Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: YouTube Theologians, welcome to the Theology Q and A podcast. I'm Pastor Brian Wolfmuller, St. Paul and Jesus Staff Lutheran churches in Austin, Texas, joined by Pastor Andrew Packer, Good Shepherd Lutheran Church, Collinsville, Illinois. Pastor Packer, I heard that you were boycotting the Issues Etc conference this summer, June 12 to 13.
Something going on with you and Craig? Are you. Everything okay?
[00:00:21] Speaker B: I heard you were speaking, so I said, I can't do that.
[00:00:25] Speaker A: That's right. I'm out of there.
[00:00:27] Speaker B: Which gets me to, which gets me to a rumor. I heard this was in person to my face the other, like two weeks ago after a baptism.
The grandfather of the child being baptized listens to us and said, I can really tell you guys actually like each other and get along and really care about each other. I would like to squash the rumor. When the camera goes off, we're at each other's throats. It's terrible.
You can imagine. It's just like the tension is. You could cut it with a knife. That's right. When the camera goes off, it's always showing.
[00:00:57] Speaker A: I was a kid and my mom was yelling at me, or maybe she was proud. It was more likely she was yelling at one of my brothers. And, and she, and answered the phone and said, hello. You know, real sweet. That's how we are when the recording starts.
[00:01:14] Speaker B: That's right.
[00:01:14] Speaker A: We're doing a. Camera goes off. So we're doing a gap show now. So if you're listening to the podcast, this is what's happening. We're, we're. Re. We have been doing seven questions, which is one question a day, every day. We're swapping it over. So we're going to do five questions a week, Monday through Friday and then on Saturday the whole big long thing will drop. So we're going from seven to five. Well, we got to do a little gap. So it's a two question episode today that we're doing and then next week it'll kind of fall, hopefully fall into that regular production schedule. A question Monday to Friday, the whole big thing on Saturday, and then Sunday. Let's see if I can do Sunday. Drive to churches. I need to get back into the habit. So that's what we're doing. So you got a couple of questions for us? Oh, we can take our time and just marinate in these ones, stretch them out.
[00:02:05] Speaker B: This one's a follow up. This came up because of the, the video last week on women teaching the church.
A number of comments basically said our distinction on speaking versus writing that when a woman writes A book. It doesn't carry with the authority of her like preaching in church. They don't buy that distinction. They believe that writings carry authority and they mention specifically. Right. The Bible and the Confessions. But how would we say those are different? Or how would you say they're different?
A woman writing a book versus like the Bible or confessions or other authoritative writings. Why is that?
[00:02:40] Speaker A: We have a couple of writings from women in the Bible.
I mean, maybe not writing, but Mary had composed a hymn and it's based on the Hymn of Hannah.
And, and I don't want to, I don't want to discount those things and, but I don't want to also let them stand in contradiction to the command that I don't permit a woman to preach or teach in the church.
We have is this. We. We have in the very first Lutheran hymnal that was published, we have eight hymns. And one of those eight hymns was written by a woman.
I used to know the details of who it was and how she was. I think she was married to Luther's son for a while. Something like this.
So that there's, so that we've always.
Well, I don't know if always, but there's been always a place in the Scriptures from As, from Hannah when she was praying and, and singing this, her hymn of praise at the very beginning when her, when the Lord gave her the gift of Samuel.
And, and we've always had that especially hymnic and poetic, theologically beautiful voice from women in the Scriptures.
So we, we have to receive that as a gift from God, but also understand that it's not standing in violation of the command. So I think we have to, from the Scriptures themselves hold both of those things.
And I think that's this kind of public teaching where I got this distinction. And you and I were talking about this a little bit too from my own Dr. Judish professor the seminary, who wrote an extended piece on this from.
In what it Means to be a helper from, from Genesis, when the Lord creates Eve to be a helper. And he. He makes the explicit point that, that writing theologically according to her expertise is one way that women are helping men. They're serving that role as helper. So he, he doesn't just like allow it, but states it explicitly as a, as a way that that role of helpfulness is, is. Is given. Now I suppose if someone understands the writing of a book to be an authoritative act of teaching, then the, then it would be right. You would then say that, well, women shouldn't also write and I suppose that some books are understood to be authoritative. I mean, like Scripture and the Confessions.
