3.1 General characteristics against German and Nordic backgrounds

When Martin Luther declared in his Smalcald Articles that any catechized seven-year-old child knew that the church was ‘the little sheep who hear the voice of their shepherd’ (SA III,xii:1; The Augsburg Confession 2000: 324–325), he was using a biblical image: a shepherd or pastor along with his sheep or flock. As theologians at the ground level of the Lutheran Reformation spoke about the church as a subject of theological interest, they did so with reference to the holy scriptures, which they sought to make the basis of their ecclesiological ideas. As others before and after them, they contemplated and drew upon images for the church provided by these most sacred texts of the Christian tradition (Minear 2004). With opponents loyal to the pope as the head of the church, Lutherans particularly debated those passages of the New Testament that served as evidence for a primacy of Peter and, by extension, as justification for the Roman curia’s claim to universal supremacy (e.g. Matt 16:18–19; John 21:15–17). In treating the scriptures as the word of God in written form, the Lutherans were in full agreement with theologians loyal to the papacy. Disagreement about the place of the scriptures in the ecclesial systems that governed the church’s teaching and life could crop up, as did questions about authoritative interpretation. But for theologians of the sixteenth century, the books of the Bible were authoritative as writings of prophetic and apostolic origin, behind which stood the Holy Spirit. Lutherans shared these common convictions. Not all texts bore equal ecclesiological import, but Lutherans, like other readers, were operating well before the critical methodologies of a subsequent era, and so they took Colossians, Ephesians, and the Pastoral Epistles – all books with serious ecclesiological weight – to be genuinely Pauline. They held the holy scriptures to be clear and placed their interpretation and exposition among the chief duties of university theologians, under curricular revisions shaped by Renaissance humanism. On an ecclesial level, the sixteenth-century confessions and church orders entrusted judgment of doctrine, on the basis of the scriptures, to bishops and superintendents (CA XXVIII:21; [CPCE] 2018: 94–95).

As with most names that subsequently come to be associated -isms, Luther’s theology can be distinguished from appropriations and representations of it in the subsequent tradition. A papally excommunicated son of the Western church, around 1520 he decried the captivity of that which was sacred to the church under the Roman curia, while affirming local oversight and governance of the church and calling on the nobility and civil authorities to act for its good. None of this was unprecedented. In fact, the ecclesial reform program of Electoral Saxony, led in part by Luther and Melanchthon, was an attempt to reinstate a churchly form of episcopacy. It entailed visitation; oversight of teaching, sacramental practice, and the care of souls; and ordination carried out by super-ordered ministers: the parsons and superintendents (Elert 1967b; Kretschmar 1995). Though attempts at evangelical bishoprics were doomed to eventual failure by the politics of the empire in which prince-bishops and -archbishops ruled ecclesiastical estates (Wendebourg 1997), these German reformers were aiming at a spiritually and institutionally integrated pattern of ecclesial life, according to which the church would again be governed under the doctrinal and sacramental authority of ministers operating on the local and regional level. Instead, they got a further step in the bifurcating trajectory of the later Middle Ages: a church governed by an external authority distinct from sacramental-ministerial authority, a church organized under the heads of state (das landesherrliche Kirchenregiment), bishop-like princes. Consequentially, their German heirs had to, and did, come to terms with this set of affairs for three centuries.

The reform of the Nordic countries was also magisterial, but more so. Danish and Swedish kings, whose forebears under the crown had at times struggled with a church governed from Rome, strengthened their sovereign hold on their territories and further unified their kingdoms in the Lutheran-led reform of their churches. With the end of the Kalmar Union in 1523, the once-united kingdom was split into Denmark, Norway, and Iceland on the one hand, and Sweden with Finland on the other. Johannes Bugenhagen, the parson of Wittenberg, played a major role in King Christian III’s reforms of the Danish kingdom. In addition to crowning the king, he composed a church order and consecrated the first seven superintendents – later referred to as bishops – under whom the diocesan structure of the Danish church was preserved. King Gustav Vasa of Sweden was interested in a state church dependent on its king. Not only did the crown absorb much ecclesial property, he curtailed the power of the bishops to a certain degree, forcing Bishop Peder Månsson of Västerås to consecrate bishops for open dioceses in Sweden and Finland – a move that would make the Church of Sweden an attractive ecumenical partner for the Church of England in the twentieth century, since the Church of Sweden maintained an apostolic succession understood to proceed by chain of episcopal consecrations.

3.2 Symbolical expression (the Lutheran confessions)

The Lutheran reformers were sometimes called upon to offer official formulation of doctrine for and on behalf of the territories that had followed their teachings and adopted certain ecclesial reforms based on them. As such formulations were received into the ecclesiastical structures of regions that adopted Lutheran reforms of the church, they achieved a recognizable status as symbols or confessions of the church. The Augsburg Confession (Confessio Augustana, CA) of 1530 enjoys ubiquitous standing in the Lutheran tradition. Before the initially pejorative moniker ‘Lutheran’ stuck, the ecclesial heirs of the Wittenberg reformation spoke of themselves as ‘churches of the Augsburg Confession’ (FC–SD, Binding Summary: 2, 8; [CPCE] 2018: 526, 528). This document is best interpreted in its historical context, as well as in view of the imperial Confutation that responded to it and Melanchthon’s Apology (Ap) that offered further explanation of it. Luther’s Small Catechism (SC) usually stands alongside the Augustana as a received confession in Lutheran churches, as often do Luther’s Large Catechism (LC), his Smalcald Articles (SA), and Melanchthon’s Treatise on the Power and Primacy of the Pope (Tr).

The Augsburg Confession presents the church as a perpetually existing, historical reality: ‘the assembly of saints in which the gospel is taught purely and the sacraments are administered rightly’ (CA VII:1; [CPCE] 2018: 43). Two consequential facets of this compact, dogmatic definition must be noted. On the one hand, the church is described in a mysterious, creedal manner, with ‘assembly of saints’ (congregatio sanctorum) paralleling ‘communion of saints’ (communio sanctorum) in the Apostles’ Creed. The German version of the Augustana calls these saints ‘believers’, thereby referencing the justifying faith of its fourth article, which was fiercely contended by the Confutation of 1530 ([CPCE] 2018: 38–41; Kolb and Nestingen 2001: 108–109). Like God the Father Almighty, the resurrected Christ, and the eschatological resurrection of the body, the saints or believers are not simply visible now. On the other hand, they are by no means invisible, but are mysteriously or sacramentally congregated by ministerially proffered, external, bodily means – the gospel and the sacraments – that the Holy Spirit uses to work this justifying faith (CA V; [CPCE] 2018: 40–41). Against charges to the contrary by the leading pro-papal theologian Johann Eck, AC XIV affirmed that public preaching and teaching and the administration of the sacraments – the duties of the ecclesiastical ministry instituted by God – required ordination ([CPCE] 2018: 46–47), and Melanchthon’s Apology affirmed the desire to see canonical ordination under the bishops continue (Ap XIV; [CPCE] 2018: 222–223). Thus, the Augustana’s definition of the church simultaneously recognizes a mysterious and hidden internality of faith alongside the ministerially mediated, sacramental externality of the liturgical assembly. The theological ordering of these two factors – and the neglect of one for a hegemonic propagation of the other – has shaped various streams of ecclesiology in the Lutheran tradition.

