Posted on 11/01/2006 7:53:49 PM PST by sionnsar
The Revd Pr John Fenton, sometime pastor of Zion Evangelical-Lutheran Church in Detroit and weblogger of Conversi ad Dominum, has posted the text of his resignation delivered to the parish after yesterday’s Mass. Pr Fenton is leaving Lutheranism for the Orthodox Church.
I tender my resignation because, over time, I have come to see and believe that the faith believed, taught, confessed and lived in the Orthodox Church is the faith of the apostles. Therefore, I sincerely believe that the Orthodox Church is the true visible Church of Christ on earth. For this reason, my family and I will seek to be received into communion in the Orthodox Church.
Interesting read.
Lutheran to Orthodox ping. To the Latins I have pinged, give this a read if you can. One of his reasons for going to Orthodoxy is just what we have been discussing on the indult thread.
Amazing letter..and decision.
I have read his letter, and I find some strange things. I had expected to be in sympathy with his decision, but found my self disagreeing more than agreeing. His comment that the liturgy is inspired by the Holy Spirit - with the appearance of being on a par with Holy Scripture - is over the edge. I wish him well, but I must respectfully disagree.
There may have been some infelicities in how he said what he did, but it is certainly true that for us as Orthodox Christians, our liturugical texts really fall only behind the Holy Scriptures and the decrees of the Ecumenical Councils in authority.
They are more authoritative than nearly all writings of the fathers, and here is why: the Holy Spirit dwells in the Church, and over the centuries, the Church has arrived on certain ways of expressing the faith in prayer. How we pray is of the very highest importance, and therefore, what they say absolutely has to be true in spirit and expression.
Our liturgical texts are "consensus documents" that represent the consensus not of a given group of theologians or bishops, or of a given era. They represent the consensus of the ages, and thus represent the living presence of the Holy Spirit in the Church.
St. Justin Popovich once wrote that the lives of the saints are "applied dogmatics." One could say that our liturgical texts are "prayed dogmatics."
I wish him well -- it is not an easy road for someone to leave their comfort zone for Orthodoxy. At a certain point one cannot do otherwise, but it is still hard.
I'm sure my priest knows him.
A few times recently, Fr. Daniel (the senior priest of the Antiochian Archdiocese) has been away from our little mission and our mother parish for missionary work--specifically discussions with LCMS clergy contemplating conversion to Orthodoxy.
As a fellow pastor in the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, I have had several conversations over the years with John Fenton. And after hearing him give a paper at a conference a couple of years ago, I have to say I'm not surprised by his leaving Lutheranism. Of course, I disagree with him theologically.
Thanks for the ping, brother. The man is following his beliefs. I wish him well and I am happy he is converting to a Church :)
What is the background to this?
I have heard of a (for lack of a better word) High Church Lutheran parish in Detroit, was he the pastor of that one?
When we were still in the Episcopal Church, we thought that too -- that we had to stay and fight. It didn't work, it didn't help -- look at what the EC has come to.
What we did find, however, is that our little true-to-the-Lord church, and the others like it, got into a circle-the-wagons mentality. WE were the ones who had it right, THEY were wrong. There was something so NOT of the Lord in it, and part of it took place in us.
Your new bishop recently asked me what core issue motivated me to embrace the Orthodox Faith. It is this: The Liturgy never changes. I don’t mean that chants or prayers or feasts are not added or subtracted gradually over time. What I mean is that no priest or bishop or congregation can decide to cut the Eucharistic Prayer or go with a new style of worship or change things to suit his convictions or the times. Why? Because the liturgy is not something smart men have created and so can modify. The liturgy is from the Holy Spirit in the same way that the Scriptures are from the Holy Spirit. In the liturgy, the Holy Spirit rightly instructs us in Holy Scripture and His presence transforms us and the gifts set forth in the Holy Eucharist. So the liturgy is the way the Faith is given, confessed, prayed and proclaimed. As the liturgy goes, so goes the Faith together with your certainty and surety.Bad bishops and aberrant priests have and will always surface in the true Church. From time to time, they introduce novel and heretical teachings. But if the liturgy doesn’t change, then their faith-destroying words will not take hold and will eventually fade away. The bottom line, then, is that the unchanging liturgy keeps us on the straight and narrow. It keeps us both on the way to the Kingdom, and in the Way which is Our Lord Jesus Christ. And the Kingdom of heaven is the goal, and the Lord Jesus is our Life.
I find myself in close agreement, following the old Latin maxim lex orandi, lex credendi. One could imagine a situation where, every 40 years or so, the hierarchs of a Church got together and rewrote the liturgy top to bottom. Assume validity, orthodoxy and all the rest--but would that be a good idea? No--it would be an abomination, totally against the religious instinct of man which is by nature traditional. It would break the historical link that runs from the modern age, back through the medieval Church, to the Fathers and right back to the Apostles. And it would, moreover, be a *temptation* to invalidity and heterodoxy because it's hard for human beings to stop putting their grubby hands on the liturgy to improve this-or-that about it.