But.
But that's just not really how we treat books. I. I mean, I don't know. You're. I, You're. The example that you gave is pretty good. That. From the Judish thing. I. I don't want to steal your thunder on that one. But you. You know, when we're reading books, we can say, hey, that's helpful, and that's not. It's the same as this. Like, the same as our teaching here that hopefully people can find this helpful because we're pointing to the Scriptures. But. But if they don't, there's no.
Like, you don't get excommunicated or church discipline for disagreeing with us on the Internet. We're here trying to be helpful voices. And it's different.
The authority that we carry as we are publishing stuff publicly online is different than the authority that we have when we're preaching from the pulpits that the Lord has called us to.
So, I mean, I'm just kind of restating the argument. I'm not sure if I've really added anything to it, but
[00:06:23] Speaker B: I thought of a couple helpful, maybe examples. If you and I got a letter from the Pope today that said, you're no longer pastors, you and I would laugh and go on with our day because the Pope has no authority over us. So even though it's a written letter and he has authority, when we receive it, we're like, we don't care because you have no authority over us. But if we got a letter today from President Harrison and our district president that said, you can no longer be a pastor now, it's a different discussion.
[00:06:50] Speaker A: Why?
[00:06:50] Speaker B: Because they have ecclesiastical authority over us. Right.
And it's different if I write a letter. If we just said right now to someone, maybe in the comments, hey, we're putting you under church discipline, they would laugh. Because we have no authority over them. Right. Unless it was one of our members. But if I write a letter to one of my members and say, hey, you're under church discipline, that comes with authority because of my office.
Right? So I think this distinction people are trying to make about. Well, some writings carry authority, yes.
But even writings that carry authority only carry authority if the person who wrote it has authority over you.
Right. We don't just say just because the Pope has authority, that when he writes me a letter that somehow now carries weight with me, it doesn't. I don't care what he says. He has no authority. Over me. But it's different if my ecclesiastical supervisor, if President Curtis sent me a letter today reprimanding me, I would take that seriously. That's an entirely different thing. And so I think there's that confusion there, or even like you brought up in the comments, I had quoted that Judish section and the person I was responding to said, well, I like everything he said, except for that last line.
So the thing that Judas wrote, you did not immediately receive as being authoritative over you, otherwise you wouldn't disagree with it.
[00:07:55] Speaker A: Right.
[00:07:56] Speaker B: I mean that. That's the whole point. When you receive a book, in this case a woman maybe writing a book for CPH or an article or whatever, it doesn't immediately have authority over you. You're reading it and evaluating it. But even in the book, kind of the book Arsen put out, can Women be Pastors, there's several essays in there that make the argument very clear that women historically have and still do and can write theology and write theological works.
So even in a book that's designed to show us that no women cannot be pastors, put out by our own publishing company, put together by the president of our synod, like, has articles that discuss this very thing. So I think those distinctions need to be made. Like, just because some reigns carry authority, yes, obviously the Bible. But why is the Bible authoritative? Because it came to us from God. Why are the Confessions authoritative? Because we pledge ourselves to them and say they're in accordance with the word of God.
But just because someone has authority and writes something doesn't mean that now has authority over me, unless their office is one that's actually over me. Right. You could write a letter to my wife reprimanding her for something and it doesn't mean anything. But if I talk to my wife, that's a different. We have a different relationship. That's a different kind of thing.
So those distinctions matter. I don't know why people get hung up on this with the writing thing, but I think it's an easy distinction to make. So there used to be a helpful
[00:09:24] Speaker A: sort of thing where if you were a doctor, that meant you were a public teacher of the church and you could be ordained to be a priest, and that gave you sort of authority there in your parish. And then if you were lifted up to be a doctor of the church, that kind of. It gave you a more public authority and it authorized you to write.
And so Luther could write because. Not because he was. Had different ideas, but because he was a doctor of the church and he understood that as an office that was part of the orderliness of the, of the Reformation. That's lost now. We just, we have nothing like that at all.
