Pope and Patriarch have the same religious functions: to govern the church, and to be the official interpreter of Scripture. We can disregard church governance in this essay; Luther was willing to allow to the pope outward governance of the church as a visible institution if only he wouldn't insist on interpreting Scripture against itself and obscuring the Gospel. So the pope's essential function is as official interpreter of Holy Writ. On his own authority, he tells you what God had in mind.
For centuries, people in this part of the world have been divided over the question of whom to accept as official interpreter of Scripture and answerer of religious questions. Pope or Patriarch? Who to believe? Who to obey?
Is there a purgatory or not? The pope says yes. The patriarch does not, although Orthodox also pray for the dead. Whom to believe? Who has the authority? Pope or Patriarch?
Moving to the East changed the way I think.
As long as the question is, ``Shall we believe the Pope or not?'' it was an easy one to answer.
As soon as the question becomes, ``Shall we believe Pope or Patriarch,'' the question changes radically.
Because, as Isaac Asimov pointed out in his coruscatingly brilliant sci-fi novel The Gods Themselves, once you leave singularity and admit a second possibility you have to ask whether there is a third. Or a fourth... or a tenth or a hundredth or a thousandth.
This is when a fundamental flash of insight struck me:
John Paul II is pope for Roman Catholicism,and the founder of every Protestant sect is pope for his confession. His system of theology or his theological peculiarity interpret Scripture for his followers.
the Patriarch is pope for the Orthodox,
John Calvin is pope for the classical Presbyterian,
John Wesley is pope for the Methodists,
Roger Williams is pope for the Baptists,
Among Pentecostals, practically every pastor is pope of his congregation. Some Pentecostals, and all liberals, are pope in the shrine of their own sovereign hearts.
But this brings up the inevitable question: Is Martin Luther pope of the Lutherans?
No one who has read much of Luther could answer yes to that question. Neither he nor the system of theology he formulated authoritatively interpret what the Bible means.
Note that word ``authoritatively.''
The only authority in Lutheranism is the authority of the Word itself. Luther's principles of interpretation are derived from Scripture, not imposed on it. My own ``Ten Commandments of Bible Interpretation'' were taken from specific instances where Christ used a principle of interpretation to interpret Scripture.
In other words, Luther's teachings had meaning for his followers only because Luther came up with convincing Scriptures to demonstrate his points.
Likewise today, no Lutheran pastor, professor, theologian, bishop, college president, synod president, seminary rector or publisher or editor has any spiritual authority other than the authority to speak first and last and quote Scripture in between. If the Scripture he quotes is unconvincing, or if he has no Scripture to quote, everyone else is free to disregard him.
Is Luther the pope of the Lutherans?Where you have a pope, you have a railroad track. Scripture is one rail and the pope is the other and although the pope says ``I go in the same direction as Scripture,'' in fact Scripture must and will be bent to go in the same direction as the pope, because the Pope has a voice and the Scripture has to be read. Every pope, Catholic, Orthodox or Protestant, therefore directs and is thus above Scripture. Every pope claims to be parallel and equal to Scripture, but in fact he is superior to it, because it must follow where he leads.
No.
Who then is?
You might think, ``The Lutheran confessions.''
Not so.
Please permit an illustration at this point.
The Lutheran Confessions, however, do not relate to Scripture as one railroad rail relates to another.
The Lutheran Confessions relate to Scripture as a balustrade relates to a staircase. The stairs were there first. The stairs can carry you upwards; the balustrade can not. The sole function of the balustrade is to keep you on the stairs. And that they do.
So the Lutheran Confessions are not our pope. Nor is Luther.
Who then is?
Here is my slight improvement on Luther. I quote it almost on a daily basis as I teach my students and parishioners. ``The Bible is its own pope.'' Or, if you'd rather have it in this form, ``The Word of God is all the pope we need.'' Or, ``God is His own pope.''
During the debates between Luther and Eck, Eck castigated Luther for the ``black pope'' of ink on paper that Luther was proposing. Professor Kurt Marquart quoted him as saying, ``Give us a fine, a living pope!''
Ever since that time Lutherans have been running scared from the charge that we have made of the Bible a paper pope. This charge is quoted in Pieper's Dogmatics, and a refutation is therein attempted. Several of my fellow seminarians wrote papers on the topic, in which they attempted to prove that the Bible was not a paper pope.
That was a matter of judgment. I think that they were mistaken, and so was Pieper.
We do have a paper pope. Or, rather, we have a certain pope. Rome has a highly uncertain and changeable pope, which the many contradictions between popes amply demonstrate. Praise the Lord that John Paul II has rejected the heresy that St. Mary be venerated as Co-Redemptrix; but who's to say that some future pope won't reverse John Paul? It's happened before! Even though John Paul II is right, he's right for the wrong reason, and it reinforces the bad precedent of papal infallibility. So even when he's right he's wrong, and the next pope may do to Mary what John Paul couldn't.