But then, that's why I'm a traditionalist! :)
Of course, I don't believe the new order of Mass in the Latin Church is heretical (I was at a quite beautiful one last night). But the very fact of its introduction gave all sorts of heretics and quasi-heretics at the parish and episcopal level a prime excuse to introduce every faddish bit of heresy/personal nonsense under the sun.
The theology of the Mass vis a vis Rome did not change. But go to your average parish in the U.S., and you see that as far as a large percentage of Catholic laymen were concerned, it certainly seemed to change. What they *saw* was a desacralization/demolishing of the sanctuary, the tabernacle moved off to the side, all sorts of crappy banal music in place of the venerable chants of old. They saw Father look more like a "buddy" who led a prayer service rather than a priest of the New Covenant who offered the Holy Sacrifice. They saw the statues and stained glass shipped away, and replaced by interiors that Fr. Corapi compared to "the inside of an empty refrigerator."
The lex orandi changed in the American version of the Latin liturgy, and the lex credendi changed with it--at least in the pews.
So yes, I think his comments are spot on, and until we Romans get our act together liturgically, we will continue to write ourselves out from consideration when the Holy Spirit prompts the children of the Reformation to look towards the Apostolic Church. By rights, from the Latin Church they came and to the Latin Church they must return. I certainly don't blame this pastor and wish him well, and rather than get upset about why he or Dreher or anyone else went East instead of West, I think it is high time to stop wagging our fingers at these folks and, instead, take a good hard look at what scandals and sins WE have allowed to flourish in our midst which have deformed our ability to mirror Christ to the world.
Amen, and don't get me started on the pop pablum. hahah.
The Tridentine Council says, speaking of the Roman Sacramental forms, that the Liturgy itself was composed by Jesus Christ himself, together with the words added by the Holy Apostles and the Holy Pontiffs of Rome. In the case of the East and their Liturgies, one would substitute the Holy Patriarchs of Constantinople or Alexandria or Antioch depending upon the Church. Jesus Christ was filled with the Holy Spirit of course, being one of the Holy Trinity, while the Apostles and Saintly Pontiffs and Patriarchs were God-inspired men imbued with God's spirit to do rightly with the form of worship of God's people.
Considering that we Catholics and Orthodox believe that the Faith of Jesus Christ consists of our living Tradition, which is the Holy Scriptures, our worship and liturgy, and our traditions of life such as fasting and methods of prayer we believe were left us by Christ and the Apostles, I don't see how you cannot put the Liturgy on par with the Scriptures.
It is impossible for God's people to worship using false forms that teach heresy or a bad life, because it is impossible that the Holy Spirit would allow Holy Mother Church to institute such a Liturgy. All that is within the Liturgy is conducive to piety, right living, right belief, and right worship because the Holy Ghost wishes it to be so, and if it were not so, the Church would cease to exist where such changes are made, because first and foremost, the Church is a community around the Bishop and his Priests at worship in the Eucharist, having been included in the Church through sanctification by Baptism, Confession, Marriage, and the other sacraments.
This is what is so upsetting to we traditionalists in both the Catholic and Orthodox Churches with the notion of a comittees of Masonic "experts" tinkering with our calendars and sacramental rites in order to "update" them for "modern man". As if the inspiration of the Holy Ghost ever goes out of style!
I am not sure I'd agree with that, Claud. The Latin Church did not use the "filioque" until the 6th century and then kept it "unofficial" until the 11th.
Then, again, the Latin Mass did not use the Creed in the Mass until after the Great Schism either. I would also think that the Latin epiklesis was a wee bit stronger in including the Holy Spirit in the Mass.
The Latin Church theology today is not the same as it was in the first millennium, so neither can the theology of the Mass have remained the same.
You are right on the money, AB, which begs the question why did the Latins change the Divine Liturgy so many times and why are there many Catholics today who believe that the Mass should reflect different "epochs" rather than the transcendental Tradition of the Church.
In other words, the Mass should not change any more than the Scripture; in other words it is wrong to subject that which is holy to corrupt human fads.
I will have to disagree with you on our Lord Jesus Christ being "filled with the Spirit." There is no confusion between the Hypostases.
But since you broached the subject, I wonder whether you are merely drawing an inference that the Latin theology changed based on an assumption that Rome *must* have once understood the Procession exactly as the East did/does.
As far as I know, the Latin Fathers were consistent in teaching the double Procession. Rome's hesistancy to adopt it was not due any taint of heresy but rather that it represented an as-yet unauthorized addition to the universal Creed which was not looked on favorably by the East.
Do you have any hard historical evidence that there was a doctrinal change *within* the Latin Church on this point?
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