained the second largest Lutheran church. The third major church of North American Lutheranism was the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod, with more than 400,000 baptized members. The ELCA's constituency is chiefly found in the Northeast and the upper Midwest; other concentrations of Lutherans are found in states where Lutherans first settled: Pennsylvania, New York, Virginia, and the Carolinas. Canadian Lutheranism, about 300,000 strong, is divided into two bodies paralleling the ELCA and the Missouri Synod in the United States. The larger of the two, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada (ELCIC), had about 180,000 members in some 600 congregations by the early 21st century. In 1997 the ELCIC adopted an "evangelical declaration" as "a guide for its future mission." Canadian Lutheranism is strongest in Ontario and the Western provinces.
The question "What is Lutheran theology?" is not easily answered. Martin Luther himself was not a systematic thinker, and his colleague Philip Melanchthon became for many his authentic interpreter, raising at once the charge that Melanchthon had distorted Luther's thought. The doctrinal controversies in 16th-century Lutheranism are indicative of the difficulty of defining precisely what it means to be "Lutheran." Nonetheless, Luther's own thought has always been the guiding force in the delineation of Lutheran theology. The two major Lutheran confessional statements of the 16th century, the Augsburg Confession of 1530 and the Formula of Concord of 1576, have traditionally been thought to explicate Luther's teachings.
Since the introduction of Lutheranism in European countries was not centrally directed, the emergence of Lutheran theology took place variously. Thus, not all Lutheran churches formally accepted the Formula of Concord. Authority in Lutheranism is understood as fidelity to the confessional documents that constitute authentic exposition of biblical teaching. Lutheranism has no formal teaching office comparable to that of the Roman Catholic Church.
Foremost among Lutheran teachings is the insistence, shared with all Protestant traditions, that the Bible is the sole source of religious authority. Lutherans subscribe to the three ancient ecumenical Christian creeds together with the 16th-century Lutheran confessional statements. All Lutheran churches affirm the Augsburg Confession; some, notably those in Germany and the United States, additionally affirm the confessional writings found in the Book of Concord. The Formula of Concord designated the Bible as the "sole and most certain rule" for judging Christian teachings. This position was in marked contrast to the Catholic affirmation of both Scripture and tradition. Luther never accepted the Catholic insistence that church tradition was merely making explicit what was already found implicitly in Scripture.
The new centrality of the Bible had dramatic consequences. Luther understood the need for a Bible in the German vernacular, for only if the Bible was accessible could its teachings be appreciated. Luther's example of making available a vernacular Bible was followed by reformers throughout Europe, such as William Tyndale in England. Catholic theologians promptly recognized the powerful weapon Luther had created and undertook to provide vernacular translations of their own. None of them, however, possessed the literary cogency of Luther's translation or of the translation produced early in the 17th century under the direction of King James I of England.
Following St. Augustine, Western Christian theologians until the 16th century conceived the redemptive act of divine grace as taking place within the context of willful human collaboration. This centuries-old consensus of divine and human cooperation was sharply rejected by Martin Luther, who maintained that the apostle Paul denied human participation in the process of salvation. Accordingly, the Augsburg Confession notes, people "are justified freely on account of Christ through faith when they believe that they are received into grace and their sins forgiven on account of Christ, who by his death made satisfaction for our sins"; God "imputes [this faith] as righteousness in his sight" (Augsburg Confession, IV). Modern Lutheran theologians, among them Rudolf Bultmann and Paul Tillich, have applied this doctrine about grace to doubt as well as to guilt and have called attention to the change in the cultural and religious situation since the 16th century. Thus, Tillich interpreted justification through faith as a person's accepting his having been accepted in spite of unacceptability.
This doctrine ("the article by which the church stands or falls") provides the key for understanding the Bible (Apology, IV. 3–5) as a book that has two kinds of content—law and promises. Law demands a perfect inward as well as outward obedience to the divine will, which reason can never achieve. As such it drives men to despair, but the despair is conquered by the promise that God justifies the unjust man. This means that in Lutheran theology, in the act of being justified before God, the human being recognizes no positive or constructive role for the law. "The law always accuses," always destroys what the sinner had thought would impress God. God then effects a new creation by producing the new and justified person in Christ. Theologically, the doctrine of justification gives a Christocentric (i.e., what honours Christ) stress and a practical (i.e., whether afflicted consciences are consoled) emphasis to the other articles of faith.
Lutheranism has a doctrine of human nature that defines the natural state as one in which humans do not fear or love God and are self-seeking. Human beings have freedom of will concerning the outward observance of laws (civic righteousness) but not before God (where they are inevitably unrighteous). They have a knowledge of God but not a true knowledge (they think, for example, that righteousness is what God has rather than what God gives).
