Lutherans have a unique heritage that makes teaching predestination doubly difficult.
Most pastors know that the topic of predestination is a tricky subject. For teaching, it’s often hazardous – though it shouldn’t be, since predestination is essential to the consolation the gospel gives. But there’s a reason that predestination and divine election make for difficult conversation.
One obvious explanation is the general religious culture of the United States. Where rhetoric about the American Dream teaches people to become self-made creations of their own hard work and ingenuity, the gospel teaches that God chooses us despite anything we bring to him (John 15:16). Where the doctrine of free will abounds in much Christian media (due to the legacy of American revivalism and the Second Great Awakening), Reformation theology understands that human beings are captive to sin and cannot free themselves (Rom 3:9–18).
On the other hand, Lutherans have struggled to distinguish the Lutheran doctrine of election from that of the Reformed tradition. In the US, evangelicals often think in terms of a binary: are you a Calvinist or an Arminian? Calvinism is then reduced to five “points” (often abbreviated as TULIP), and Arminianism refers to any doctrine in which free will plays a role in bringing sinners to Christ. This could include sophisticated doctrines like Molinism, adopted by some evangelical theologians. It could also refer to less elaborate theories in which people must make a decision to give their lives to Christ, perhaps demonstrating this decision by saying a “Sinner’s Prayer.”
But Lutherans have a unique heritage that makes teaching predestination doubly difficult. For many Lutheran churches, the legacy of Lutheran pietism stretching back hundreds of years shapes how Lutherans think about their faith, whether they’re aware of it or not. This is especially the case for Lutherans with a Scandinavian background.
The pietist renewal movement in Europe is usually identified first with the German Lutheran pastor Philipp Jakob Spener (1635–1705), though Johann Arndt (1555–1621) is arguably a predecessor of pietism. In the eighteenth-century, pietism would expand in Germany around the same time Enlightenment ideas migrated from France into German universities.
With the decline of Lutheran scholasticism during this time, many German Lutherans looked to the renewal of personal commitment, devotion, and experience in faith. Though it remains a common caricature, Lutheran scholastic theology acquired a reputation for being spiritually arid and uninspiring – focused only on the details of doctrine, but not the life of the Christian.
In contrast, many pietists emphasized a personal experience of repentance and conversion – and it’s that emphasis that has made teaching predestination difficult. When pietism made its way to Scandinavia, it was enthusiastically taken up by the revivalist Norwegian lay preacher Hans Nielsen Hauge (1771–1824). Hauge’s preaching emphasized individual experience and conversion, as well as the necessity of “living” faith in Christ. It’s always dangerous to assurance when adjectives and adverbs start crowding around faith in Christ. This kind of thinking usually undermines the power of God through the external word and grounds the effectiveness of grace in the type of response we have to it.
Hauge’s spirituality had an immense impact on Norwegian Lutherans who immigrated to the United States during the nineteenth century and thereafter. There was even a synod named after him, although the various Norwegian Lutheran church bodies at the time were all influenced by Hauge to one degree or another. Because of its emphasis on conversion, Lutheran pietism tended to downplay the importance of the sacraments and the sovereignty of God, who works salvation in those he chooses.
Even to this day, Lutheran pietists will speak of “evangelism for the baptized.” So, the story goes, someone can be baptized but not have a “living” faith in Christ. Thus, preaching aims at getting people to make a decision for Christ, turn from sin, and walk in the way of measurable righteousness. Not only does this undermine the power of baptism, wherein God’s word creates faith and new life, but it also makes the sermon into an altar call. The preacher’s job is to get people to convert, not convert them with the power of the gospel proclaimed.
Lutheran pietism also inherited a doctrine from Lutheran scholasticism that made the doctrine of election even more difficult to teach. To distinguish themselves from Calvinism, Lutherans, after the publication of the Book of Concord (1580), devised a doctrine of foreseen faith (intuitu fidei) in which God foresees those in whom his grace will prevail and convert. Thus, God’s choice (or election) is done “in view of” faith. This means the most certain assertion on election I can make is that God chose me because he knew that his grace would win me over – that’s tepid, especially for those with burdened consciences who find themselves in the middle of doubt over their standing before God.
Most Lutherans wouldn’t notice that this doctrine departed from Luther’s teaching in The Bondage of the Will (1525) and the Formula of Concord (1577) for quite some time. Martin Luther and the Confessions teach that election is a doctrine of the word. God’s choice for you is pledged and given through the proclamation of the gospel. As the Formula of Concord states, “Upon this [predestination of God] our salvation is founded so firmly that the gates of hell cannot overcome it.” (FC Ep XI.4)
This is a firmer foundation for assurance because God’s choice is attached to and revealed through the means of grace, not hidden in the inaccessible foreknowledge of God. It means God’s choice of you is delivered to you despite how you may feel about that choice at the moment. However, it was only in the nineteenth century that Lutherans started to turn back to Luther and the Confessions on the doctrine of election. This caused controversy in the Missouri Synod, though it was dealt with swiftly by C. F. W. Walther and his allies, who staked out the position of Luther as the official position of the Missouri Synod.
In the Norwegian Synod, the controversy dragged out much longer, causing a schism. Those who sided with Walther took the “first form” position on election, but others advocating a “second form” favored foreseen faith and started their own synod – humorously called the Anti-Missourian Brotherhood.
It seemed that pietism – mingled with a weak theology of predestination – had leavened the whole lump when it came to the Norwegian Lutherans. All the various groups got together to sign an agreement on predestination in which both “forms” of the doctrine would be tolerated. And in 1917, they merged into a single church body. The mixture has been unstable ever since.
While pietism is not wholly to blame for the challenges to teaching and preaching predestination today, it is part of the story. But it is a story worth paying attention to, especially for pastors and lay people trying to understand why so many Lutherans – known to be the church’s finest preachers of grace – often struggle so mightily against the God who chooses, elects, and predestines us in his mercy. Without properly identifying God’s choice with the word of promise, which forgives sin, we will be left only with ourselves, our piety, and our good works to find the assurance of salvation.
