The Theology of Martin Luther CH509

 LESSON 18 of 24

Luther’s Doctrine of the Church

Dr. Robert A. Kolb, Ph.D.

Experience: Professor of Systematic Theology
at Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, Missouri

It is by this time no surprise if we begin to talk about Luther’s

understanding of Christ’s church by saying that his doctrine of
the church rests within the context of his doctrine of the Word.
That’s true of everything else in Luther’s theology, so why should
it be different in the doctrine of the church?

We might go to his Smalcald Articles of 1537 for the shortest,

most succinct definition of the church. We do not concede to the
papists that they are the church. Luther wrote they are not. Nor
shall we pay any attention to what they command or forbid in
the name of the church, for, thank God, a 7-year-old child knows
what the church is, namely, holy believers and sheep who hear the
voice of the Shepherd. That’s what children mean when they pray,
“I believe in one holy Christian church.” Its holiness does not
consist of surplices, tonsures, albs, or other ceremonies of theirs,
which they have invented over and above the Holy Scriptures. The
holiness of the church consists of the Word of God and true faith.

Luther’s definition of the church, as he was preparing to meet

Roman Catholic theologians at council, explains, reveals the
setting in which he worked out his doctrine of the church in
opposition to the prevailing (one might say, to the oppressive)
definition of the church, which came from Rome and which
excluded the Lutherans. He (Luther) didn’t really want to exclude
them, he saw the church wherever the Word of God was, wherever
the lambs, the sheep of the Shepherd were listening to the voice
of the Shepherd, even if their ears were partially turned away, as
he believed they were in much of the Roman communion.

Roman theologians saw the doctrine of the church as the key

matter in the dispute which swirled around Luther. They believed
that Christ’s church is secured by that doctrine which teaches
that the pope is truly the vicar of Christ. The unity of the church,
the institutional unity of the church had to be held together for
the preservation of Christian doctrine, they believed. Luther
found that the Scriptures, which spoke to him of justification
by grace through faith, were not being listened to in the circles
of the papacy. So fairly early in his career, he began to become

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Lesson 18 of 24 Luther’s Doctrine of the Church

disillusioned with papal leadership, and that led him fairly quickly
to doctrinally separate himself from the papacy and to render
against the papacy the harshest critique of all. He came slowly
but surely to the conviction that the papacy was the biblical man
of sin described in II Thessalonians 2, the Antichrist.

At the time of the Leipzig debate in 1519, he reluctantly came to

the conclusion that, as he said, we are Hussites all, meaning by
that that the identity of the church as the elect people of God,
as proposed by John Huss, was indeed a correct reflection of the
biblical message.

Only gradually did Luther separate himself from the papacy,

only gradually did he come to the conviction that the papacy was
the Antichrist. That idea was not new with Luther. During the
Middle Ages, any number of reformers had pointed to individual
popes, occupants of the papal see, as the Antichrist, largely on
the grounds of moral corruption. So Luther did not invent a new
critique of the papacy, but he changed its focus from the medieval
focus. No longer was the individual pope per se the problem, the
whole institution of the papacy was the problem. Luther first
was disturbed because the pope (in this case, Leo X) would not
come to the defense of the gospel, but rather let his underlings
persecute it. But that only led him to a far deeper and more far-
reaching conclusion that as constituted this institution, with this
claim that its occupant was the vicar of Christ, was a usurpation
of the place of Christ in the church, was an oppression on the one
hand of the people of God and on the other hand of God Himself.
And, therefore, because the doctrine of the papacy had created a
system, which inevitably, he believed, subverted the gospel and
replaced the Word of God with the word of human creatures, he
opposed it.

Scott Hendrix has traced the development of Luther’s gradual

progress toward this conviction that indeed the papacy is the
Antichrist. He labels the first period before October of 1517 a
period of ambivalence. We have really evidence of two sorts in
Luther’s later reflections on the papacy. At some points he claimed
that he had been an arch-papist, and at other points he recalled
earlier doubts about the papacy. It’s indeed possible that both
reflect a certain reality of Luther’s earliest period as a theologian.
Ideas of questioning papal power were indeed in the air after the
Council of Constance, at which John Huss had been burned, but
at which the bishops of the church had asserted the power of the
council.