Similarly, the meaning of predestination is to be sought not in the hidden counsel of God but in his revelation (Formula of Concord, Epitome XI). Lutheran teaching differs from the Calvinist double predestination by accepting the formal inconsistency of saying that believers are predestined to salvation without saying that unbelievers are predestined to damnation, for the purpose of the article on predestination is to console the troubled conscience. The mechanism of predestination has been the subject of controversy within Lutheranism (whether the decision of God is made "in view of faith"), but the basic position expressed in the symbols has been maintained.
In opposition to the claim that the Roman Catholic Church was the only legitimate ecclesiastical organization, as well as to the biblicist demand to restructure the Christian Church according to the New Testament pattern, the Augsburg Confession (Art. VII) defines sight." This affirmation, on which "the church stands and falls," has received a variety of interpretations since the 16th century. In the 19th and 20th centuries, Lutheran theologians sought to express the teaching in new ways, always insisting that it represented an authentic interpretation of the apostle Paul. Thus, Paul Tillich interpreted justification through faith as the condition of being accepted despite one's unacceptability.
In a famous definition, the Augsburg Confession speaks of the church as the "congregation of saints [believers] in which the gospel is purely taught and the sacraments rightly administered." "Gospel" is interpreted to mean that God justifies believers on account of Christ, not on account of their merits (Augsburg Confession, V). Right administration includes the practice of communion under both kinds (bread and cup). For the unity of the church it is sufficient to agree concerning the gospel and administration of the sacraments. This is the formula Lutherans use to build ecumenical relations with other churches. But it also brings difficulties, for the meaning and degree of "agreement" are always difficult to define and measure.
Luther regarded the church as essentially hidden or invisible. Although it is as weak and sinful an institution as any other one, it is possible to believe that God works in and through the church because it is founded on God's word.
This doctrine has undergone transformations since the 16th century. Orthodoxy and Pietism understood the invisibility of the church to mean that only God knows who among the assembled people are true believers (the invisible church as distinguished from the visible congregation). In the 19th century a sacramental-institutional conception was formulated by some Lutheran theologians (e.g., the German leader Wilhelm Löhe), a congregational conception by others (e.g., the conservative American C.F.W. Walther), a national or folk conception by still others (e.g., the Danish leader N.F.S. Grundtvig), and a historical-evolutionary conception (i.e., the church as the first actualization of the Kingdom of God to be progressively realized in history) by others. Though these differences radically divided the Lutheran bodies in the 19th century, particularly in America, today Lutherans tend to live with different conceptions of church polity without letting such matters divide them.
Of the three sacraments (baptism, Lord's Supper, penitence-absolution) recognized by Luther and the Lutheran confessional writings, which are called symbols, in the Book of Concord, the Lutheran churches generally hold to two by combining absolution in part with baptism (daily repentance is the repeated actualization of baptism) and in part with the Lord's Supper (confession and absolution). The criterion used in determining the number of sacraments was that they were actions instituted by Christ and connected with God's promise (Apology XIII). The symbols do not define the relation between word and sacraments except to say that they come together, and both have the effect of creating and strengthening faith. This is a rejection of the view that Luther regarded the true church as essentially invisible, which means that its authority is found not in a formal structure but in fidelity to Scripture. It is in no way identical to the visible (empirical) church organization. Although the visible church is prone to be as weak and sinful as any other human institution, God works in it insofar as it is faithful to his word. During the periods of orthodoxy and Pietism, the notion of the invisibility of the church was understood to mean that God alone knows who among the assembled Christians are true believers. In the 19th century the relationship of the visible and invisible church received much attention in Lutheran theology, partly under the influence of a dynamic Catholicism, with some Lutheran theologians bestowing great importance on the visible church and the sacraments and ritual. These tendencies were exemplified in the thought of Wilhelm Löhe. A more democratic understanding of the church was promulgated in North America by the Missouri Synod theologian C.F.W. Walther. The most influential conception of the visible church was the historical-evolutionary doctrine of the German theologian Albrecht Ritschl, who saw the institutional church as the actualization of the Kingdom of God progressively realized in history.
The Lutheran confessions recognize two sacraments, baptism and the Lord's Supper. According to Lutheran teaching, the sacraments are acts instituted by Christ and connected with a divine promise. Faith is necessary for a salvatory reception of the sacrament. Thus, Lutherans reject the notion that the sacraments are effective ex opere operato (operative apart from faith) and or that they are only memorial symbolic actions.
