July 27, 2023 Show with Rev. Evan McClanahan on “The Problem with Lutheranism: A Lutheran Pastor’s Critiques of Modern Lutheranism” (Part 2)

Live from historic downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, home of founding father James Wilson, 19th century hymn writer George Duffield, 19th century gospel minister George Norcross, and sports legend Jim Thorpe, it's Iron Sharpens Iron.

This is a radio platform in which pastors, Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today. Proverbs chapter 27 verse 17 tells us, iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.

Matthew Henry said that in this passage, we are cautioned to take heed with whom we converse and directed to have a view in conversation to make one another wiser and better. It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next two hours, and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.

And now, here's your host, Chris Arnzen.

Good afternoon, Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida, and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth, who are listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com. This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Thursday on this 27th day of July, 2023.

For those of you who tuned in yesterday, you may recall I announced a prayer request for my older brother Andy, who is a resident in a local nursing home here in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. He was taken to the hospital last Sunday evening with pneumonia and a urinary tract infection.

And although my initial visit to him yesterday was rather frightening because he was shivering violently and not in the best shape and was quite concerned about him, obviously, but the latest report from his nurse is that his fever is broken, his levels have all returned to normal or near normal, his white blood cell count, his blood pressure, and all of the other levels that they consider when someone is in serious condition.

And so, thank you all who have been praying. God has been hearing your prayers and smiling, and my brother seems to be on the road to recovery, but please continue to pray because of the fact that pneumonia is a very tricky thing, as many of you know, and hopefully he will be back in his nursing home soon.

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First Lutheran Church, Houston, and the NALC

Well, today is day number two of an interview I began yesterday. This will be part two of The Problem with Lutheranism, A Lutheran Pastor's Critiques of Modern Lutheranism, and my guest for the second day in a row to conduct this interview is Reverend Evan McClenaghan, moderator and occasional participant in one of the only continuously operating debate series in the country, the First Word Debate Series at First Lutheran.

He's a writer for The Everyman and the Federalist and pastor of the First Lutheran Church in Houston, Texas, and it's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Reverend Evan McClenaghan.

Well, thank you very much. Hopefully everyone understands McClenaghan is a classic German Lutheran name, and so yeah, I get that a lot. But if they heard the story yesterday, they understand we sort of snuck into Lutheran Church via the back door.

We were escorted in by someone with the last name of Schultz. So anyway, they've been nice to us in spite of our, I don't know, Scotch-Irish or whatever it is we are, ancestry. But I want to thank the guy who I bumped off today, because I know you schedule way out.

In advance.

So I know some poor soul was destined to be on the Chris Arnson radio show from, you know, four to six Eastern time today, and I'm so long-winded that that poor fella is, I don't know, you know, weaving baskets right now or something, you know?

Well, if you had been my very recent guest, Christopher Castaldo, who is Sicilian, I would have been a lot more concerned when you said you bumped off one of my guests.

I mean that in the nicest way possible. Yes.

Well, we postponed my guest who was originally scheduled for yesterday, but actually, as Providence would have it, he was thrilled because his day wound up being a lot more busy than he had intended.

Okay, good.

So he was thrilled that he was able to move it to a different day, so. Yeah, good. Why don't you, for the sake of those who did not hear you yesterday, give another summary description of First Lutheran Church of Houston, Texas?

Yeah, First Lutheran. We're down in about a mile south of downtown Houston, and we've been around since the 1840s. We're incorporated in 1851, so we're coming up on our 175th anniversary. As I'll talk about today, you know, we were a German church, right?

We were Germans that came up through the south part of Texas, through Galveston, settled in Houston. There's a First Evangelical Lutheran Church in Galveston. There's a First Evangelical Lutheran Church in Houston.

That's what we were. We actually recently took the evangelical word out of our name a few years back because we didn't want people to think we were in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.

I want to thank you for that because, although it is the leftist apostate denomination that has hijacked that word evangelical, why on earth they want that in their name, I have no idea. In fact, I don't even know why they want to call themselves Lutheran because they are neither evangelical nor Lutheran.

But I have often wondered why these Missouri Synod folks and Wisconsin Synod folks and other conservative Lutheran churches, they've still put, like St. Matthew's Evangelical Lutheran Church or whatever name they have, they still put the Evangelical Lutheran Church in there, and it's very confusing because you don't always see on the sign that it is a LCMS church or a Wisconsin church.

You don't always see that, so it's very, very baffling.