The 15th-century papacy fought a slow, hard battle to reclaim its

role as the sole authority in the medieval Western church against

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Lesson 18 of 24 Luther’s Doctrine of the Church

the ideas that had been advanced by the conciliar movement

of the late 14th and early 15th centuries. But so far as we can
tell, we do not find in Luther any reflection of views held as a
youth or as a young theologian that particularly reflect the ideas
of that conciliar movement. He seems much more to have been
influenced by the fairly strong support of the papacy and teachers
such as Gabriel Biel, from whom he learned his theology directly
or indirectly. So it’s not unlikely that in this period that Hendrix
labels the period of ambivalence, up to October of 1517, he
sometimes expressed doubts about the way popes were running
the church (most theologians did), but he may well have been a
strong supporter of the system in general. There is no reason why
he should not have been; to think that he could have thought
otherwise is probably historically unrealistic.

With the publication of the Ninety-Five Theses at the end of

October of 1517 and through the summer of the next year is a
period which Hendrix labels the period of protest. He began this
period with a protest against the papal role in the indulgence
sale; and in the ensuing controversy, he continued to criticize this
practice sponsored by Pope Leo and thereby, at least indirectly and
sometimes more directly, papal pastoral practice very specifically.
From June to December of 1518 is a period that Hendrix labels
the period of resistance. In the second half of 1518, the attacks of
the papal theologian Perarius [Pararius?] and his own interview
with Cardinal Cajetan at Augsburg undermined his loyalty to the
papacy. The papacy was now threatening him and threatening
his message, and the papal theologians who engaged him simply
didn’t want to listen. Cardinal Cajetan told Luther that he had
come to Augsburg, not to argue theology, not to discuss the best
way to present the gospel, but simply to hear Luther say the words,
“I recant.” He wouldn’t listen.

So in 1519, Luther moved into a period which Hendrix calls the

period of Luther’s challenge to the papacy. Luther appealed
from the pope, from the papal bureaucracy, to a general council
of the church. Even at its beginnings, that appeal was probably
in Luther’s mind somewhat of an ambivalent appeal because he
believed councils could err and he was not about to submit to a
council which in his opinion spoke against the Scriptures. Already
in 1519, he was working with a theory that accorded Scripture
alone final authority in the church. He continued throughout most
of his career to appeal to a council, at the same time admitting
that under papal control a council really wouldn’t be of use, but at
any rate he challenged the sole authority of the pope around the
period of the Leipzig debate in 1519 and throughout that year, as
he questioned publicly the authority which the popes accorded to
themselves in their teaching.

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Lesson 18 of 24 Luther’s Doctrine of the Church

1520 is a period that Hendrix labels the period of opposition.

In this period, Luther confronted the papacy. He called upon
Pope Leo to change sides, to come to the side of the gospel. In
the preface which he wrote to his tract on Christian liberty, The
Freedom of the Christian, he called upon Leo to abandon the
course set for him by his advisors and to come over to the side
of the gospel. At this point, Luther was not being particularly
polite anymore, he felt the very Word of God was at stake and
he was ready to confront the papacy. The papacy was also ready
to confront him. At the end of 1520 and the beginning of 1521,
the papal bureaucracy issued the threat of condemnation and of
excommunication and then delivered on that threat in early 1521.
The papacy urged Emperor Charles V to condemn Luther as an
outlaw, and that happened in April of 1521 as he came to Worms.
So Luther became convinced the pope could not help but oppose
the gospel, trapped in the papal system as he was, so Luther came
reluctantly to the conclusion that the papacy is the Antichrist.

From 1522 to his death in 1546, Luther moved beyond conviction,

according to Hendrix’s analysis, to a period he labels persistence.
As martyrs fell under the sword of the papal persecutors, as the
theological opposition became more bitter, more pronounced,
Luther could only conclude that he had been correct in judging
the papacy the Antichrist, for it was steadfastly opposing his
proclamation of the gospel, his understanding of God’s way of
salvation. So Luther turned in steadfast opposition against the
papacy and dedicated his life in part to opposing it through his
positive proclamation of the gospel.

If the medieval doctrine of the church as the pope and the hierarchy
was not to Luther’s liking, what was his doctrine of the church?
Luther was learning already from Saint Augustine in the period
in which he lectured on the Psalms, 1513–1515, that the church
is best defined simply as the congregation, the community, of the
chosen saints of God. And as he was working his way through the
text of the Psalms, he took these texts to show again and again
that indeed God gathers His church around His Word. His Word
as it is expressed in oral and in written and in sacramental form
is that point at which the church may be identified. The church
becomes audible as the gospel is proclaimed. And slowly but
surely in the 1510s then, Luther developed his conviction that all
Christians are called to be priests. He understood the priesthood
of all believers to mean that, first of all, no one can stand between
the believer and God. He understood the biblical teaching that we
are kings and priests to mean that all believers have free access to
God, can freely approach His throne of grace through the power
of the Holy Spirit, can freely plead for forgiveness for themselves.
But in addition, Luther also understood the priesthood of believers

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Lesson 18 of 24 Luther’s Doctrine of the Church

as that bridge from God to other believers, for priests come before
the throne of God and then are sent back to bring the message of
salvation to one another.