Four further factors characterize the ecclesiology presented in the primary sixteenth-century confessions of the Lutheran tradition. First, those adhering to this movement understood themselves to be participating in a patristically established pattern of asserting the truth of Christian doctrine over against errors that had cropped up against it (FC-SD Preface and Binding Summary: 1–5; [CPCE] 2018: 524–570). As they engaged in a simultaneously theological and practical act of confession, they presented themselves as heirs of the Western Christian tradition and exemplars of its lineage, claiming that their churches did ‘not dissent from the catholic church in any article of faith’, and that nothing in their confession or ecclesial practice ‘depart[ed] from the Scriptures or the catholic church or from the Roman church’, insofar as could be ascertained from its writers (CA Abuses Corrected:1 and Conclusion of Part One:1; [CPCE] 2018: 61, 59).

Their attempt to address ecclesiology and ecclesial practice in a traditional manner was tied to a second factor: the confessors approached the church not solely or even chiefly in a conceptual manner, but as a perpetually existing historical reality manifested and experienced in churches, i.e. in local and areal manifestations of the church – in ecclesial realities like bishoprics, parishes, and/or the church in a region, territory, or city. The civil authorities who presented the Augsburg Confession to Charles V offered a confession of what ‘the churches among [them]’ taught (CA I:1; Communion of Protestant Churches in Europe (CPCE): 37); the Small Catechism begins by upbraiding the bishops for neglecting their office before appealing to the parsons and preachers to properly discharge theirs (Preface:1–6; [CPCE] 2018: 347–348); the Smalcald Articles compare churches in the territories of the Smalcald League to bishoprics and parishes elsewhere (Preface:10; [CPCE] 2018: 299). Ecclesiology began on the ground, with the factual and experienced realities of the church in the churches.

Thirdly, the church for and in view of which the confessions operate is an institutional reality. Not only is it built on the ministry (Tr 25; [CPCE] 2018: 334), it is governed by the clergy, to whom belongs the peculiar ecclesial authority (potestas ecclesiastica) of order (potestas ordinis), i.e. to preach the word and administer the sacraments, and of jurisdiction (potestas iurisdictionis), i.e. to judge doctrine and exercise the lesser ban – including on a regional or diocesan level (CA and Ap XXVIII; [CPCE] 2018: 90–103, 289–294; Mumme 2015a). It is not necessary for the unity of church that rites and ceremonies be the same everywhere. At the same time, the bishops – who are to ‘keep diligently together in unity of teaching, faith, sacraments, prayers, and works of love, etc’. (SA II,iv:9 [CPCE] 2018: 308) – are accorded authority to regulate the churches’ practices and liturgical life, so long as extra-biblical stipulations are not declared necessary for the salvation of those under their care (CA XV, XXVI; [CPCE] 2018: 48–49, 74–79).

Fourthly, returning the two facets observable in CA VII, the ecclesiology of the confessions honours the believer as an individual who can say, ‘the Holy Spirit has called me through the gospel, enlightened me with his gifts’, and at the same time integrates that believer into what the Holy Spirit does for ‘the whole Christian church on earth’ (SC Creed:6; [CPCE] 2018: 355). Any believer and all believers receive and experience the full, self-giving communion of the Triune God (LC Creed:67–69; [CPCE] 2018: 440) not in some dreamlike and ideal ecclesial reality that does not exist in the world (Ap VII:20; [CPCE] 2018: 177), but in a historical, mysteriously tangible, and institutional reality that is encountered locally.

The foundations of Lutheran ecclesiology, as expounded in the sixteenth century, lie primarily with the exposition of the holy scriptures and come into recognized expression in the confessions of the sixteenth century. The scriptural basis means that Lutheran ecclesiology operates on the most common foundation of Christian theology. The Lutheran confessions do not claim to be the limit or extension of ecclesiology, but historically they may not be bypassed or contradicted by presentations of the church that claim to be Lutheran. The impetuses taken from scripture and insights from the reformers received in the churches’ confessional standards – as well as how the two intermingle – shape much of how ecclesiology unfolds in the Lutheran tradition.

3.3 Theologically productive pairings at the headwaters of the tradition

As Lutheran churches and theologians have considered the church as a topic of theology in their dogmatic and constructive systems and in view of their shifting socio-political contexts, their work has often developed structural categories already observable in the sixteenth century. Some of the most important of these categories operate in pairs – pairs, that is, of theological concerns and ecclesial factors that are drawn to each other, live in tension with one another, or both. These pairings can be considered in their own right and also in view of an underlying dynamic of internality and externality that informs them all.

Whatever other topics they may raise, most Lutheran presentations of ecclesiology will address something like the following four questions: How is the church invisible, visible, or both, and what terminology is suited to properly describe it in this regard? If the church is the assembly of believers, how does their collectively held faith relate to the means of grace? What marks the church such that it may be recognized? How does the congregation or assembly relate to the ministry?

Before turning to the subsequent historical unfolding of Lutheran ecclesiology, in which these categories continued to play important roles, the following sections address these theologically productive pairings in view of the sixteenth century.

3.4 Internality and externality as ecclesiological diagnostic

At the Leipzig Debate of 1519 and in his mature years, Luther prioritized the factual to the conceptual and the external to the internal as he set about the task of ecclesiology (Mumme 2019). His ecclesiological pattern generally aligns with Melanchthons focus on the visible assembly of the called, which distinguished itself as the true church from the false church by way of its confession of Christian teaching, its sacraments, and its ministry (1555: §28–29).

When the Augsburg Confession asserted that human beings are justified as a gift through faith in Christ "when they believe that they are received into grace and that their sins are forgiven" (IV:2; [CPCE] 2018: 41), it installed an irreducibly internal and self-referential element at the heart of what would become Lutheranisms most recognized confessional standard. Especially given the prominence of the doctrine of justification in the Lutheran tradition, the ecclesial consequences have been prodigious. CA IV (Of Justification) is, however, fused to CA V, such that when their collective content is theologically ordered, this internality of faith is preceded by the externality of the physically communicated word and the sacraments, through which the Holy Spirit works justifying faith. Luther could not have been more explicit in the ordering of externality and internality – and by extension of the factual-historical and the conceptual (Mumme 2019: 267–277) – in the Holy Spirits dealings with human beings. ‘[T]he external word […] goes before (SA III,viii:3; [CPCE] 2018: 322). In part an inheritance of Augustines anti-Donatist sacramentology, in part a conviction solidified over against radical reform movements of the 1520s, Luthers belief in the primacy of the external to the internal in Gods saving dealings with human beings would be lost on or abandoned by many of his historical heirs within the Lutheran tradition – and that with consequential ecclesiological results.

4.1 Orthodoxy and enlightenment

Various national stripes of a Lutheran monoculture took shape in the Nordic countries after the Reformation. The Danish state became a combination of its nation and its church, with the king at the head of both. The parish functioned as the basic unity of society, and the parish clergy were civil servants. King Karl XI’s church law of 1686 specified that all citizens of the Kingdom of Sweden must confess the faith of the whole Book of Concord. Not until the eighteenth century were Calvinists, Roman Catholics, or Jews tolerated, and first in the nineteenth century was conversion to another denomination legally sanctioned.