The Formula of Concord's teaching on Lutheran affirmation that in the Lord's Supper is that Christ is bodily present "in, with, and under the bread and wine" (Solid Declaration, 35 ff., adopting Luther's terminology over Melanchthon's "with the bread and wine"). The Formula of Concord proved to be the great divisive issue of the 16th century. The Lutheran teaching of the "real" presence left open the question of whether Christ is present in the sacrament bread and wine because he is present everywhere, as one party contendedubiquitously, as some Lutherans contend, or whether he is because he promises to be specifically present in the sacrament because he chooses to beelements. In the 19th century some Lutherans (e.g., Gottfried Thomasius) distinguished word and sacrament by saying that the sacraments are intended for man's natural life as the word is for his conscious personal life. This view in some cases was carried so far (e.g., in Martensen and Friedrich Stahl) as to subordinate the word (as the presentation of salvation) to the sacrament (as the participation in salvation).
The ministry is conceived of as a service in word and sacrament but not a special status. Every baptized Christian is a priest by status (universal priesthood of believers), but the public preaching and administration of sacraments devolves upon "rightly called" ministers, who are priests by office.Church and state
The Lutheran churches generally have understood the relation of church and state on the basis either case, Lutherans reject the Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, which asserts that the bread and wine are transformed into the literal body and blood of Christ, as an inappropriate use of philosophical categories to express biblical truth. Most Lutheran churches allow participation in the Lord's Supper to all baptized Christians who affirm the real presence of Christ in the elements of the bread and wine. Late 20th-century Lutheran theology, notably that of Wolfhart Pannenberg, sought to steer away from the elements of the bread and wine and to emphasize the notion of the Lord's Supper as a meal with the resurrected Jesus.
The ministry is understood as preaching and the administration of the sacraments. Unlike the ministry of the Roman Catholic Church, however, it does not entail a special status for the minister. Lutherans affirm the priesthood of all believers, according to which every baptized Christian may carry out, when properly called, the functions of ministry. While preaching and administration of the sacraments ordinarily is done by "rightly called" (ordained) ministers, Lutherans allow laypersons to carry out these functions when properly authorized.
Lutheran churches have not insisted on uniformity of the liturgy or even on uniformity of church structure. There have been Lutheran bishops in Scandinavia ever since the 16th century, whereas in Germany and North America other designations for such supervisory positions have been used. The title of bishop is accepted in the ELCA but not in the Missouri or the Wisconsin synod.
In 1970 both the LCA and the ALC approved the ordination of women, a practice carried over into the ELCA. The ordination of women is accepted by all Lutheran churches in Europe and North America except the Missouri and Wisconsin synods. Women were first ordained in Denmark in 1948. In Norway the parliament decreed the ordination of women in 1938, an act fiercely resisted by the overwhelming majority of bishops (the first woman was not ordained, however, until 1961). Most German Lutheran churches endorsed the change soon after the Norwegian decree.
Lutheran theology has understood the relationship between church and state in terms of God's two ways of ruling in the world (two kingdoms"realms" or "kingdoms"). Through the "laws, orders, and estates" of the world God rules by compelling external obedience through fear and threat of punishment. Through preaching and sacrament he rules in apparent weakness by converting the human heart. This conception has provided Lutherans with a basis for understanding the constitutional separation of state and church in the United States.The The distinction is similar to that made by St. Augustine between the City of God and the City of the World. Luther argued that God governs the world in two ways: through orders of creation, such as government and marriage, which stem from God's desire that all people everywhere live in peace and harmony, and through his Word and Gospel, though these apply only to Christians. These two domains of power and grace are interdependent because the word alone Gospel itself cannot preserve societal peace and justice—the justice, and civil government must even protect the freedom of the church to proclaim the Gospel—and civil power cannot effect salvation. Lutheranism has rejected the view that civil power is of itself evil, as well as the view that civil obedience has merit for salvation in the sight of God.
To define a citizen's relation to government one may say that in ordinary circumstances a Christian obeys the powers that be (except in matters of faith) as the agent of God's rule. But if a law or government is unjust, a Christian has the right and duty to resist it, passively accepting the consequences of disobedience for himself but actively defending his fellow man against that law or government. If the government is tyrannical, a Christian not only resists but rebels. Those Christians who also are holders of civil power have an obligation to resist and oppose misuse of such power by other rulers (as the territorial princes opposed the emperor in Luther's time). Lutheran scholars are not in complete agreement, but many would associate this view with Luther himself. In the 20th century it was developed by figures like the Norwegian bishop Eivind Berggrav, who resisted the Nazis.
In the 19th century the romantic view of the national state as expressing the spirit of a people was widely influential, but later it became suspect because of the demonic character of nationalism in the 20th century.