So it's in some ways it could be a lamenting, that kind of thing that, that, that old order of things. Like.
And it's something that we have to wrestle with. I have to wrestle with this a lot. Like who, who called me to put a YouTube video online? And the answer is nobody.
It's that therefore, because I'm. Luther wrestles with this as well. Like what if someone takes my sermon and goes and publishes it and what do you do with it? And he talks about that and he doesn't go crazy about it. It's just sort of practical advice. But what do we say about that? I have to say that because I don't have a call, I'm not coming with the authority of a call.
I'm just offering something as helpful to the neighbor. And it can be helpful or not. Take it or leave it. It's what it's there for. So it's a different kind of teaching because we have a different order and a different expectation that exists in the world. And it's also, ah, it's part of the problem of.
Because we see this abused.
I mean because there are women pastors, which is an abomination. And both ways to get there. Both the charismatic way, denying the authority of the external world word and the liberal way, denying the authority and clarity of the scripture are both not only detrimental to the office, detrimental to order in the church, detrimental to the people who are disobeying the word of God to be in the office, it's detrimental to everybody involved in the whole endeavor. It's a soul destroying thing to have women pastors. I mean it and it, and not just because it doesn't stop there. The thing itself is already soul destroying and it corrupts everything else. But because we have that, then you, you, the danger is you go the other way and you start to, you kind of have this reaction to avoid the abuse and you. And I think you go, we, we. The dangers that we can go too far in the other, the other direction because we have this great abuse of women usurping the office.
We, we have to kind of circle the wagons back the other way around and you end up making your argument too strong.
So, so, so I, I think we're trying to work in the middle. I mean, I know some people say, oh, you think women can, can write theological books? That's, that's a progressive liberal sort of thing. I just, I, I mean, I, I'm just having a hard time thinking of Dr. Judish as a progressive liberal. Can you, like.
It's just trying to not go too far in the other way. And I think it's. I think it's really important that every Christian understands themselves to be a theologian. Every man and every woman and every child is a theologian and a student of the Scriptures and that they're speaking the wisdom of God in every place that the Lord has given. And especially the women are commanded to teach especially those practical things to the younger women, but the theological things as well.
So that the prohibition that Paul puts on the office of pastor and that public teaching office is specific and he has to do it, remember, in the context of the fact that the Lord had directly called some women in Corinth to be prophetesses.
Thank the Lord that that age of the prophetess, it's not something we have to deal with because Paul's like, oh, you're yoi prophetesses. Okay, Head coverings. If you call ordain someone, it's not the women, etc, because it's like the Lord has done this thing of, of calling and putting in prophetesses in the church. So now we're trying to make sure that that is done in an orderly and. And helpful way. Boy, oh boy, had his hands full there. But we, so we have to, we, we just have to be. We have to be careful about this, that we don't. We don't kind of go crazy and react on the other too far.
Now.
[00:14:08] Speaker B: We had, we actually had a woman pastor in the comments of the last video say that she actually listens all the time and agrees with us on lots of things, but obviously disagrees with us here.
It was actually very like the tone of it, Everything was very respectful, especially for a YouTube comment. So shout out to you for that.
But I was gonna say if, if she wanted to like, reach out to us to, to discuss it. I don't want to discuss in YouTube comments just because if you have specific arguments against arguments we've made about this, you can directly contact us and I'd love to continue the conversation there. I don't want to do YouTube comments because one, I don't have time to keep up with YouTube comments and two, they just don't seem to go well. So anyways, if she's still listening to this one, she can follow up with us and love to carry on that conversation that she started there because the, you know, the.
[00:15:02] Speaker A: It's all women pastors is Always like the, I don't know, it's a linchpin issue.
It's where there's a huge pressure point there.
And I don't, I don't know exactly why, but it's where it's like, you know how, remember Spock could like, and pinch someone on the neck and they would cause them to collapse or whatever. It's like women pastors is like, is that spot where you, like, pinch and you cause a whole church body to collapse. And it's, it's happening, it happened to the Lutheran Church of Australia.