Luther shifted his understanding of some aspects of the priesthood

of all believers very, very little. He shifted his emphasis to a
certain extent as it became more and more important to build
the institution of the pastoral ministry, as we have seen in our
discussion of Luther’s doctrine of the Word. But Luther remained
convinced that all believers are priests with free access to God,
and all believers are called to confess the faith, to bring the Word
of the Lord to one another, in ways appropriate to their station
and calling in life. Above all, Christian parents were called, Luther
was convinced, to bring the Word of the Lord to their servants and
their children in the family circle.

Luther fleshed out his understanding, his doctrine of the church,

in a number of important writings, perhaps none so important as
his 1539 treatise On the Councils and the Church. It is important
for us to look at the circumstances in which Luther composed
On the Councils and the Church. He had been contemplating a
major work on the doctrine of the church for some time. Already
in 1533, he resolved to write on the role of the councils in church
life. In 1535, he did publish a treatise on the Council of Constance
and on its role in 15th and early 16th-century church life with
some letters from John Huss edited in connection with it. When
the papacy under Paul III issued its call to council in 1536, he
responded with the Smalcald Articles, which he composed at the
end of that year or in early 1537, and resolved to write more on
the issue of the council.

The doctrine of the church and of ecclesiastical authority was

very much on the front burner, as in 1538 he produced a study of
the Apostles’ and Nicene Creed and [inaudible]. Working through
the materials prepared by the 15th-century Italian humanist
Platina and materials published by his student Robert Barnes
on the papacy (which Barnes had published in Wittenberg in
1536), Luther gathered a deeper and broader understanding of
the institutional church, of the way its life had been shaped; and
therefore in 1539, he was prepared to proceed to treat the doctrine
of the church.

Again, that orientation out of personal experience was very clear.

He addressed the existential situation which lay before him. In
the first part of On the Councils and the Church, he began with
the question of reform. The papacy cannot reform the church, he
said. As he looked forward to the council that had been called,
but had not yet been convened, he said that neither popes nor

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Lesson 18 of 24 Luther’s Doctrine of the Church

councils nor church fathers will provide reliable authority for

teaching the Word of God. “The papacy has proved itself to be a
tyrannous institution,” he wrote. “It is guilty of horrendous crimes,
both of moral turpitude and of the persecution of the gospel. The
papacy has let the church go to wrack and ruin,” Luther wrote.
“Only the authority of Scripture is necessary, and the authority
of Scripture is sufficient for governing the life of the church.” He
also believed that councils had sometimes misinterpreted the
Bible—sometimes it had contradicted biblical prescriptions for
the practice of the church—so he set aside every authority for
church life but the Scriptures. [I guessed at the placement of the
quotes—AK]

In the second part of this treatise, he looked back to the early

councils of the church, first to the Apostolic Council (described in
Acts 15) and then to the first four ecumenical Councils of Nicaea
and Constantinople, of Ephesus and Chalcedon. On the basis of
these councils of the church, he taught that councils are important
in combating the errors of Satan. They have no authority to forge
new articles of faith. They have no authority to command new
kinds of good works or impose new kinds of ceremonies. And they
ought not, they dare not, interfere with temporal government. But
the councils should strive to prevent tyranny and false teaching
in the church. They should promote and further the biblical
teaching for their own age. They should fashion the biblical
message in such a way that it opposes, contradicts, condemns the
errors of their own age. But the basic rule he taught for the life of
the church is simply that the Word of God stands forever.

Luther also described the church. He gave a picture of what he

thought the church ought to look like in this treatise On the
Councils and the Church. His basic definition was that which he
had gained 25 years earlier from Saint Augustine: The church is
as the Apostles’ Creed defines it, the communion of saints, the
community of those who are holy. He defines saints—he defined
the holy people of God—simply as those who believe in Christ,
who have the Holy Spirit. For the Holy Spirit sanctifies them, daily
makes them holy through the forgiveness of sins. The holiness
of the individual Christian, the holiness of the church consists
in the forgiveness of sins and the abolition, the purging, the
mortification of the sinful influences in daily life.

