In view of this statement it would seem to be a legitimate inference that even in the straitest sect of Lutherans in America the ultimate doctrine of Lutheranism, reduced to a single word, is GRACE.
Churches, however, have their distinguishing marks. In the Lutheran Church these are more difficult to find because of her catholic origin and spirit. While forms and ceremonies are retained, they play only a minor part in the expression of her churchliness. Bishops and presbyters, robes and chasubles, liturgies and orders, "helps, governments and divers kinds of tongues," in the providence of God all of these things have been "set in the church." Lutherans in many lands make use of them. An inexperienced observer, taking note only of crucifixes and candles sometimes fails to distinguish between Lutherans and Catholics. Yet none of these heirlooms of our ancient family belong to the essential marks of the church. Their observance or non-observance has nothing to do with the substance of Lutheranism.
Lutheranism aimed at reformation and not at revolution. Its initial purpose was to bring back the Church to the common faith of Christendom. Hence the Lutheran Confession is in its large outlines that of universal Christendom. Nevertheless, it received a distinctive trend from the problems of soteriology. The ancient Church had developed the doctrines of God and of Christ. A beginning, too, had been made in the doctrines of sin and grace and the way of salvation. But the development had been hindered by hierarchical traditionalism and by the spirit of legalism. These were the obstacles that stood in the way. The cry that went up to God from the hearts of the people in the days of the Reformation was "What must I do to be saved?" This cry found a voice in the experience of Luther himself. This is what drove him into the monastery, and this was the underlying quest of his life as a monk and as a teacher in the university, through monasticism to get to heaven. It was only when he had found Christ, and realized that his sins had been taken away through the atoning work of the Son of God, that he found peace. It is His person and work upon which the doctrine of our Church primarily rests.* *"Luther, when he said that justification by faith was the article of a standing or falling Church, stated the exact truth. He meant to say, in the terms of the New Testament, especially of Paul, that God in Christ is the sole and sufficient Saviour. He affirmed what was in him no abstract doctrine, but the most concrete of all realities, Incarnated in the person and passion of Jesus Christ, drawing from Him its eternal and universal significance."—Fairbairn, "The Place of Christ in Modern Theology," page 159.
In the words of the Small Catechism, Luther still teaches our children this foundation doctrine of our Church:
"I believe that Jesus Christ, true God, begotten of the Father from eternity, and also true man, born of the Virgin Mary, is my Lord, who has redeemed me, a lost and condemned creature, secured and delivered me from all sins, from death and from the power of the devil; not with silver and gold, but with His holy and precious blood, and with His innocent sufferings and death, in order that I might be His, live under Him in His kingdom, and serve Him in everlasting righteousness, innocence and blessedness."
But while we thus find in the Son of God and in His atoning work the foundation of the faith of our Church, many obstacles had been placed in the way of securing this redemption. Legalistic conditions made it impossible for the sinner to know that his sins had been taken away. It was here that the Lutheran Reformation pointed the way to a return to the simplicity of the Gospel by its Scriptural definition of justification. Sola fide, by faith alone, was the keynote of the Reformation. Be sure that you bring back sola was Luther's admonition to his friends, who went to Augsburg while he himself remained at Coburg.
Thus justification by faith became the material principle of Protestantism and a second foundation stone of Lutheranism. It is true that Calvin and the Reformed churches also accepted this principle, but they did not begin with it. Their system was based on the idea of the absoluteness of God. The Lutheran system emphasizes the love of God to all men; the Reformed system emphasizes predestination; which, by selecting some, excludes the others. As the theologians describe it, Lutheranism is Christocentric, Reform is theocentric.* *Calvin, like Luther, read theology through Augustine and without his ecclesiology, but from an altogether opposite point of view. Luther started with the anthropology and advanced from below upwards; Calvin started with the theology and moved from above downwards. Hence his determinative idea was not justification by faith, but God and His sovereignty, or the sole and all-efficiency of His gracious will.-Ibid., page 162.
A third principle relates to the means of grace. Here we have less difficulty in discerning the line of cleavage which separates us from Rome on the one hand and from the rest of Protestantism on the other hand.
The Lutheran Confession regards the word of God as the means of grace. The Sacraments also are means of grace, not ex opere operato, but because of the word. They are the visible word, or the individualized Gospel. Hence, it is correct to say that the word, in the Lutheran system, is the means of grace. This is doubtless news to many of our brethren of other faiths, who think of us only as extreme sacramentarians, and have looked upon us for centuries as Crypto-Romanists. Nothing could be further from the truth. It was only by an accident that the emphasis of polemical discussion in the sixteenth century was laid upon the sacramental question, where it never belonged.
In her doctrine of the means of grace, the Lutheran Church differs toto coelo from Rome. It is not the Church which, through its authority and its institutions, makes the means of grace effective; but it is through the means of grace that the Church is created and made both a product and an instrument of the Holy Ghost.