The Lutheran Confessions, unlike the Reformed, have no article on Scripture, although the Formula of Concord does designate the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments as the "sole and most certain rule" for judging teachings and teachers.
Toward tradition the attitude of Luther and the confessions was conservative; they retained whatever did not conflict with the Gospel of justification through faith. They viewed the written tradition of the church fathers as useful for interpreting the Scriptures but not as a source or norm of teaching. Some Lutheran theologians in the 19th century developed an organic view of the relation of the two (i.e., Scripture contains a truth that is unfolded in the course of history) not unlike that of the Roman Catholics Johann Möhler and John Henry Newman.
Lutheran teaching on ethics is determined by the perspective of the two kingdoms—the domain of law is not to be confused with that of the Gospel—and by the relation of faith and love implicit in justification. Works of love are the result, rather than the condition, of faith. Human beings have freedom from concern with self by the act of God and are enabled to direct their concern to other human beings. The works a person is to do are specified in part by his status in the world (as parent, ruler, subject, and other roles). Though early Lutherans thought of status in more natural terms (as "orders of creation"), recent Lutherans have given the concept a historical reference (e.g., a person's particular destiny). A person's calling is to do well whatever his status requires. A second factor defining the works a person is to do is the concrete need of fellow human beings.
Lutheran teaching has been shaped in part by the theological controversies in its history, almost all of which were at one time divisive. They had to do with such questions as the relation between divine and human agency (synergistic controversy, predestinarian controversy); whether works are indifferent, necessary, or dangerous for salvation (antinomian controversy, Majoristic controversy); whether in a state of confessional disagreement any questions are neutral (adiaphoristic controversy); what the nature of the sacramental presence is; whether the divine power resides in the Scriptures only when they are being used or also apart from their use (Rathmann controversy); what are sufficient grounds for church unity (syncretistic controversy); and whether God's election of believers is made "in view of faith" or not (predestinarian controversy).
The worship service also was affected by the theology of the Reformers. Luther's "German Mass" of 1526 reflects changes that began about 1523. Apart from shifting the emphasis from sacrifice to thanksgiving, Luther's chief innovation here was to take the words of institution out of the framework of prayer and make of them a proclamation of the Gospel. This change has been preserved to the present day, although there is now a tendency to put the words again into a eucharistic prayer.
Because of the Reformers' emphasis upon the importance of the word, the sermon took an essential place in the service. Preaching is usually based upon a biblical text, a biblical story or doctrine, or a theological theme. Partly in reaction to the 19th century, there is an effort to keep preaching biblically oriented, though not necessarily tied to specified texts.
The term mass, at first retained, is not normally used except in the Church of Sweden (högmessa) as a name for the main service of worship. The other minor services disappeared from use during the 17th century, though some have been recovered in the liturgical reforms of the last century. Only Matins and Vespers are used with any regularity.
The basic order of service in most Lutheran churches is the same. It consists of two main portions (preaching and sacrament) in which the Kyrie, Introit, Gloria, Credo, and Agnus Dei are incorporated. Under the impact of the liturgical movement in the 20th century the didactic emphasis has given way to an emphasis on celebration in the service. Liturgical revisions (Swedish order of 1942, German of 1954, in the United States in 1941, 1958, and 1978) have brought an even greater uniformity in the basic order. They have also restored communion as a normal part of the regular Sunday service.
Lutherans observe two sacraments, baptism and the Lord's Supper (communion, Eucharist). The common practice is to baptize children and adults who have not been baptized previously. The frequency of communion has increased in recent years, but there are still many congregations where it is celebrated only once a month or less often. Though the usual practice has been that only those who have been confirmed may participate in the Eucharist, in 1970 Although this conception allowed North American Lutherans to accept the separation of church and state in the United States and elsewhere, it also meant that Lutheranism, unlike Calvinism, made little effort to "Christianize" the social and political order. Historically, this entailed the autonomy of the secular realm, even a certain subservience of the religious to the secular. Quite consistently, when the German peasants staged an uprising in 1524–25, Luther forcefully argued that social and political demands cannot be justified by the Gospel.
Lutheran theology stressed obedience to government as a Christian duty and did not, as did Reformed theology, produce a fully developed doctrine of resistance against tyrannical governments. Luther advocated resistance only if the preaching of the Gospel was in jeopardy. This principle was first put to the test in the middle of the 16th century, when the Lutheran city of Magdeburg successfully resisted Emperor Charles V's reintroduction of Catholicism.
Nazi totalitarianism caught German Lutheranism unprepared to offer a clear rationale for opposing tyranny. The weakness of Lutheran theology on this point became evident during the period of Nazi rule. Thus, when the government decreed racially exclusionary laws, which had implications for the churches, most Lutheran theologians conceded that it had the authority to do so under the divine order. The impact of Nazi Germany and other totalitarian regimes led some Lutheran church leaders, such as the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Norwegian bishop Eivind Berggrav, to reconsider the traditional Lutheran view.