Oh, it looks like it's happening to the, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Germany also. And they're just being brought to their knees by this issue.
And it could, it could be just this force of feminism that's just in, in modernity that kind of brings that, that confessional point that, that biblical authority to its knees, and then everything else sort of collapses.
But I, I, we did a video about that.
Five Questions to Ask about Women Pastors.
I wonder if I, I wonder if I could find my notes on that. But the, the question is, I mean, in some ways, what do you do with these texts from St. Paul?
Like, the Holy Spirit has given us these texts, and you have to do something with them.
Can we receive them with joy as a gift or not?
And remember that our biblical integrity starts with our confessing the things that we don't like.
I mean, there's all these great things in the Bible that we agree with. Great.
That's great.
It's when the Bible disagrees with me about what I want to do or what I want to think or whatever, that that's the real test of biblical authority. So I might like the fact that there's not women pastors in the church. That's great. So those passages aren't trouble for those of you who don't like it. That's where the test is.
There's other paths. And the Lord will make sure for each and every one of us that there's things that he says that we don't like, that we don't want to believe, because it's part of our being. The children of God is listening to his voice and believing what he says. So it could be women pasture, it could be the age of the earth. It could be, I don't know what. You just pick whatever. There's going to be something that I wish said, something else, and it could be the doctrine of hell. And it's. It. That's what I mean. That's a good one. For probably all of us. And I wish it was different than it is, but am I going to let the Bible tell me something I don't want to hear?
And so for whatever reason, for, like, big churches, it's the lady pastor thing that. That kind of brings them to their knees.
It. And it forces this question. So.
[00:18:06] Speaker B: All right, next question.
Why did Lutheran insist on assurance so much?
They say newish Lutheran here.
I am thankful for the Lutheran emphasis on the assurance of salvation. It is a help to me. I got to wondering, why did Luther himself back in the 1500s, find it Pastor pastorally necessary to emphasize assurance?
I realize he struggled with the issue personally, but was lack of assurance a widespread issue in his day?
So he wants to know what drove the good Roman Catholics, which is, you know, an anachronism, but what drove them during his day to have lack of assurance?
[00:18:46] Speaker A: Yeah, what's interesting is that there's a famous article by Christer Stendahl. It was in the Harvard Theological Review called the Introspective Conscience of the West. I think it was 1950, and it was, it was a seminal thing that led to a lot of the new perspective on Paul because Stendahl goes on, he. He argues in this piece that that something happened in the Middle Ages that had people really inwardly focused on. And, and so the question that is normally presented to us is that Luther was asking the question that everybody was asking.
Cut to the documentary where someone's looking at the picture of the Last Judgment, saying, how can I have a merciful God? Or how can I avoid the God, God's wrath? They were trembling before the. The, The. The wrath of God. And Stendel goes on to argue that that's putting something on Paul that wasn't there, therefore. And then the, the guys just grow out of that and come up with a new perspective on Paul, which is really like the same thing that Jerome said about Paul. There's nothing new about it, but no matter.
It's a, it's an interesting thing to think about. Here's a couple things to notice, though. Number one, when Luther and Melanchthon and the Wittenberg theologians talk about the, The Pope and their opponents, theological opponents, they're. They say that the, Their problem is that they're indifferent. They don't care if God smiles or frowns.
The. When Luther wrote the 95 Theses, this was what he. He was saying.
He was not saying, hey, you. You papists have made it too hard to be saved.
He was saying, you've made it too easy. If the Wrath of God can be satisfied by paying a coin for an indulgence. What are we doing here? And it was a.
They were addressing the chief problem was one of spiritual pride and indifference rather than one of despair.
But what the. When the Lord comes along and he touches that pride with his spirit and with the law, it pushes it to humility, which leans towards despair.
And so after the preaching of the laws come along and the conscience has become guilty, now there's a terror that's there. And so that's the result in every time, at every generation with the preaching of the law. And that's what Luther experienced himself, because he just took it very seriously.
He took the command of God to be pure and holy.
He would.
[00:21:19] Speaker B: He.