These Nordic manifestations of confessionalization were mirrored by developments in Germany. There too ecclesiology unfolded as an operation of controversial theology, but on a confessionally chequered map, where Lutheran territories often bordered those of Roman Catholics or with Calvinist sentiment. Given the confessional patchwork of the land now known as Germany, Lutheran ecclesiological efforts during the age of orthodoxy could be aimed in different but related directions. On the one hand, there were confessional and polemical operations, in which theologians took aim at Roman Catholic and Calvinist opponents, either challenging their understandings of the church, the ministry, and the sacraments, or mounting defences against charges levelled by them. On the other hand, there were efforts to heal the established but perhaps not yet utterly hardened divisions of Western Christendom.

Against Roman Catholic opponents the Centuriators of Magdeburg, a bastion of the gnesio type of Lutheranism in the turbulent period following Luthers death, offered an ecclesial history that legitimated the existence of a Lutheran type of church living separate from Rome. The Magdeburg Centuries by Matthias Flacius and Johannes Wigand evinces a clear interest in the historical continuity of the church, especially as regards its doctrine, which functions as a sometimes clearer and fuller and sometimes dimmer and reduced presentation of the light of divine truth. Although they thought, in some sense, in the direction of church as defined by its confession of the faith, the Centuriators did not reduce the church or its historical continuity simply to a matter of doctrine; instead, they recognized a visible church effected in a structured form by the word, to which preachers of the word belonged as organs and instruments (Wagner 1973: 13–84). The Roman front also played a significant role in works like Johann Gerhards Theological Commonplaces. When it came to his loci on the church and the ministry, Gerhard had no interlocutor more important than Robert Bellarmine, whose Disputations on the Controversies of the Christian Faith, had, for example, asserted that church was just as visible as the Kingdom of France or the Republic of Venice. Entering the controversialist fray, Gerhard debated not only the nature and identity of the church along the lines of visibility and invisibility, but also ministerial issues, such as the distinction between bishops and presbyters as a matter of divine right (Gerhard 2010: 70–142; 2012: 48–63).

At the same time, German Lutherans were also pressed to call attention to ecclesiological distinctions that separated them from Calvinists. This direction of controversialism proved somewhat more delicate though no less stormy, inasmuch as Calvinism as yet had no legal standing in the Holy Roman Empire and could exist only insofar as Crypto-Calvinism infiltrated Lutheran lands and institutions. One such a Lutheran-Calvinist controversy arose between the Hamburg parson Philipp Nicolai, and Urban Pierius, erstwhile court preacher in Dresden and professor at the University of Wittenberg who was eventually jailed for his Calvinist teachings. The substance of their rupture was ministerial (Baur 1980: 119–126). Nicolai asserted that, based on Gods promises, God was present in the ministry, indeed in the preachers mouth. Pleading and anti-magical case, Pierius contended that God as sovereign subject did not thus bind himself to the finite, and that such a predication of the concrete presence of God was injurious in objectifying God. In a mode similar to Lutheran-Calvinist debates surrounding the Lords supper, the heart of this disagreement orbited the questions of Gods self-binding and his presence as mediated a finite instrument such that his presence could be claimed in a specific place, i.e. through the ministerial service of a specific person. Pierius contended that only a spiritual power and divine activity could be claimed of the ministry, since a spiritual immediacy exists between God and Christians and since such concreteness as Nicolai claimed would threaten the sovereignty of God and the freedom of the Christian subject. According to Nicolai the ministry had a theophoric character; according to Pierius it did not and could not.

The solidifying of confessional lines that generally took place during the period of orthodoxy did not mean that some theologians were not openly working towards a reunification of Western Christianity. Georg Calixt of the University of Helmstedt used his chair of controversialist theology to pursue an irenic and conciliatory theological path (Fry 1979). Shaped by the Thirty Years War, he sought to identify a way toward ecclesial peace (Mayes 2004). Following Nicolaus Hunnius’ distinction of fundamental and nonfundamental articles of the faith, Calixt suggested different doctrines were of different import: some were antecedent and self-evident; others constitutive as teachings divinely revealed and necessary for salvation; still others were consequent, derived from the antecedent and constitutive doctrines. Constitutive doctrines he described as fundamental, and derivative as nonfundamental. With this distinction in place, he thought there could be a peaceful fellowship of faith between Calvinists, Lutherans, and Roman Catholics on the basis of a patristic consensus on fundamental articles of the faith as found distilled in the Apostles Creed, the so-called consensus quinquesaecularis (the consensus of the first five centuries). The tradition of the first five centuries was the standard by which what was necessary for salvation could be distinguished from subsequent developments and nonfundamental derivations (Böttigheimer 2003). Though he inspired Gottfried Wilhelm Liebniz in his later quest to provide theological grounds for ecclesial reunion on the basis of a substance metaphysics capable of reframing confessional differences surrounding the holy supper (Edel 2000), the Helmstedter found an indefatigable opponent in Abraham Calov of the University of Wittenberg. Not only did Calov reject the distinction of the relative importance of doctrines, he saw contention in the fathers and did not recognize consensus as a marker of the truth. Further, it was clear to Calov that Calixt’s system placed the doctrine of justification, by which Calov understood the church to stand or fall, in the category of nonfundamental doctrines developed after the first five centuries. This seemed a blatant affront to the heart of the Lutheran reformation. Calov and Calixt were the leading figures of the Syncretist Controversy, which began after Calixt participated in the Colloquy of Thorn in 1645. This eventually led Calov, who thought true doctrine to grow as an organic whole, to compose his Consensus Repetitus Fidei Vere Lutheranae (The Repeated Consensus of the True Lutheran Faith), in which he claimed that the Lutheran Church was the true church of Jesus Christ. Johannes Musäus, multi-term rector of the University of Jena, took something of a mediating position in the controversy. He shared Calov’s conviction about the danger of sorting doctrines into the categories proposed by Calixt, and although he was quite sanguine about what degree of consensus could be reached on a patristic foundation, he did think that the consensus of the fathers – so far as it existed – could serve as a valuable starting point for dialogue. On the other hand, he opposed Calov’s Consensus Repetitus as an undue expansion of ecclesial doctrine on the basis of theological opinion even as he opposed Calixt’s notion that the Apostles Creed functioned as a summation of all material necessary to the Christian faith. Instead of subtraction or addition, the Lutheran confessions of the sixteenth century marked out the parameters of the true Lutheran faith. Whereas Calixt seems to have found the church catholic in the first five centuries – especially represented by the church’s ancient patriarchates – and Calov identified it with the Lutheran church, Musäus made a distinction between visible and invisible central to his presentation, loosing the internal and invisible essence of the church from its external form (Albrecht 2000). In this sense the church, properly speaking, was by definition one, and external union was possible only under agreement on all articles of the faith.