Lutheran ethical teaching has been described as centring on faith active in love, which means that the believer makes moral choices in freedom, without preset rules and laws. Lutheranism has thus eschewed the notion of a specifically Christian ethos but has insisted that the place of ethical endeavour is the common ordinary life, in which Christian believers are called upon to serve their neighbours. This ethical teaching, therefore, emphasized the sacredness of all human activities and maintained that an ethical life should be pursued apart from legalistic rules in what Martin Luther called "Christian freedom."
Although Luther retained the basic structure of the mass and liturgy, he introduced significant changes in the worship service, primarily of a theological nature, in writings such as the German Mass of 1526. The emphasis in the traditional mass on the reiteration of the sacrifice of Jesus was replaced by an emphasis on thanksgiving. Luther saw the sacrament of the altar (the Lord's Supper) not as an autonomous form of the Gospel but as a proclamation of it. Therefore, he retained only the recitation of the words of institution ("In the night in which he was betrayed, Jesus…") from the prayer of thanksgiving. Because of the importance placed on the Bible, the sermon occupied the pivotal place in worship.
In the early 21st century, most Lutheran churches followed essentially the same order of worship. It consisted of two main parts, Word (Liturgy of the Word) and the Lord's Supper, both understood as the proclamation of the Gospel. The liturgical movement in the 20th century, which sought to restore the active role of the laity in church services, affected Lutheranism by deemphasizing the didactic sermon and increasing the frequency of the celebration of the Lord's Supper. Other liturgical revisions (in Sweden in 1942, in Germany in 1954, and in North America in 1941, 1958, and 1978) increased the uniformity of Lutheran worship beyond national boundaries. Although traditionally only confirmed members received the Communion elements, in 1970 both the Lutheran Church in America and the American Lutheran Church approved endorsed participation for 10-year-old baptized children, whether they have been confirmed or not.The in the Lord's Supper for baptized younger children, even for those who have not been confirmed. In the decades following the reform, a tendency emerged in the ELCA to allow even young children to receive the bread and wine.
Other rites of the Lutheran churches are baptism, confirmation, ordination, marriage, and burial. In the rite of Lutherans practice infant baptism. In confirmation (which usually occurs between the ages of 10 and 15) a member makes public profession of the , the individual publicly professes the faith received in baptism. In the rite of marriage the church ceremony may replace the civil ceremony or it may serve as an invocation of blessing on the civil ceremony. Ordination of the clergy does not endow its members with a special character or give them a special status, but it sets them apart for the particular office of preaching the word and administering the sacraments. This rite is interpreted either institutionally (i.e., preaching is an order instituted by Christ and transmitted from generation to generation [succession]) or congregationally (i.e., the congregations call certain of their members to assume the functions of preaching and administering the sacraments for them). In 1970 the Lutheran Church in America and the American Lutheran Church approved the ordination of women, a practice carried over in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, which came into being from a merger in 1988. There is no sacrament of extreme unction, but there is a burial service for the dead.
An important role was played in the Reformation by hymns, which Lutheranism made an important contribution to Protestant hymnody, which not only conveyed the evangelical teaching but also allowed for increased popular participation in the church services. The bestworship. Many of the well-known Lutheran hymns come from the period of the 16th and 17th centuries (e.g., "A , notably A Mighty Fortress Is Our God" God, by Martin Luther, "All Glory Be to God on High" by Nikolaus Decius, "O O Sacred Head Now Wounded" Wounded, by Paul Gerhardt, "Wakeand Wake, Awake, for Night Is Flying" Flying, by Philipp Nicolai, "Now Thank We All Our God" by Martin Rinkart). But each nation has made its contribution (e.g., Thomas Kingo in Denmark and Norway), and Lutheran hymnals today include hymns from many ages, nations, and communions.
Among the composers of choral music (cantatas, motets, masses, settings of the Passion of Christ) Johann Sebastian Bach ranks highest (e.g., Mass in B Minor, St. Matthew Passion, and St. John Passion). But other composers of importance were Michael Praetorius, Heinrich Schütz, and Dietrich Buxtehude. To this music should also be added the Scandinavian folk tunes (e.g., L.M. Lindeman in Norway).
Education of the laity and clergy was an early problem for the Reformers. The means developed to meet it have had a formative influence on Lutheranism to the present day.