Luther and his students often spoke of the marks of the church;
and at least with later Lutherans, the marks of the church were
simply described as Word and sacraments, as the various forms
of the word in oral, in written, in sacramental expressions. But
Luther lays out seven marks of the church, and adds another
one that is not a distinctive mark of the church but necessarily

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Lesson 18 of 24 Luther’s Doctrine of the Church

accompanies the life of the church, that is, expressions of love in

the horizontal realm.

The first of Luther’s marks of the church (again, no surprise) is

the Word. He comments that not all churches, not all individual
Christians, and not all gatherings of Christians have the Word or
have a clear understanding of the Word in equal measure. But the
important thing is the Word itself. It sanctifies all that it touches.
“It is the anointment that anoints to life eternal,” Luther says
here. The presence of the Word makes the church present; for,
through the Word, God creates believers. God creates His family
and gathers His family together.

Luther says that there are four expressions or four characteristics

of the Word of God in the church. And here he is not using
the definition that I have used—the Word in oral, written, and
sacramental forms—he is really thinking of that Word that springs
from the Scripture, that is founded in the inspired Scriptures.
But he is thinking of it as it is proclaimed and practiced in the
congregation. So he says the Word is, first of all, preached; the
Word takes form in the sermon. Secondly, the Word is believed;
the Word takes form in the heart and the minds of its hearers.
Thirdly, the Word is professed or confessed; the faith of the heart
that is created by the Word cannot help but express itself in the
public confession of the faith. And finally, the Word is lived; the
Word does transform the lives of Christ’s people, and the Word is
seen reflected in their lives.

All four are necessary, and they flow in a sense in that order, one
from another. “They cannot have faith without a preacher,” Paul
wrote to the Romans, and so Luther too emphasized that the life
of the church flows from the presentation of the Word in public
proclamation, in the sharing of baptismal grace and the meal of
the Lord’s Supper. That Word as it goes forth then is heard and
believed. But believers cannot keep the secret, the children of God
can’t keep the secret; they must profess, they must confess, they
must share what God has given them. And they do that with their
lips, first of all, but then they do that also with their lives. The
Word of God transforms the lives of Christ’s people. The Word of
God, Luther said, performs every miracle. It effects and sustains
and carries out, it does everything in the church. The whole life of
the church flows from the Word of God.

The second mark of the church is baptism, Luther wrote in 1539.

Using Titus 3 and its description of the bath of regeneration that
justifies God’s people, this is God’s means of bestowing a new
identity upon the fallen children of humankind. So Luther says,
the church baptizes as it brings God’s Word to make disciples in

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Lesson 18 of 24 Luther’s Doctrine of the Church

every nation.

The third mark of the church is the Lord’s Supper. Christ has
instituted and ordered the Lord’s Supper; and the church marks
itself as the place where Christ’s family is gathered by the Father
as it celebrates this supper of God. It is valid, Luther says, as a
precious gift from God.

The fourth mark of the church, Luther taught, is that extension

of the baptismal rhythm of dying and rising, which the church
observes in both public and private confession and absolution.
Indeed, in Lutheran worship services, the public confession of the
whole people of God was observed, and the pastors were ordered
and commanded by their church constitutions to pronounce
absolution upon the confessing congregation. But Lutherans in
Luther’s time also boasted that their pastoral care was anchored
in private confession and absolution, so that tender consciences
could be brought to a stronger faith by that individually
administered word of forgiveness and freedom.

The fifth mark of the church, Luther taught, is the office of the
ministry, God’s gift to the church. Luther recognized, along with
all his contemporaries, that there was a need for order in the
church. The German phrase vinkolpraydega [?], preachers off in
a little secret corner of their own, was a concept that sent chills
up and down the spines of late medieval Christians also within
the Protestant communities. For in the medieval period there had
been these preachers who had sprung up outside the ordering
of the church and who generally represented the biblicistic,
moralistic, anticlerical, antisacramental, millenarian heresies
that nipped at the heels of the official church. So those early
Protestant reformers who came out of the medieval tradition of
church order were very suspicious of the preachers who came to
preach as traveling salesmen, we might say, without some kind
of official call from a congregation or from the authorities of
the church. And very often, from a Lutheran perspective, those
fears had been justified, for very often these unofficial preachers
had brought one form of heresy or another into the places where
Lutherans were trying to institute an evangelical reform that did
not conform to the pattern which these unofficial preachers were
preaching.

In his section on the office of the ministry, Luther includes a

long section criticizing the practice of clerical celibacy. Luther
himself had been reluctant to marry, but fairly early on in his call
for reform he recognized the damage which the oppression of the
church officials had wrought as they forbade Christian marriage
to their priests. So even in 1539, Luther sharply criticized the

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Lesson 18 of 24 Luther’s Doctrine of the Church

imposition of clerical celibacy.