Yeah, if you don't know what the logo is, you know, I drive by and I see the LCMS logo, so I know what that is, but most people don't know that. So, yeah, and it's too bad that the ELCA has made it sort of difficult for us, but actually, as you were saying, the joke is that, you know, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America is not Evangelical Lutheran or a church.

But it is in America, so I guess we'll give them that. But yeah, that was essentially a merger in 1988. Well, it was in the works for the 80s, but it was the LCA, the ALC, and the AELC that merged in 1988 formally to form the ELCA, and that was kind of the best name they came.

Up with.

And I mean, there's cultural baggage with it, you know, in terms as well as, like, is Evangelicals kind of a voting bloc, or it kind of, it could describe everything from like a Oneness Pentecostal to a, you know, Bible church attending, Bible-believing, you know, Calvinist, right?

So it's not especially any more especially a helpful name. But anyway, long story short, we were, as I said earlier, yesterday, we were in the ENR for a long time, the Evangelical and Reformed Denomination.

That denomination was one of the eight that formed the United Church of Christ, the UCC. So from its heyday, that denomination was already kind of very, I'd say, liberal and ecumenical, and we eventually left the UCC.

But we always, I think we always kind of had this maybe kind of lower church, you might say, or kind of Calvinist strain to us. These days, I'd say we're pretty high church, high liturgical, traditional church, and yeah, we'd love people to stop in and say hello, a number of folks from ELCA parishes are, for whatever reason, they are finally at their wits' end with the ELCA, and they're stopping and visiting and saying, oh, I didn't even know this church was here.

We're, you know, glad that y 'all haven't gone totally off the rails yet. So that's who we are.

Yes, and I have heard that there are people leaving the local EL—well, we actually have two in Carlisle, ELCA churches, but the one that I'm aware of that began performing same-sex marriage, which is really not a marriage, as we know, but calling it that, and sadly and tragically having the legal protection of that idea of a marriage, that people are leaving there because of that.

Now we should only hope that these people who are leaving actually become born again, because I have had interviews with pastors who have brought their congregations out of leftist denominations or have accepted calls to the pastorate of formerly liberal congregations or congregations formerly in liberal denominations who have left, and when the evangelical pastor comes, he discovers sometimes that a great number of these people may have biblical morals, but they are as lost as an active homosexual because they are not regenerate, and it eventually becomes obvious.

So just because somebody has a biblical conviction on morality does not mean that they're saved.

Right.

Yeah, sure. Yeah, I think that's part of what we're talking about, is some of these mainline churches, they kind of get a little bit stuck in time, they become institutions, and we don't always do a very good job of teaching our people what it really means to have a relationship with Jesus Christ or to confess Christ as your Lord, and Lutherans might be a little bit bashful about some of the personal Lord and Savior language.

But yeah, so I don't take issue with that, but we do paedo-baptism, so some of that language is associated with credo-baptism, which we could talk about as well. But yes, there's an institutionalism that sets in, and it's just kind of the way we've always done things becomes the reason the Church exists, and that's a real problem.

Women's Ordination in the NALC

Now, you are a congregation of the North American Lutheran Church, and as you said yesterday, you are a very conservative denomination, with the one exception that may raise the ire of other conservatives is that you ordain women.

Now, does every congregation need to believe in that and even practice that, if a woman were to apply, for instance, or become a candidate for a pastor?

Yeah, actually, that's a good question, and the short answer is I don't know. I would suspect probably very, very back-of-the-napkin math, probably a third of the pastors in the North American Lutheran Church probably would not openly defend the ordination of women.

I know we're not supposed to say things like that, and maybe I'll get in trouble, but I think that's probably just the case. But we serve in parishes where, you know, that's a big fight, and it can result in a lot of hurt feelings.

So, you know, we kind of had to fight the big fight to get away from the sexual deviancy. Now, I do understand the argument that every church that ordained women, whether the United Methodist Church, eventually what we call the ELCA, it was the LCA back in the day, or ALC, but, you know, the Presbyterian Church USA, etc., etc., etc., they all ended up in the same place, right, on the far-left spectrum of Christianity and borderline not Christianity at all.

So, what you're seeing in the Presbyterian world, you have the Evangelical Covenant Order, you have the NALC, you have the Anglican Church North America, you've got the Global Methodist Church. Those are all four church bodies that already had the ordination of women, and they didn't want to cut that back, right, or they didn't want to cut that out.

It's very rare that church bodies will actually do that. And so, what they're trying to say is, hey, can we be conservative on every other issue except this one? And I think it remains to be seen, if I'm being perfectly honest.