To instruct the people in Christian teaching, Luther not only translated the Bible into the vernacular but also wrote his Small and Large Catechisms (1528–29). The small one was to be used by heads of households to instruct those under their care. It includes not only the three parts that had been in use before (the Ten Commandments, the Creed, and the Lord's Prayer) but also three additional parts on baptism, the Lord's Supper, and absolution. Each topic in the various parts is connected with an explanation in the form of an answer to the question, "What does this mean?"—a device Luther used in order to avoid mechanical memorization.
The Small Catechism, with various expositions, has remained a basic instructional tool in the Lutheran churches, though it has been supplemented by other materials (e.g., Bible courses, Sunday school literature, projects).
In the 20th century efforts have been made to connect the secular world and the Christian tradition by establishing institutions such as the academies for laity in Europe (which provide opportunity for regular meetings of persons from specific vocations to discuss the relevance of Christianity to those vocations) and the church colleges in the United States.
The polity of the Lutheran churches varies from country to country. The Church of Sweden has maintained the episcopal succession unbroken, and congregations there are given great . American Lutherans have been heir to this heritage, but since the 19th century they have also embraced the hymnody of Anglo-Saxon Protestantism. Hymns from the 20th century, such as those by the German composer Hugo Distler, have been adopted somewhat more sparingly, though in the early 21st century, as evidenced by the new ELCA hymnal and worship book, Evangelical Worship, a persistent effort was under way to make Lutheran hymnody contemporary and multicultural.
The polity of the Lutheran churches differs between Scandinavia and Germany, with North American Lutheranism and Lutheran churches on other continents reflecting both traditions. The Church of Sweden, which ended its status as a state church in 2000, has maintained the episcopal office (and with it episcopal succession), and its local congregations have considerable freedom to appoint their own pastors. The Danish Church lost but later regained the episcopacyfirst rejected then reintroduced the episcopal office. In Norway there is a closer tie the ties between church and state had traditionally been closer than in the other Scandinavian countries. Since 1869, by an arrangement with Russia, the Finnish Church is with the parliament exercising a major voice in church affairs, but in 2006 the General Synod of the Church of Norway agreed that church and state should separate in Norway. Since 1869 the Finnish Church has been independent of state control but is supported by public funds.
Until the end of World War I, the administrative affairs of the Lutheran churches in Germany were under secular authority, administered by a commission of laity and clergy, a system that grew out of the emergency situation of the Reformation. After the collapse of the government in 1918, the churches drew up new constitutions placing the congregations under a General Synod in some provinces and under a bishop in others; and the several provincial churches (Landeskirchen) were united in handled by government offices, with the ruler exercising important power as summepiskopus, or presiding bishop, a system of church governance that emerged from the Reformation. With the establishment of the Weimar Republic, the regional Lutheran churches (Landeskirchen) adopted new constitutions that in some provinces placed the congregations under a superintendent and a general synod while in others they were placed under a bishop. These Landeskirchen consisted of 15 Lutheran and 12 Prussian Union synods along with one Reformed synod. These churches were united in 1922 in the German Evangelical Church Federation (1922Deutscher Evangelischer Kirchenbund). At the For Lutherans the concurrent existence of both Lutheran churches and churches of the Prussian Union in the federation was highly problematic, since it posed the question of the federation's theological viability. Confessional Lutherans insisted on the creation of an Association of Evangelical Lutheran Churches (ELKD; Evangelisch-Lutherische Kirche Deutschlands).
After the end of World War II, after the conflicts under Hitler, Lutheran, Prussian Union, and Reformed Landeskirchen organized the Evangelical Church in Germany was organized under Bishop (Evangelische Kirche in Deutschland, EKD), under the leadership of bishops Theophil Wurm and Hans Meiser and Pastor Martin Niemöller, adopting the Declaration of Barmen (1934) as a binding statement. The . The member churches of the EKD adopted the Declaration of Barmen, with its expression of the communalities of the Lutheran and Reformed traditions, as a foundational statement. To safeguard Lutheran confessional concerns, the United Evangelical Lutheran Church of Germany , formed in 1948, became a unit within the Evangelical Church in Germany.In the United States the Lutheran churches have the same denominational standing as other churches. The polity (Vereinigte Evangelisch-Lutherische Kirche Deutschlands, VELKD) was established in 1948 as the federation of Lutheran regional churches. By the late 20th and early 21st century, efforts had begun to integrate the VELKD more fully into the EKD.
Despite the division of Germany into four Allied zones of occupation at the end of World War II, the EKD encompassed both East and West Germany. The creation of the East German and West German states in 1949 initially did not mean the end of the EKD. In 1968 pressure from the East German government forced the East German churches to leave the EKD and establish their own East German Evangelical federation (United Evangelical Lutheran Church in the German Democratic Republic).