Cognizant of their place within a Lutheran type of church in a now divided Western Christendom, Lutheran theologians went about their perennial task of expositing the doctrine of sacred scripture. The theologians of the period of Lutheran orthodoxy presented the church as a body (the body of Christ), as a bride, and as the house of God (Gerhard 2010: §17, §18, §21). Although many still insisted on the church’s visibility (cf. König 1664: §1026), ecclesiologies of the period adopted visibility and invisibility as a structural principle for assessing and presenting the church. The true version of church could be diagnosed by its presentation of the most orthodox doctrine. Though theologians continued to speak of about the word and the sacraments as organs or instruments of salvation (König 1664: §1019), Lutheran Orthodoxy shifted emphasis from the preached word that effected faith to the scriptures as the foundation for right faith and pure doctrine. The holy scriptures became a sort of prolegomenon in the era of Lutheran Orthodoxy, which witnessed the unfolding of the doctrine of scripture’s inspiration and presented the Bible as the formal principle of theology. Building out a category taken from Melanchthon, the orthodox dogmaticians could speak of ‘the church strictly speaking’ (ecclesia stricte dicta) and ‘the church loosely speaking’ (ecclesia late dicta), tying the former to the invisible multitude of the elect and the latter to the visible assembly of the called (Kühn 1989: 265). They thereby accorded a certain priority to the invisible. Over against Luther’s understanding of the three estates, a significant theological shift took place as the civil estate and the domestic-economic estate ceased to operate as hierarchies or estates next to the church and were instead placed inside of it. The magistrate was, therewith, accorded care for the Christian religion (cura religionis) in his territories, and the civil authority had the right and bore responsibility of the outward ordering of the church (ius circa sacra), even if it eventually came to be somewhat distanced from the spiritual oversight of the church in matters of faith and worship (ius in sacra).

Pietism and Enlightenment rationalism were in part responses to Lutheran Orthodoxy. Its scrutiny of the rectitude of faith paved the way Pietism’s inward turn. Philipp Jacob Spener, herald of subsequent efforts toward a German Protestant union (Hirsch 1949: 127–138 [vol. II]), called attention to the elements of faith and life that Lutherans shared with the Reformed, over against Roman Catholics. In Herrnhut, the Pietism of Nikolaus Ludwig, Reichsgraf von Zinzendorf melded with the ecclesiology of Moravian refugees as their ‘congregation of brothers’ (Brüdergemeinde) undertook influential and expansive mission work that operated beyond confessional differences. Pietism, which shared with the Enlightenment a preference for the invisible church, made ecclesiology ‘pragmatic to the point of functionalism’ (Tjørhom 2016: 334) and ranked visible manifestations of the church as secondary to the invisible nature of the true or little church. Its proponents and adherents were more concerned with the appropriation of salvation than its ad-ministration; its obligation to a very detailed order of salvation both internalized and anthropologised a salvation that had as little need for external mediation as the Enlightenment had place for outward means of grace in religion.

Like the Pietists, rationalist thinkers of the Enlightenment were also sceptical of Orthodoxy’s identification of salvation with doctrine. Johann Salomo Semler appropriated the categories of visibility and invisibility to call attention to the distinction between theology and religion, influencing Immanuel Kant in his assertion that only the weak needed the doctrines and ordinances of the church for religion. Kant saw the church as a vehicle for the religious faith of free individuals, which itself could pass away with its laws and dogmas. Both Spener and Semler lent the doctrine of the common priesthood of Christians (1 Pet 2:9) new weight. Consequentially, the reformers’ fundamental conviction about the primacy of the external to the internal did not readily survive the Enlightenment’s placement of religion with the abstract and intangible, nor Pietism’s personalising and strict subjectivising of human beings’ relationship to God.

In the mid-nineteenth century, Friedrich Julius Stahl aligned Orthodoxy, Pietism, and Rationalism with three successive theories of church polity (1840: 5–46). Lutheran Orthodoxy maintained a certain episcopalism, presenting the head of state as the standing, emergency head of a region’s church, which still enjoyed some institutional independence within the state. Pietism’s internalization of ecclesiology was able to pair with a territorialist understanding of church, wherein the head of state’s authority over the institutional church needed no justification via an episcopal byway. The Rationalists espoused a collegial system of polity, in which the sovereignty of the people itself was accorded sovereignty over the church.

4.2 The long nineteenth century

The long nineteenth century, stretching from the French Revolution to the First World War and including such events as the Napoleonic Wars, the revolutions of 1848, and the Franco-Prussian War, was a period of upheaval for Lutheran churches in Lutheran states. By the turn of the century Romanticism and awakening movements had begun to move ecclesiological sentiments in new directions, with internality of experience sometimes fusing with a renewed appreciation for tradition.

The Danish Church, oft subject of Søren Kirekegaard’s reproofs, was shaped in a congregational direction by its Pietist Inner Mission, albeit with fresh affinity for an older Lutheran orthodoxy as promulgated by Klaus Harms of neighbouring Schleswig-Holstein. N. F. S. Gruntvig and the Gruntvigians constituted a uniquely Danish reform movement, which discovered in the liturgy and in the Apostles’ Creed substantial moments of continuity for the faith and life of the church. The Danish focus on mission was shared in Norway, albeit from a more individual direction, while Christianity in Sweden was still that of the Swedish Lutheran Church, characterized by centralized state control. After Sweden lost the eastern portion of its territories to Russia in 1809, ecclesial life in the new Grand Dutchy of Finland was shaped by both the Lutheran and the Russian Orthodox Churches. During this period, the Nordic countries took first steps in a more pluralistic direction, tolerating other denominations and religious groups and allowing conversion, albeit with the Lutheran confessions still as recognized standards of the official churches.

In Germany, F. D. E. Schleiermacher sought to keep individual piety tied to the institutional church. In his synthesis of Pietist and Enlightenment impulses, the church emerged as a creature of faith (Tjørhom 2016), the social form of religion that followed faith. Schleiermacher also offered theological support to Prussian efforts to unite German Protestants in a single church. Echoing Spener’s sentiments, he asserted a consequential ecclesiological principle: ‘[Protestantism] makes the individual’s relation to the Church dependent on his relation to Christ, while [Catholicism …] makes the individual’s relation to Christ dependent on his relation to the Church’ (Schleiermacher 1989: §24).

Adjacent to feeling and piety, the category of experience played a significant role in Schleiermacher’s theological program. This particular facet of his theology was taken up in Erlangen, which came to be the centre of a Lutheran confessional revival in Germany, which – contrary to Schleiermacher – opposed the Prussian Union. The Lutheran confessional revival, fuelled in part by the revolutions of 1848 and 1849, was very much an ecclesiological revival. Confronted by ‘a church that want[ed] to know nothing of Protestantism and a Protestantism that want[ed] to know nothing of the church’ (Harleß 1838: 2), the Erlangers turned to the Lutheran confessions as documents with legal standing in their church, presenting them as tried and true testimonies to right, collective experience of the faith as it had unfolded in an organic fashion. One challenge posed by Schleiermacher’s influential legacy was the integration of the means of grace into a revitalized understanding of the church. For three centuries since the Lutheran Reformation the word had been preached, people had been baptized, and the supper had been celebrated in Lutheran territories, but as Lutherans of the nineteenth century scrutinized ecclesiology, it was unclear whether the church was responsible for these phenomena, or whether they were responsible for the church. Even within Germany’s neo-Lutheran revival opinions were mixed. In Erlangen J. W. F. Höfling struggled to integrate the sacraments into his ecclesiological system, and Adolf von Harleß described them signs of the church’s existence by which the church assembled itself. Theodor Kliefoth, superintendent of Schwerin and president of its high consistory, on the other hand, asserted that God generated, assembled, and maintained the church through the means of grace while also ordering the church (Kliefoth 1854; cf. Grundtvig 1976: 62). F. J. Stahl of Berlin and A. F. C. Vilmar of Hesse insisted that particular persons, i.e. ministers, were an indissoluble facet of this divine ordering.