I will say, too, I did a study school class a while back. It was quite long, I mean, six or eight weeks or something, where I tried to do as much research as I could, look at the biblical passages, and I wanted to know what were the arguments the old LCA, the Lutheran Church in America, or ALC, American Lutheran Church, what were the arguments they made to ordain women?

I wanted to kind of get back to, like, source material. This would have been the late 60s, early 70s, and I dug into some, you know, there's some online resources available, and the arguments are just, they're just not there.

It was almost as bad as, well, women can vote, you know, women can, you know, women are working in the workplace, and so it only makes sense that women are leading the congregation. There really have not been, in my view, even if I totally agreed with women's ordination, and I know people who do that would agree with me when I say this, there just have not been many attempts at robust biblical defenses of the practice.

The things that are commonly said—you didn't maybe want to go here, but—.

That's fine with me, because I know that a lot of people, especially from my complementarian and even perhaps patriarchal-leaning background, that's still stuck in the back of their head from yesterday.

Oh, for sure. It's a—yeah, yeah. No, I understand. It's going to be a big issue. People would write me off, you know, from day one because I'm in a denomination that, you know, that does that. I get that, you know.

So I'd only ask that you listen to the words that I'm saying. I'm not a liberal proposing liberal. I'm quite the opposite. You know, I'm probably more conservative than—in fact, I think what I'm saying is actually in many ways more conservative than some in the Missouri Senate on some of these other issues.

Some of our understanding is a relationship to the law and whatnot. But the main arguments, I think, that are used to justify women's ordination are, for example, well, women were among Jesus' disciples, to which I would say, well, yes, we're all called to be Jesus' disciple, but that doesn't mean that we're qualified to be an elder.

Or they'll say women were the first to proclaim the resurrection, you know, the gospel of resurrection. Well, yes, we're all called to proclaim the gospel of resurrection, but that doesn't mean we're all qualified to be an elder.

So, you know, you have these examples where, yes, women are most definitely lifted up in the Christian story, certainly above and beyond the contemporaries of Christianity at the time, say, Greek and Roman culture, for example.

And yet there are qualifications for elder, and it's hard to get around that. So, you know, yes, you can have deaconesses, for example, like Julia, and yet that is not an elder. So anyway, I would— it's not a hill I'm going to dine, but I will say this.

I will say this. I've known a lot of male pastors who are truly awful. So, you know, being a man is also not—it might be a baseline qualification, but merely being a man doesn't make you a good pastor.

In fact, I have a friend, a very dear friend, I won't mention his name in case my quotation of him gets him in trouble, but he is a conservative Presbyterian in a denomination, the Associate Reform Presbyterian Church, that is conservative, but just like the North American Lutheran Church, they ordain women.

At least they did a decade ago. I have been hearing people who have insisted that they no longer do that, and I have never seen that verified. I know that the Associate Reform Presbyterian Church in Canada never and still does not ordain women, but the United States branch does, at least from my last experience with a friend down south, but he lamented that they ordained women, and he said, but the thing that's worse is that many of the women preachers are better than the men.

Yeah, well, and I'll say just objectively, this is going to make some people—you know, they're really conservatives among us. They won't want to hear this, but yes, there are very, you know, faithful women serving the church, and, you know, so I'll just leave it at that.

Like I said, it's not—I'm a solo pastor. You know, I'm gifted and able to do ministry at our church. There's an agreement among, you know, the members and myself as to what they want me to do and what I'm happy to do for them, and I will only have to deal with—I'll never have to deal with that issue, right?

Not really. The church will when I go, so I've tried my best to explain, you know, what would be helpful to them. But anyway, but that's—yeah, we're in the North American Lutheran Church. That's where we're at right now, so.

And just for the sake of any of my listeners who are Reformed, who are immediately writing my guest off for even being in a denomination that ordains women, well, if you love Sinclair Ferguson, he, while pastoring in the United States, was in the aforementioned Associate Reform Presbyterian Church denomination, which ordains women.

So I'm not saying that Sinclair is infallible or inerrant, but he is definitely a great hero of the vast majority of very conservative Reformed Christians, and he did not see that as so objectionable that he would refuse to be a pastor in that denomination.

So I'm not saying that he agreed with the practice. I'm just saying that he agreed to be a pastor. He accepted a call to be a pastor in that denomination. We have to go to our first break, and when we return, we're going to pick up where we left off with my guest's critiques of modern Lutheranism.

I urge you, after this live show is over, to listen to the recording of yesterday's program, because we went through a lot of issues that you don't want to miss. And so at your earliest convenience, listen to part one of our discussion with Pastor Evan McClanahan on his critiques of modern Lutheranism.