East German Lutherans, living in a society that was hostile to Christianity and intermittently persecuted Christians, sought to avoid confrontations with the state, even when it decreed an all but mandatory "youth consecration," which was to replace confirmation. In contrast to communist Poland, where the Catholic Church did not shy from outright confrontation with the regime, East German Lutherans were determined to cooperate with the state whenever possible while at the same time affirming the need for the church to be the church. This strategy was expressed in the slogan "church within socialism." By the late 1970s a rapprochement with the communist regime had begun to take place. Nonetheless, membership in the Lutheran churches declined significantly in the roughly half-century of communist rule in East Germany. When the German Democratic Republic began to experience a series of human rights demonstrations in 1988 and 1989, Lutheran pastors and churches were in the forefront of the demand for greater civil liberties, thus playing an important role in the eventual disintegration of the East German state. The unification of Germany in 1990, however, had little impact on church membership, as the downward trend begun during communist rule continued. In the early 21st century less than 20 percent of the population of the former German Democratic Republic belonged to a Christian church.
In the United States the polity of the Lutheran churches is congregational, but in a complex form in which congregations yield some authority to synods on regional and national levels. Elected heads are called presidents in some Lutheran bodies, but in the largest, such as the Lutheran Church– Missouri Synod and the Wisconsin Synod Lutheran Church, while the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America , they are bishops.uses the term bishop for its 65 synodical leaders. It also has a "presiding bishop," elected to a six-year term, who guides churchwide activities and initiatives. An assembly of all member churches meets every two years and is the legislative body of the ELCA. Besides these larger Lutheran churches church bodies, there are a number of smaller Lutheran free churches both in Europe (e.g., the Evangelical Lutheran [Old Lutheran] Church , in Germany) and in the United States (e.g., the Church of the Lutheran Confession or the Apostolic Lutheran Church), which have complete greater congregational autonomy.
The Lutheran World Federation, established in 1947, is a cooperative organization.
A global association of Lutheran churches was first established in the Lutheran World Conventions, which met at Eisenach in 1923 and in Copenhagen in 1929. In 1947 it assumed permanent form as the Lutheran World Federation (LWF), an umbrella organization of the various national Lutheran churches. The LWF has no authority to speak for worldwide Lutheranism and mainly serves as a forum for intra-Lutheran discussion and ecumenical consultation with other churches. The LWF took the lead in ecumenical conversations with the Roman Catholic Church, which led to a Joint Declaration on justification, signed by representatives of the Roman Catholic Church and the LWF in 1999. The document declared that no substantive theological differences exist between the positions of the two churches on the topic. However, among Lutheran theologians, especially in Germany, the "Joint Declaration" evoked intense criticism for being unfaithful to the Lutheran tradition, even as the Roman curia also recorded reservations about the document, which nonetheless is understood as a milestone in Lutheran-Catholic relations.
The most exciting development of the 20th century was the dramatic expansion of Lutheranism beyond its European (and North American) homelands. Of the 65 million Lutherans who belonged to the LWF at the beginning of the 21st century, there were roughly 39 million in Europe, 5 million in North America, and 20 million in Asia and Africa. This new geographical diversity has created the same challenge for Lutheranism as it has for other global but originally European churches: that of maintaining traditional European and North American leadership in thought and practice as more and more adherents are found in other parts of the world. In the early 21st century there were about 30 Lutheran church bodies, with some 15 million members altogether, in Africa and more than 40 churches, with some 8 million members, in Asia.
General surveys and bibliographic tools include Günther Gassmann, Historical Dictionary of Lutheranism (2001); Donald L. Huber, World Lutheranism: A Select Bibliography for English Readers (2000); and Julius Bodensieck (ed.), The Encyclopedia of the Lutheran Church, 3 vol. (1965), is the standard English reference work on Lutheranism, although articles vary from the scholarly to the propagandistic.On Lutheranism in the United States, see Sydney E. Ahlstrom, "Theology in America: A Historical Survey," in James Ward Smith and A. Leland Jamison, Religion in American Life, vol. 1, The Shaping of American Religion (1961), pp. 232–321, a survey that sets Lutheran theology in the context of other developments; and Abdel R. Wentz, A Basic History of Lutheranism in America, rev. ed. (1964), a standard work on the major developments. a useful reference work that does not always hide its confessional bias. The older work by Conrad Bergendoff, The Church of the Lutheran Reformation: A Historical Survey of Lutheranism (1967), a broad survey of Lutheranism, is useful for information on Lutheranism in the Scandinavian countries. L. DeAne Lagerquist, The Lutherans (1999), is a thorough study of Lutheranism from the Reformation to the present day.