Höfling, who set the main direction for Erlangen’s ecclesiology, accepted Schleiermacher’s Protestant principle and took the invisible church, whose existence was simply a given (Brunner 1962: 238 note 3), as his ecclesiological starting point. Operating under what he considered the "proper Protestant perspective" of the church as an essentially inner and spiritual fellowship (Fagerberg 1952: 233), all matters of institution were presented as necessarily secondary. Careful to avoid anything with an air of Roman Catholicism, Höfling strictly separated ecclesial ministry from the governance of the church and categorized all external matters of the church’s life under the necessarily secondary heading of the law, including liturgical matters of ‘ceremonial law’. Significantly, he presented the ecclesial ministry as a derivation of the general priesthood of believers, which delegated certain functions to it.

Some who were associated with the confessional revival did not, however, follow Erlangen’s dominant ministeriology, including Erlangen’s own Franz Delitzsch. Along with Stahl and Vilmar, Wilhelm Löhe of Neuendettelsau presented more institutional visions of the church, in which external facets of ecclesial life were prized as part and parcel of its sacramentally fed existence and historical-continuous character. Underscoring the word and sacraments as means of grace, they understood the ecclesial ministry, which Theodor Kliefoth described as "the means-of-grace office" (1854: 132–231), to be founded in a particular institution of Christ and passed on by ordination. Stahl stressed the priority of the Christ’s lordship in the church as an institution by way of the word, the sacraments, and the ministry – Christ’s instruments – to Christ’s lordship in souls – his abode. Thus, by the middle of the nineteenth century, theological sentiments about the church as an institution could move in wildly different directions even within the Germany’s confessional revival.

In the political upheavals that were reordering the states and governmental systems in which they lived – or in the lands of their emigration, where they lacked state ecclesial structures altogether – Lutherans of the nineteenth century sought new connections to one another in theological federations, such as the General Evangelical Lutheran Conference of Germany (1868) and the Evangelical Lutheran Synodical Conference of North America (1872).

Somewhat opposite the Neo-Lutheran confessional revival, Neo-Protestantism unfolded in the direction of cultural Protestantism (Kulturprotestantismus) in the latter decades of the century. Under the influence of Kant, the pro me (for me) element of the gospel had become the a priori assumption of a transcendental ‘I’ (Bayer 1994: 107–108). Immediacy, including an unmediated relationship to God, was assumed. Hegel took the abolition of externality as a basic principle of the Reformation. Ecclesiologically, this transcendental ‘I’ had an ecclesiological counterpart in the transcendental ‘We’ of the general priesthood of all believers. Believers simply existed, and – as believers – their direct access to God was to be taken as the starting point of ecclesiology. This trajectory, which appropriated Schleiermacher’s alignment of internal sense and feeling with consciousness of God had a marked impact on the Lutheran tradition. A primacy is clearly accorded to the internal in ecclesiological reasoning; nothing can rightly be predicated about the church that does not pass through the internality of faith. If the starting point of ecclesiological reasoning is an undifferentiated immediacy of relation to God in faith, and if the word of God is the gospel first in being subjectively appropriated as such, then the entire external edifice of the church and the ministry as an institution qua edifice and institution are simply necessary matters of the law. Binding the divine to the internal generates ecclesiological repercussions. External matters of the church’s institutional life were necessarily secondary. Trutz Rendtorff has shown how a given appropriation of the doctrine of justification, with inherent elements of internality, has led to the indefiniteness and indecisiveness of folk-church structures lest external, ‘human’ orders somehow be related to salvation (1970). Georg Rietschel operated with these Neo-Protestant underpinnings in his liturgics: the liturgy, including the rite of ordination, pedagogically taught what was already the case. Similarly, Rudolph Sohm’s treatment of ecclesiastical law neatly quarantined all matters of church law and ecclesial organization from questions that could be considered properly theological. Cultural Protestantism operated with a kind of ontological dualism (Kinder 1964: 59–60). With the church as a given, a subjective reality essentially unmoored from external or historical causation, the proponents of cultural Protestantism could focus their attention on its effects, indicating how it leavened the whole culture and connected it to a Christian religious foundation. Toward the long century’s end, the heirs of the awakenings and the confessional revival protested that ‘evangelisch’ (Protestant/evangelical) did not stand for ‘a generic, undifferentiated, Rome-free, dogma-free, universal Protestantism’ (Kinder 1955: 280). Nevertheless, at least in Germany, the passing of theological verdict on radically divergent streams of ecclesiology was overtaken by events leading to the establishment of the German Empire and eventually to the collapse of the Landesherrlichen Kirchenregiment in 1918.

4.3 Recent and contemporary

Lutheran ecclesiology since the First World War has been shaped by new stages in the relationship between church and state, by the formation of international Lutheran federations, and by the ecumenical movement.

In the twentieth century the Lutheran monocultures of the Nordic lands became more permeable, in part due to a general secularizing tendency operative in these societies. Governmental control of state churches and former state churches loosened, but with the Lutheran churches enjoying a recognized majority status as peoples’ churches (Volkskirchen). At the same time the ecclesiology of Einar Billing helped lay a foundation for the welfare states of Sweden and Denmark, a replacement for an earlier concept of oeconomia as a familial-economic hierarchy or estate established by God. In Germany Lutheran ecclesiology had to confront the National Socialists’ attempt to co-opt the unified German Evangelical Church for its purposes; the leading resistance was mounted by the Confessing Church, itself a pan-Protestant institution, whose Barmen Declaration would shape ecclesiological convictions downstream by declaring that ’The Christian Church is the congregation of brothers in which Jesus Christ acts presently as the Lord in Word and Sacrament through the Holy Spirit’ (Barmen 3; Rabinbach and Gilman 2013: §188). The Lutheran ecclesiologies of emigrant communities and foreign missions developed in countries that allowed religious freedom without offering Lutheran churches favoured status.

In 1923 the Lutheran World Convention met for the first time. It was replaced in 1947 by the Lutheran World Federation (LWF), the largest Lutheran body in the world. The smaller International Lutheran Council (ILC) and the Confessional Evangelical Lutheran Conference (CELC) were founded in 1993.

Nathan Söderblom, archbishop of Uppsala, who was instrumental in bringing together the Lutheran World Convention, was also a Lutheran pioneer in the ecumenical movement. He suggested a model for ecumenical interaction based on Schleiermacher’s apologetics, which flipped an older controversialist tendency by encouraging interlocutors to understand each other’s traditions. Lutheran ecumenical dialogues, which have taken place on both national and international levels, have led to greater understanding with the Reformed, Anglicans, Roman Catholics, the Orthodox, and Christians of other traditions, sometimes resulting in declarations of fellowship. As a result of such ecumenical engagement, Lutheran ecclesiology today faces a question about what social shape the church’s life may take, such that the particularities of a given confession be maintained as growth in communion with other churches is recognized (Schwöbel 2002).