But we left off, basically, after his critiques of the two-kingdom theology that is very prevalent in Lutheranism, conservative Lutheranism, and he didn't totally write it off, but had some serious concerns about it and how it is used.

And we'll pick up right there where we left off when we return from our first commercial break. If you have a question, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com. Chrisarnson at gmail .com. Give us your first name at least, your city and state, and your country of residence.

Only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter, like you are a Lutheran who is disgruntled or has problems with something that you experience as a Lutheran today, and you don't want to draw attention to your identity.

I understand that. But if you're just asking a general question, give us your first name at least, city and state, and country of residence. We'll be right back.

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That's royaldiadem .com. We're now back with our guest today, Pastor Evan McClanahan, who is the pastor of the First Lutheran Church in Houston, Texas. We are discussing part two of a discussion we began yesterday of the problem with Lutheranism, a Lutheran pastor's critiques of modern Lutheranism.

And our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com. If you have a question of your own, chrisarnson at gmail .com. As always, give us your first name, at least your city and state, and your country of residence if you live outside of the USA.

I would like to read a question that came to us yesterday that we did not have time to read from a dear friend who has actually been a guest and a co-host on occasion on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio. His name is Charlie Liebert, formerly a colleague of Ken Ham, the world-renowned young earth creationist.

And Charlie Liebert has his own ministry called Six Day Creation, and the website of that ministry is sixdaycreation .org, and it's spelt S-I-X. It's not the number, and I think I may have given you the wrong website.

It is sixdaycreation .com, not dot org, I'm sorry. Sixdaycreation .com, and remember to spell six, S-I-X, don't use a number. And Charlie, he has a question, I'm Presbyterian, but soon after I was saved in 1977, I worked with a Lutheran pastor in Greensboro, North Carolina.

I was always confused by the different denominations that used the name Lutheran, Missouri Synod, and many others. For example, using the Presbyterian name, we have OPC, PCA, PCUSA, ARP, and it goes on and on.

They range from very orthodox to the heretical. Can you give a little background on the different Lutheran groups? And obviously, we don't want you to spend a lot of time on this, because our main theme is your concerns and your critiques of modern Lutheranism, but give us a brief overview of the prominent Lutheran denominations.

Lutheran Denominations and Their Ethnic Histories

Well, actually, I think this kind of ties into my third point, which is one of the problems with Lutheranism, which is the ethnic histories, because really, to understand Lutheranism in America, I think you've got to understand where those Lutherans came from, because we're not very good at making more of them.

And so the Missouri Synod, for example, a denomination I have great respect for, by and large, they were folks that originally came from, I think it was southern Germany. They did not want to become in a union church, a unionized church, if you will, with Presbyterians.

They were still in the 1820s, not agreement on the Lord's Supper, going all the way back, of course, to Zwingli and Luther and the Marburg Colloquy and all of that. So rather than a fellowship with Calvinists, they came to America.

And so I think that's part of the DNA of the Missouri Synod. It's always been a little bit insular, not necessarily in a bad way, but maybe sometimes in a bad way. For that reason, you know, we kind of, you know, stick to ourselves, and we're going to preserve true Lutheranism, and we're going to be the confessional Lutherans.

Meanwhile, you know, you had other German Lutherans and Norwegians and the Swedes and some Danes that came to America for different reasons, you know, to farm, you know, to have access to land, and yes, perhaps to have some more religious freedom.

There was a pietist strain in the 1600s that opposed kind of state church understandings, kind of the Lutheran version of Puritanism, perhaps. And so they came to America, and, you know, they brought their cultures with them, they brought their attitudes with them, they brought their languages with them, and who did they congregate with?

Other Norwegians, right? So it's not uncommon still in America today to have a Norwegian Lutheran church next door to a Swedish Lutheran church. And so I think those cultures sort of lent themselves to different denominations and different kinds of fellowship.

Like I said, my church, in fact, my founding pastor was educated at St. Krishona Seminary in Basel, Switzerland. So not that hard to understand that he was probably as much Calvinist as he was an Orthodox Lutheran.

So he was our founding pastor in the 1840s, our church became evangelical and reformed. That's very different from the, in fact, in 1880, a dozen families left my church, which was, I think, at the time called First German Evangelical Lutheran Church, and they formed Trinity Lutheran Church, which is now in downtown Houston.

So Trinity Lutheran, which is Missouri Synod. So it doesn't, even back in the 1880s, there was significant enough differences to where people felt obligated to leave my congregation, and they were probably right to do so, by the way, and formed another church here in Houston.