[00:21:19] Speaker A: In some ways he had the gift of, of that by the Holy Spirit through the law, to take that seriously. So it, it had him looking for comfort. And he saw that then and in the Lord's people who are really paying attention to the Scriptures not to. To use it to prove how good they were. But the. Who are looking at the law of God and realizing that I don't keep it so, so I. I can't save myself. I need someone else to save me.
Where they look for in the Scriptures for that, this is interesting, is not Paul.
In fact, every time Paul talks about his conscience, he talks about how good it is.
Paul never talks about a bad conscience. He says, my conscience is good, My conscience is clean. You got nothing on my conscience. It's great. But where you look for in the Scriptures for a bad conscience is the Psalms.
From depths of woe I cry to thee, O Lord, have mercy on me, O Lord. If you, O Lord, count iniquity, oh Lord, who could stand? Especially those penitential psalms. But all the Psalms, as they wrestle through this life, standing before the goodness of God, talk about the terror of facing, of facing God on the judgment day with nothing but our own works to hand over.
So I think Luther learned this from King David.
[00:22:42] Speaker B: I was thinking about the Babylonian captivity of the Church as a good place for them to, to check out kind of how Luther wrestles with this and what, what he thinks. Because, for example, right on baptism, he's like, nobody understands baptism anymore. Like they don't even know what it's for or they have it so they can't take comfort in it. Especially because right at that time, if, if you made shipwreck of your faith or something, or you screwed up your baptism, then you had to have the. Had to have penance, right? The plank that you float on to get back to the ship or whatever to get back in. And Luther said, no, baptism is this excellent, wonderful gift that you should delight in and find comfort in. And he looked around and didn't see people finding comfort in their baptism. Right. It just was something that was done and then you screwed up pretty fast and now baptism means nothing for you. So then he talked a lot about how you need to live in your baptism. And we have that small catechism too. So that's a great work for looking at this issue of what are some of the things that caused lack of assurance was there's all these things like the sacraments, the word of God stuff in captivity using that language from the Bible of the Babylonian captivity. And he saw again anachronism but the Roman Catholic Church as having these things in captivity and people not understanding the gospel, not understanding baptism, not understanding the Lord's Supper and what it really meant for them and for their conscience and for assurance of salvation and how they could look to those things and hope in them. So that that's a place I would. I would look to understand Luther more fully on this issue. Is that that great work? And it's a pretty easy read too.
It's, you know, some are a little harder like bondage of the will, but that one's. That one's pretty easy. Is that when you have up on.
[00:24:20] Speaker A: I have not on your website. I don't think. I don't think there's a public domain version of it yet. So.
[00:24:25] Speaker B: Oh, that's too bad.
[00:24:27] Speaker A: We should. I've got on the Councils in the churches the. The one that is available free download on the website is on the freedom of the Christian and that talks about this a couple of times too. So that's a nice. That might be a nice place. Yeah.
[00:24:39] Speaker B: That's interest
[00:24:42] Speaker A: good. Well hey, that's going to wrap it up for today.
So the mini episode we mentioned issues etc. This is their. This is the. This is so great. You should actually go. Pastor Packer. Now I'm going to try to talk you out of your boycott.
It's June, it's June 12 and 13 in Concordia Chicago. It's got great speakers mostly
[00:25:08] Speaker B: but
[00:25:10] Speaker A: I can't tell my. I can't call myself a great speaker. Pastor Packer.
Sheesh. It's got great speakers and me it's all. It's really great. But it's. The conference is more than that because they, it's. They have worship. They have the hymn sing with Weeden. They've got a singles event on Friday night. Carrie and I are going to go to that. That'll be a lot of fun.
It's just a.
It's just great to be gathered with 500 people that are all confessing the same thing.
They're all kind of theological folk. And so to, to see everyone, to make those connections, it's really great. So encourage everyone to attend, attend that conference. And thanks Pastor Packer for, for being here. Thanks everyone to send in those questions.
Thanks to the lady pastor for the comments.
Hope she reaches out. That'll be really good. And God's peace be with you. We'll talk to you soon.