In addition these historical developments, Lutherans of the last century have continued to produce theologies of the church that sought to address questions about the church’s nature and visibility, about the relationship of faith to the word and sacraments, and about the ministry.

In some contemporary efforts it has been common to put the preached word and the administered sacraments out in front of the faith by which the church is defined, while simultaneously describing preaching as the voice of the church and the sacraments as its actions (Skydsgaard 1963: 18, 39). Which comes first, faith or the means of grace? One approach to this puzzle is to treat all mediation of the gospel as a word-based type of communication, such that the gospel is proclaimed "in the word and the sacrament" (Schwöbel 2002: 386). Not only does such a description place the activity under which the gospel is being considered in the vocabular orbit of 1 Pet 2:9, the only instance of exaggellō (to proclaim or sound forth) in the New Testament and the classic text for the general priesthood of believers, it treats the word and sacrament[s] as activities of the church seen as a fellowship of collective witness. The event of the gospel’s proclamation presumes the ecclesial fellowship that makes it possible, such that the church simultaneously acts as the instrument of the gospel and is created by the gospel, with human cooperation written as a law into both the origin and maintenance of the church (Herms 2010: xvi–xvii, 39). In a sense, this approach revisits the issue of visibility and invisibility from another angle: the clearly visible collective fellowship gathered around the word and sacraments sees to its preaching and their administration, whose gospel goes before the more nearly invisible faith of individuals. The visible church is then presented as the means for the communication of the gospel, which – insofar as it fulfils its task of ministry – brings the invisible church into existence and sustains it (Härle 2015: 468, 471–72). Another approach, affirming the church as a creature of the gospel and recognizing the word of God as the holiest of all holy things (cf. LC Ten Commandments: 91; [CPCE] 2018: 399), honours the sacraments alongside the preached word as particular confrontations with the judgment and grace of God (Kinder 1961), which as ministerially delivered realities are what they are apart from any collective or individual reception of faith, such that the gospel externally delivered opposite the law creates both faith and the church (Kinder 1957: 137). Thus, while acknowledging that the church is not immediately available to visual sense perception (unsichtlich), the category of invisibility (Unsichtbarkeit) can simply be abandoned. Nevertheless, based on certain indicators of its hidden and revealed presence, which themselves are available to sense perception, the church is recognizable (Kinder 1958: 173–174).

As modern developments in the theological presentation of the word and sacraments are noted, a shift in Lutherans sentiments about ecclesiological reasoning out from the sacred scriptures is also required. A major shift in Lutheran theology had been transpiring since the Enlightenment’s historical-critical scrutiny of biblical texts led to the undermining of the previously untouchable foundation of Lutheran Orthodoxy’s theological program. By the turn of the nineteenth century, this shift was clearly being felt in the rank and file of the church. By the middle of the twentieth century, critical engagement with scripture resulted in least two important ecclesiological changes. First, many theologians had begun working de facto with a more authoritative canon within the canon of the New Testament – more specifically, a real Pauline canon distinct from the ‘deutero-’ or ‘pseudo-Pauline’ epistles (Prenter 1967: 524). This led to the theological prioritization of a more charismatic picture of the church, underwritten by Romans and 1 Corinthians, over the more structured ecclesial pictures, presented by Colossians, Ephesians, and the Pastoral Epistles. Accordingly, their more institutional facets are judged later accretions to the real apostolic model. Second, the gospels themselves are often not read as the reformers would have read them, namely as direct and clear presentations of the words and actions of Jesus, but at least in part as competing visions of the communities in and out of which they arose (Schnelle 2009). Ecclesiologically, these methodological shifts tend to place communities witnessing to Christ out in front of authoritative texts as such, and they assign matters of institution and structure a necessarily secondary – i.e. non-apostolic and non-divine – status.

It is almost impossible to find a Lutheran theologian who does not wave the flag of his or her tradition’s esteem of holy scripture in some high fashion, but, taken across its five-century history as a whole, Lutherans’ ecclesiological engagement with the holy scriptures operates in divergent directions. Some have taken the church and the apostolic ministry to be direct institutions of Christ, attested by the Gospels, and the structures and offices of the broader Pauline corpus to be of apostolic origin and thus of dominical weight. Others have sought to be guided by the witnessing communities behind the Gospels and Acts, themselves outgrowths of the Jerusalem community’s encounter with Christ, and by a pre-institutional and charismatic vision of the church taken from the narrower Pauline canon. And between these loosely described poles a spectrum of opinion also exists.

There is perhaps no greater matter of inner-Lutheran ecclesiological dissent than Lutherans’ differing understandings of ministry – or the ministry – and how this relates to the Christian congregation. As Wolfhart Pannenberg observed, inner-Lutheran disagreement surrounding this structural category can impinge on Lutherans’ ability to engage in ecumenical dialogue (1990: 287–288). Though all espouse a divine institution of the ecclesial ministry, some understand the particular or special ministry of those who bear it as their specific or professional office to be derived from and a necessarily ordered form of the general ministry of all believers’ priesthood. Accordingly, ministry is the job of the whole church; it is actuation of the life of this fellowship of faith, a duty all Christians share as soon as they share in the life of the congregation. Any who minister in a special way, do so as those called to it by, in the name of, and on behalf of all (Herms 2010: xxvi, 54). Along this trajectory ordination is often understood as a liturgical recognition of such a calling and/or as a ritualized conferral of rights and duties from the congregation, but not itself as an essential blessing or capacitation to the ministry of preaching and administering the sacraments (Härle 2015: 477); episcopacy is most often viewed as a function, for which competency is attained through education. Professional ministers do what all Christians do; the difference between them and other Christians is one of theological competency and degree of public engagement, but not one of essence. This ministeriological trajectory takes CA V to be speaking of ministry in general, and not the ministry of particular people; preaching and administration of the sacraments are understood as functions not tethered to persons. However, it has also been noted that there is no preached word and no administrated sacraments without the persons who preach and administer (Brunner 1962: 245 note 11). So, along a rather different trajectory, the ministry is not general but particular and tied to persons. In this vein most credit the ministry to Christ’s call and commissioning of the apostles. This apostolic office, from the beginning wed to particular persons, is then most often understood to pass from those who already bear it to others in ordination, an act entailing at least prayer and the laying on of hands and understood as a real benediction (Giertz and Andrae 2010: 157–169; Heubach 1956). The notion of succession is overt. However, given the Lutheran appropriation of an earlier medieval position, which held that the clergy presiding over parishes and those who oversee dioceses belong by divine right to the same order (Tr 60–65; [CPCE] 2018: 340; Ott 1969: 19–25, 40–48, 78–87; Wendebourg 2000: 197–205), this succession must be distinguished from a subsequent understanding of ‘apostolic succession’ (Kretschmar 1995; Piepkorn 1970). Along this trajectory the difference between ministers and congregation can, with qualification, be described as essential – not a difference pertaining to their salvation or individual sanctity – but to their office in the church. On a historical level, the aforementioned trajectories mirror to a considerable degree positions in a debate that eventually split Germany’s nineteenth-century Lutheran revival, whose participants variously accusing one another of Romanist and Reformed importations into Lutheran ecclesiology (Fagerberg 1952: 101–120, 271–312; Mumme 2024).