Good treatments of Lutheran history are Eric W. Gritsch, A History of Lutheranism (2002); and Eric Lund (ed.), Documents from the History of Lutheranism, 1517–1750 (2002). Lutheranism in the United States is covered in E. Clifford Nelson, The Rise of World Lutheranism: An American Perspective (1982), is a helpful discussion of the cooperation among between 20th-century Lutheran churches. E. Clifford Nelson (ed.), The same author also edited a survey of North American Lutheranism, The Lutherans in North America, rev. ed. (1980), is a study on the various periods of American history.
Works on Lutheran teachings include Theodore G. Tappert (ed. and trans.theology include Robert Kolb and Timothy J. Wengert (eds.), The Book of Concord: The Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church (1959, reprinted 1987), official translation; , trans. from the German by Charles Arand (2000). Edmund Schlink, Theology of the Lutheran Confessions, trans. from the German by Paul F. Koehneke and Herbert J.A. Bouman (1961, reissued 1975; originally published in German, 1940), is a dialectical still-useful neoorthodox approach to Lutheran theology; . Wilhelm Maurer, Historical Commentary on the Augsburg Confession, trans. by H. George Anderson (1986; originally published in German, 2 vol., 1976–78), offers a thorough work on study of the basic Lutheran document; Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, 3 vol. (1951–63, reprinted 1973), a systematics by the most original Lutheran theologian of the 20th century; and confessional document; while Karl Ferdinand Müller and Walter Blankenburg, (eds.), Leiturgia: Handbuch des evangelischen Gottesdienstes, 5 vol. (1954–70), a historical and theological examination discusses the Lutheran service both historically and theologically. Concise but useful is Friedrich Mildenberger, Theology of the Lutheran service.Confessions, ed. by Robert C. Schultz, trans. from the German by Erwin L. Lueker (1986). Paul Althaus, The Theology of Martin Luther (1966, reissued 1996); and Werner Elert, The Structure of Lutheranism (1962, reprinted 2003; originally published in German, 1931), are still valuable.

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Don't get me wrong, I root for the U.S. in most, if not all, other sports.
Don't get me wrong, I root for the U.S. in most, if not all, other sports.
China was close because they were hitting their 3's and the Americans missed all of them. Wade has been dominant and looks like his old self, not the injured and beaten down guy playing in Miami last year.
To me, the key to this team is three point shooting. If they hit them, they will win gold because it will open up the driving lanes. If they don't, teams will pack in the defense and dare them to shoot.
Variatio delectat - Cicero
Huge game against Greece. I can't be more excited. Although I noticed that they are starting Jason Kidd's corpse...
Variatio delectat - Cicero
Chris Bosh has been having an amazing game. As has D Wade.
The pressure on D has kept them in transition which has kept the Greeks from setting up on defense. They're playing quite well, but still not shooting particularly well.
Very solid performance by the US team. Bosh was fabulous. LeBron is playing some of the best basketball I have ever seen, and Wade was fantastic. Greece is the type of team that typically gives the US problems, so things are looking good.
Variatio delectat - Cicero
Lebron is showing what he can do, when he doesn't have to score 75% of his teams points. LBJ is the world's best player at 23...sick
and, Bosh was ridiculous guarding the smaller guards along the perimeter today...too bad he gets lost playing in Toronto.
Bosh was reminding me of KG with that tenacious D.... makes you wonder if he can keep up his motivation for the Raptors.
Thank God the "Jail-Blazer" era is over
Rooting for team USA Basketball is like rooting for Haleburton to win the bid
(of course, I'll feel differently in 2012 when Oden and Roy are wearing the red, white and blue)
Last edited by gm; 08-14-2008 at 06:01 PM.
Never overlook the obvious
anyone rooting against the team or that thinks sheed should be on the team might need to re-examine things....but to each his own
I don't see how rooting for the USA basketball team is any different than rooting for Phelps, both are far and away better than their competition and should cruise to a gold medal(s)
If Phelps was swimming against your alma mater and knocking them off in the regionals every year, you might feel differently.
Pick the player you cannot stand to see repeatedly beating your favorite team. The kind of guy guy who is arrogant and rubs it in your team's face every time? Who will never condescend and give your team credit when he loses?
Then put him on the national team and tell me you've got no problem rooting for his success.
Last edited by gm; 08-15-2008 at 05:19 PM.
Never overlook the obvious
On a side not I find it amusing how Team USA gets credit for playing defense. It is a part of the game. If you don't play defense you will lose the game. From the little I have watched of the team when they play poor defense the other team scores. When Team USA plays basketball the fundamental way they are unbeatable.
Who wins a game Team USA 08 or Team US 92?
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