Likewise, the bellicose Patriarch of Athens may find himself locked in controversy soon with the Patriarch of Istanbul over Greco-Turkish politics. The patriarchs of Kiev and Moscow don't always see eye to eye. And pope and Patriarch have contradicted each other often enough.
But our certain, definite, paper pope never contradicts itself. Nor can it; because all its ``papal pronouncements'' have already been made and time-tested for self-consistency. They are not constantly added to by new bulls, decrees and rulings. They exist in a single book of 1200 chapters which has been complete and consistent for nineteen centuries. During that same period millions have sought in vain for untruth, self-contradictions and internal or external inconsistency.
Accepting the Bible as our paper pope, rather than fleeing from the charge as somehow discreditable, enables us to present our faith to the world as something completely unique in Christendom:
Lutherans, and only Lutherans -- in fact, only confessional Lutherans -- have a closed system of theology.
All other confessions have open systems. All other confessions allow some human being the authority to tell us what God must have had in mind. Only Lutherans have a closed system of theology in which only God is allowed to do so.
Now, mind you -- our system of proving what one part of Scripture means by adducing another part of Scripture is not unique. All denominations use it at least part of the time, because it is so obviously the correct one. Nobody, for example, denies that Peter was one of the Twelve.
Some denominations use it most of the time and only lay it aside when it teaches something that human reason just can't swallow, such as the Real Presence of Christ in Holy Communion. By doing this, of course they show that their pope is the human reason of their founder.
But confessional Lutheranism attempts to let the Bible be its own pope all the time, and the purest Lutheranism will be that synod of Lutheranism that does this most consistently.
Whenever my students ask a difficult question, I gain time to think by reciting the formula, ``Well, let's let the Bible be its own pope.'' Sometimes this leads me to completely new but heretofore hidden Biblical knowledge, for instance, that Thomas doubted because he had an identical twin brother. (This knowledge was not lost in the East, where Thomas is not called ``Didymus'' but ``the Twin.'' It stems from the fact that his name is ``Twin'' in both languages and is translated from language to language, rather than transliterated. Names don't translate. Nicknames, however, can be carried from language to language. His experience as a twin led him to be more suspicious than the others of cases of uncertain identity, and to demand tactile and not just visual evidence.)
Usually it just leads us to the treasures of our Lutheran heritage.
In any case, the philosophical consistency and elegant simplicity of this system of theology is enormously appealing to Ukrainians, who are not strange foreigners with barbarous ways but the genteel poor -- mostly educated, neatly-dressed, extremely polite and cultured people who are looking for divine verities and increasingly find them in the Ukrainian Lutheran Church.
Most churches are satisfied not to be shrinking and delighted with a straight-line graph of growth. Our growth graph was straight-line at first but has since become exponential.
When I was here alone, we added a worshiper a week to our attendance. When Joel Rakos took over my parish in Ternopil to give me more time for the seminary, the other parish I founded started to grow at one per week and the Ternopil parish continued to grow at one per week. And when in the incredibly short time of five years and nine months the first Ukrainian pastors were graduated from St. Sophia Seminary, which was founded one day without forethought, growth approximately doubled again. We are now adding four or five worshipers a week to the total in the dozen cities we serve. When these congregations send young men to the seminary, that growth curve should continue to move exponentially, to the greater glory of God.
Is this an improvement on Luther?
If we are saying exactly what he said, but saying it better in our circumstances, then yes.
And this improvement is based on one simple proposition: The word of God (which teaches the Gospel of Christ) is all the pope we need. No human need apply.
Protestants make the founder of their particular sect their pope. His system of Bible interpretation and his or her peculiar teachings are allowed to interpret and even overrule clear Scripture, as in the Adventist attempt to re-establish the Sabbath despite Colossians 2:16-17. Adventists are good people -- there are none better and many not as good -- but their Sabbath doctrine is untenable and is only taught because Ellen G. White is their pope.
Protestants generally also make man the supreme pope over Scripture; their only disagreement is on which man, and they usually interpret the Scriptures as the founder of their particular sect did. For many people, the equivalent rule would be, ``Thou shalt let thy reason interpret the Bible.'' The Election Controversy illustrates Protestant interpretation.
One finds oneself disagreeing with the highest human authorities when one accepts this Commandment. There is more theology in the ten-volume Theological Dictionary of the New Testament than I could get into my head if I spent the rest of my life studying it, and yet they are clearly in error on a key passage. Jesus prophesied that the Gospel would be preached in the whole world (greeko>ikum'enh) and then would the end come. The T.D.N.T. says that in all other passages, greeko>ikum'enh means the known world, the Mediterranean area and its environs, but in this passage it must mean the earth. Nope. Sorry. The word means what it means and what it means is that as soon as the Word got around the known world of the time, the Lord was perfectly capable of returning. And this is how the early church understood it; this is why the Thessalonians were quitting their jobs and lying around waiting like Millerites for the Lord to return. They knew that as soon as the Gospel had gotten around the Mediterranean Basin the Lord could return at any time. His return does not hang on finding every isolated tribe still lost in the Stone Age and telling them about Jesus.