Lutherans agree that the ministry operates within and not apart from the congregation. A question exists as to whether the ministry and ministers also stand opposite (gegenüber) the assembly of believers as something other than a necessary instance of social order and a pool of theologically educated persons modelling and directing the work that all Christians are to do. Are they representatives of Christ to the church and thereby capable of confronting sinners with divine judgment and of proclaiming the gospel as a message whose merciful veracity simply stands – apart from the internal sentiments of a given soul or souls – and therefore can be preached to those in need of but not themselves capable of salvation? This case can be adjudicated by asking what kind of religion supports or fails the presence of the gospel as the gospel (Baur 1980: 106–107).

As Lutheran ecclesiological efforts of the last hundred years have taken up theological pairings that date at least as far back as the Reformation these remain productive. And in the contemporary flowering, as at the historical root, the diagnostic of internality and externality merits application. If it is true that the church is a communion, and that this communion is not constituted through itself, but from outside itself (Schwöbel 2002: 409), then the claim that the church is a creature of the gospel in the same way that it is an instrument of the gospel, necessarily involved in a permanent process of cooperative self–realization (Herms 2010: xxviii, 45), may actually constitute a contradiction the most basic principles of the Lutheran reformers’ soteriology, albeit on the collective level of the community. The attentions more recently afforded to speech, language, ritual, history, liturgy, and tradition by theology, philosophy, and the social sciences – a fresh "praise of externality" (Wannenwetsch 2009) – point in the direction of a reappraisal of this somewhat lost but potently latent factor at the foundation of Lutheran ecclesiology.

4.4 Polities and particular ecclesial trajectories

Though Lutheranism now extends throughout the world, its oldest historical centres are Germany and the Nordic countries, along with the Baltics. These, along with the United States, have thus far yielded the most in the way of ecclesiology. Though one cannot cleanly mark out a German form of Lutheran ecclesiology that is entirely distinct from a Nordic form, given emphases of a German trajectory that distinguish it from a Nordic trajectory – especially that of Sweden and Finland – can be discerned. These trajectories relate to the structure of the church and ecclesial polities as they have operated in these lands. American Lutheran ecclesiology, which draws on Nordic and German tradition while responding to the American religious landscape, has been both productive and rather polarized.

The life, structure, governance, and polity of Lutheran churches has been shaped, on the one hand, by the spectrum of convictions playing through the aforementioned structural categories, and also by the shifting political landscape and theories of the last five centuries. For most of the twentieth century, it was common to claim that the church can thrive either as a state church or as a free church (Prenter 1967: 515). Some have claimed that though there must be a polity, no particular polity may lay claim to be the proper structuring of the church’s governance and ordered life together (Höfling 1851: 16–19). Other voices, such as those associated with the Princeton Proposal for Christian Unity, have contended that it is mistaken to see polity as theologically indifferent, and that facets of a given polity are indispensable for a doctrinally integrated life of the church (Yeago 2000, 2004). The various positions relate to the facts that Lutherans have variously lived in ecclesial structures overseen by bishops, tied to given states, or as free churches, and that Lutheran churches today are often an amalgam of what were once more clearly distinguishable types.

4.5 Lutheran approaches to general ecclesiological concerns

Lutheran ecclesiology has unfolded over the course of five centuries, not in a vacuum, but alongside the ecclesiological questions of the fractured Western church and with increasing contact with the churches of the East. Some matters that are or that have clearly become essential to the task of ecclesiology are not necessarily marked by Lutheran distinctives, nonetheless they are or have become so germane to questions about the church that Lutheran ecclesiological efforts naturally address and integrate them. Three such matters are Israel, eschatology, and the state so far as it relates to the church. All three of these topics live in a nexus marked out by ecclesiological deliberations about the people of God and about the kingdom of God.

5.1 Federations, communions, and associations

The Lutheran World Federation is a global communion of churches in the Lutheran tradition, the largest Lutheran association in the world. It is comprised of 150 churches in nearly a hundred countries with approximately 77 million members. At its 1947 inception it was constituted as a free association of churches, such that the federation itself would have no power to legislate for or interfere in the autonomy of its member churches. What membership in the LWF meant at this point was a rather open question. The fact that the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod doubted the organization’s federative character and opted to remain outside the LWF for its alleged lack of doctrinal consensus urged deeper reflection on the nature of LWF and on the ties of its member churches to one another. With the recognition that by granting and denying membership the LWF was tacitly operating with a doctrinal foundation, it seemed improper for shared doctrine not to be consummated with church fellowship (Brunner 1966). When the LWF considered the issue of apartheid and eventually suspended white African churches over the matter, it was clear that an association exercising a kind of church discipline was something more than a federation, paving the way to its self-redefinition as a communion of churches that agree in their proclamation of the word and have pulpit and altar fellowship with one another (Root 1997). Its representatives were invited to the Second Vatican Council, and the LWF has been Lutheranism’s leading ecumenical actor, carrying on bilateral dialogues with Roman Catholics, the Orthodox, the Reformed, Anglicans, and Mennonites. In recent decades relations in the LWF have been strained by issues surrounding human sexuality, specifically by the blessing or ecclesial contracting of same-sex unions and by the ordination of homosexual clergy, which threaten to rupture the communion. The Mekane Yesus Church of Ethiopia, the LWF’s largest member church, broke fellowship with the ELCA and the Church of Sweden over these issues.

The International Lutheran Council is a worldwide association of confessional Lutheran church bodies and groups united by an unconditional commitment to the holy scriptures and to the Lutheran confessions of the Book of Concord. More than 50 churches and 7 million baptized members are affiliated with it. It is structured with voting members, non- voting associate members, observers, and registered organizations. As it is not a communion, the churches associated with the ILC are independently responsible for fellowship with one another. A statement unanimously adopted by its 2009 conference affirmed lifelong monogamous, heterosexual unions as the divinely intended arena for the exercise of human sexuality and classified the practice of homosexuality as a sin violating the will of the Creator. The Confessional Evangelical Lutheran Conference, affiliated with the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod (WELS) is composed of thirty-four church bodies with approximately 430,000 baptized members.