So I think probably, you know, it ultimately goes back to, there were strains of, like, high sacramentology and lower sacramentology, you know? So whether you would have the Lord's Supper, how often you would have it, you know, the degree to which Christ was truly present, the bread and wine, those were some disagreements.

I think Lutherans have always been pulled into the evangelical world that surrounded it. We've always been a little bit ashamed of being Lutheran. That's not what I'm saying, by the way, with my critiques here at all.

But I think Lutherans, there have been some Lutherans who've kind of wanted to blend into the evangelical world rather than retain their kind of unique Lutheran identity, their confessional, their liturgical identities, and so on and so forth.

So they sort of lost their identity. Here's how I would put it. If you had a spreadsheet, this is to summarize it. If you had a spreadsheet, and let's say there are four or five issues, and the combination of those particular issues kind of is where you're going to end up, how you answer those issues is where you're going to end up in a denomination.

The same thing is true, I'm guessing, in Presbyterianism, perhaps Anglicanism. But you have just outright liberalism, right? So just basically denying, I don't know, the Bible is the word of God. So that's what we see in the progressive circles.

You've got whether or not churches are congregational or whether or not you need bishops, so some kind of hierarchy or structure beyond the congregation. You've got women's ordination, of course. And actually, six-day creationism is an issue.

I mean, in the Missouri Synod, there's disagreement about to what degree the six-day creationism is a gospel-level issue. So even in conservative church bodies, there's not wholly disagreement about that.

So I think some combination of outright liberalism, women's ordination, congregationalism, or having bishops and or presidents and that sort of thing. And I guess there's a few other dividing issues, but those are pretty much it.

So there are combinations of that, right? So like congregationalists who ordain women, congregationalists who don't ordain women. Churches with structure that ordain women, churches with structure that don't ordain women.

So those are the main issues.

And correct me if I'm wrong, and perhaps you're not even aware of this yourself since you're not in this denomination, but I have heard that the Wisconsin Synod tends to be a lot more isolationist. I have even heard extreme examples of perhaps a Wisconsin Synod Lutheran husband who is married to a Missouri Synod Lutheran wife, and they can't even pray together.

Did you know if any of that is true? Is that an extreme? Well, yeah. So yes, the Wisconsin Synod is considered to be more.

Conservative than the Missouri Synod. For example, of course, this was going back 20, 30 years before the Boy Scouts thing was really an issue, but they're kind of known for not endorsing Boy Scout troops in their churches because the God mentioned in, they say, the Boy Scout creed is not the Trinitarian God.

It's kind of the generic God. I don't necessarily disagree with them on that. I think they're actually quite prescient on that, given where Boy Scouts went. It's kind of the Trinitarian God or bust. Yeah, because there's a lot of Mormon.

Influence in the Boy Scouts. But there have been some scandals in the Missouri Synod church. For example, a pastor in New York. Do you mean the Wisconsin? No, actually, I mean Missouri,.

But it's related. Okay, real fast. There was a pastor who prayed at a public service after 9 -11 in New York, right? Yes. Yeah, and it was like, well, now if he prayed, it's an act of worship, and he's doing it with, and these were non-Christians, like, so like a Muslim imam or something was there, right?

So that was sort of a scandal. And then there was another issue, I think, after the school shooting in Connecticut, the one that Alex Jones made so famous. And I can't remember the name of the town. Anyway, Newton, maybe Connecticut, but there was a Christian prayer service for that, and he got permission even to attend and pray.

And then still people came at him. And that's the kind of conservatism, I have to say, that kind of drives me nuts, where I'm not saying it was necessarily right or wrong in those instances to pray, but I think they did conduct themselves probably in ways that were okay, or they apologized after the fact.

I don't know. Sometimes, so yes, in conservatism, you end up with questions about the degree to which you can fellowship. So I would imagine that if a husband and wife were not, you know, one was Missouri Synod, one was Wisconsin Synod, I would imagine, for example, neither could have communion in the other's church.

You know, so they practiced fairly, you know, close communion. And I think that's a little, you know, to me that's a little bit going far because they both affirm the Lutheran confessions. So I think if the Lutheran confessions, at least I think they would both say that, if that's kind of our standard, but at the same time, if I went to a Missouri Synod church and they, you know, I talked to the pastor in advance and he said, I'm not going to commune you, I would say, okay, no problem.

I understand. Not going to get offended at that at all. It's your church. You know, I'm not really for the isolationism, though. You know, I want those of us who confess Christ as Lord and submit to the authority of Christ, even if we don't agree, if our Reformed brothers, we don't agree about the Lord's Supper and other things, let's have the most robust fellowship we can.