5.2 Ecumenism and post-ecumenism

Much Lutheran reflection on the church in the last century has been produced in the orbit of and shaped by ecumenical exchange with Roman Catholics, the Reformed, and Anglicans. Ecumenical contact has not been limited to these groups, but they are the most significant. Important regional dialogues between Lutherans and Roman Catholics have taken place in Germany and the United States, in addition to the Lutheran-Roman Catholic dialogue carried out by the LWF. An early result of the international undertakings was the 1972 Malta Report, which presents the collective church as the priestly people of God, as both creature and minister of the word, while at the same time affirming that the ministry stands opposite as well as in the congregation (§48, 50; Meyer 1984). Church and Justification (1994) takes up elements of the ecclesiology of communion made prominent in and around Vatican II and weighs the church in light of the Trinity (Meyer 2000 [vol.2]). Recent efforts in Germany and at the international level have taken up the apostolicity of the church and the ministry (Lutheran–Roman Catholic Commission on Unity 2006; Wenz, Schneider and Sattler 2004). Lutherans and Roman Catholics recognize that ecclesiology and particularly various understandings of (the) ministry constitute the principal obstacles in their ecumenical efforts (Kasper 2009a: §110; Härle 1989: 279–280). Lutheran contact and consolidation with the Reformed antedates the ecumenical movement, especially in Germany, where Friedrich Wilhelm III’s Union of 1817 sought to merge the Lutheran and Reformed churches under Prussian rule. In Germany the Union of Protestant Churches (UEK), which under the umbrella of the Protestant Church of Germany (EKD), stands in full pulpit and altar fellowship with the VELKD. The Prussian and German unions of Lutheran and Reformed churches paved the way for the Community of Protestant Churches in Europe (CPCE), formerly known as the Leuenberg Church Fellowship (Mannermaa 1981). Its founding document, the Leuenberg Agreement (1973), lacked an overt ecclesiology, but the topic was taken up by The Church of Jesus Christ (1995), which presents the church as a reality defined by the message of the gospel and declares ordered ministry to be necessary. Together the Church of England and the Church of Sweden were forerunners in what would become the ecumenical movement, affirming intercommunion already in the early 1920s, with the Church of Finland joining thereafter. The Porvoo Common Statement (1993), signed initially by the Anglican churches of Britain and Ireland and by the Nordic and Baltic Lutheran churches, resulted in the full communion of these churches by coming to official agreement about episcopacy and episcopal succession. As orthodoxy of doctrine was assumed, the statement has a very specific focus; it was accepted by the Church of Denmark in 2010, whereas the Latvian Church has remained an observer in the Porvoo Communion.

Risto Saarinen has indicated that Lutheran ecclesiology as shaped by its ecumenical endeavours faces the question of ‘Rome or Geneva?’, noting that German sentiment pulls more in the Reformed direction of Leuenberg, whereas the ‘higher-church’ sympathies of the Nordic countries, some of whom do not belong to the CPCE, gravitate more toward the institutional ecclesiologies operative around Canterbury and Rome (Saarinen 2008: 182–183). At the same time non-European Lutherans have called attention to the life-and-death struggle for a confessional centre in all Protestant denominations, including their own (Braaten 1998: 9). Echoing sentiments of Ephraim Radner, David Yeago (2004) has pointed to the thinning relevance and gradual disappearance of denominations, doubting their viability as subjects in the ecumenical process. In view of the first decades of the twenty-first century it seems likely that matters of human sexuality, usually filed by Lutherans under the ecclesiologically unrelated heading of ‘ethics’, will give rise to a necessary re-examination of theological anthropology. Inasmuch as theological anthropology is antecedent to or bound up with all matters of human relation and community, the ecumenical shakeup may prove as dramatic as the current denominational turbulences. Tensions within the LWF, the formation of the Mission Province in Sweden and the Mission Diocese in Finland, as well as the separations of Lutheran Congregations in Mission for Christ (2001) and the North American Lutheran Church (2010) from the ELCA all point in this direction.

5.3 Directions toward the future

As Lutheran ecclesiology faces the challenge of articulating an understanding of the church that is capable of addressing and theologically shaping its social form (Schwöbel 2002), such that personal faith and ecclesial institution stand in harmony with one another (Anselm 1999: 1101), two factors seem of particular import.

First, though receiving less attention today than a generation ago, communion ecclesiology still holds promise, if it is allowed to ferment a bit more. The possibilities for a Trinitarian approach to communion ecclesiology might be refreshed by christological infusion, especially by observing the motion of the incarnation. Though the incarnation involved the divine Son taking a human nature as it were up and into himself, on the level of human history and experience the incarnation was definitively and redemptively the movement of God condescending toward human beings. As the communion of the church is related to the essential communion of the Holy Trinity, the God-toward-human motion of the incarnation – the motion a Word external to human beings for their salvation (cf. CA V) – must be observed. Likewise, the doctrine of processions, which can be related to communication and certainly to communion, does not support ontological stratification of persons, but it does entail priority as well elements of activity and passivity in the communion of the immanent Trinity. If communion ecclesiology is coordinated with the doctrine of the Trinity, the doctrine of the church cannot begin in a homogeneity lacking source.

Second, inasmuch as the church is the church as a perpetually existing, historical reality, it always has a social form. The current form must be examined against its divine foundations, such that formation and re-formation take place in view of them. As Lutherans take stock of the form of their churches in the twenty-first century, it is worth bearing in mind that the shape of the church suggested by the reformers and their confessions, itself claiming to be the reinvigoration of a more ancient pattern, remains a vision awaiting realization. In Lutheranism’s first centuries, a real-pneumatic ecclesial authority capable of exercising a kerygmatic-doctrinal and sacramental jurisdiction, even over the highest personal instances of civil authority, was a political impossibility. What Lutheran bishop, superintendent, or parson could turn a king or prince away from the church’s altar? Given the unfolding magisterial reformation in Lutheran lands, the possibility of an office of oversight not backed by the sword and operating with authority to visit, to oversee preaching and teaching and doctrine, to put open sin under the lesser ban, and to ordain first became a possibility with emigration and the gradual disassociation of states from their Lutheran churches. In the more recent centuries, the political shift toward representative systems of democratic governance, fused with a pietistically supplemented understanding of the priesthood of all believers, has meant that the ministerial leaders of Lutheran churches are still subject to a personal instance of authority that holds sway also over the civil realm – namely constituents capable of casting votes. To a greater or lesser degree, this fact is baked into presbyterial-synodical polities among Lutherans the world over. Faced today with not only post-Christian cultures but new forms of post-pluralist totalitarianism, Lutherans must ask what form of the church will not surrender its holiness to secularism nor its catholicity to isolationism.

If the ancient episcopal federalism commended by the reformers and their confessions receives such attention (cf. SA III,viii:9), elements of priority and progeny, activity and passivity, externality and movement will become discernible in this form of communion. Its bishops, however, cannot stand alone. Either their office owes to a divine institution and can claim apostolic foundation, or it does not and cannot. This question cannot be answered in either direction without appeal to holy scripture and without clarification of what in holy scripture counts as the Word of God and what in the New Testament qualifies as apostolic (see 1.1 above). Especially if their office is understood to be apostolic and attested by the apostolic scriptures, the bishops themselves must obediently receive the canonically witnessed teaching of the apostles. Likewise, ‘a new symbolic theology’ (Kasper 2009a: §107) will be required. No teaching authority of the church of Christ can claim to be its first voice of authority. All Christians, including those overseeing the church, are heirs and obedient to the faith as it has been truly confessed before them. The church cannot live without recognized, authoritative, and therefore binding doctrine that stands above the fluctuations of contemporary intuition and shifting collective preferences. It, including its overseers, is the obedient heir of the faith as that faith is truly expressed and handed down. Only as the church acknowledges what has been spoken rightly and truly – only as it can indicate authoritative confessions of the faith – is it in a position to speak the Gospel authentically today.