The sixth mark of the church, Luther describes as its prayer, its
public praise, its thanksgiving. The public praise and thanksgiving
of the church was especially important for Luther because
it gathered the whole people of God into the community of
worshipers. God was to be at the center of this public prayer and
thanksgiving. Luther believed that as a monk he had worshiped
God, not for God’s sake but for his own sake. He had tried to use
his worship as an excuse to make himself look good in God’s
sight, and so he rejected that. He wanted public prayer and praise
to flow from the love for God, which swells up in the heart of the
believer who knows that God has done all for his or her salvation.

Luther also included in this mark of prayer and praise and

thanksgiving the necessity of Christian instruction. Because the
catechism was so important in his own plan for the reform of the
church, it is just natural that he included it here. The church must
be marked not only by its worship but also by its instruction, for it
must bring to all believers a clear sense of the demands of God and
the law which point out to us that we cannot on our own—on our
own merit, by our own reason or strength—believe in Jesus Christ
or come to Him. And then the church must instruct its young and
its old in the gospel of Jesus Christ, teaching that justification
which frees us from all worry about our own sinfulness and about
the shadow of our own death, so that we may be liberated to
accept the bonds that tie us to the neighbor’s need.

The seventh of Luther’s marks of the church he labeled the cross.

And he summarized the cross as every kind of misfortune and
persecution which falls upon believers. Believers will inevitably
stand under the cross. This is a reflection of Luther’s theology
of the cross, particularly of that fourth point in our outline of it
which labeled the Christian life a life of daily taking up the cross
and bearing it for the sake of the Lord and for the sake of the
neighbor. Here Luther views the cross as those trials that are
imposed by the devil and the world and our flesh. These trials
include our inward melancholy and despair (trials that Luther
was more than familiar with), all our fears that plague our souls.
There were also outward trials: the trials of poverty and the
contempt of others and illness itself. But above all, the church is
marked by persecution, for Luther believed that the true church
of God, the true people of God, is but a remnant in this world. He
believed that the mighty structures of the official church would
always be tempted simply by their institutional nature to turn to
self-defense and self-preservation at the cost of the gospel. So he
believed that within that church, that institutional church, there
would always have to be but a small remnant of the people of

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Lesson 18 of 24 Luther’s Doctrine of the Church

God; and he expected that that small remnant of the people of

God would frequently be persecuted. Some of his most beautiful
expressions of what it means to be the church come in those few
letters that he wrote celebrating God’s gift of martyrdom to some
of his followers. Indeed, Luther was a little bit different in his
treatment of martyrdom than many of his contemporaries, for he
saw martyrdom as both a tool of Satan to drive the gospel from the
church and also a gift of God, which highlighted how precious the
gospel truly is. And he believed that, again, this gift of martyrdom
could be the devil’s rod but God’s staff as well.

In the cross, in misfortune, in persecution, Christians become

more and more like their head, the head of the body of the church,
Jesus Christ. They do not bear the cross as a sacrifice for sin, they
do not have their own crosses in any way that contributes to their
own salvation to be sure, but in the cross they are like Christ in
that they meet the neighbor’s need through suffering.

In this treatise, On the Councils and the Church, these seven

marks really for Luther define what the church is to expect, what
the church is to be, what the church is to project as God’s agency
in this world. But the church also has an eighth mark, which is
not unique, which is not distinctive, and therefore, which is not
in the narrow sense a mark of the church, and that is the practice
of human love. Christians practice, according to their callings,
according to the Ten Commandments, the love of Christ. Pagans
also love, and that is why Luther was a little bit reluctant to say
that love is a mark of the church. Love is not only a mark of the
individual Christian life, according to Luther, indeed the whole
congregation of his people as a unit also demonstrate the love
of God as they reach into the neighbor’s lives, both the lives of
believers and of unbelievers, by works of charity of all kinds.

This is the picture, then, that Luther sketches of the church. The
people of God gathered to do His will around His Word, under
the power of His Word, as it is expressed in preaching and in the
faith of the people, as it is expressed in baptism and the Lord’s
Supper, in private and public confession and absolution, in the
pastoral office, in public prayer and praise and thanksgiving and
instruction, and in the cross. And as these Christians who are
marked by these seven elements go about their business together,
they will reflect the love of God in Christ Jesus into their world.

Shortly after he had written this treatise, he wrote a rather

polemical treatise against a prince, Prince Heinrich of Braunsheid
Wolfenbiddle [?], one of the most formidable opponents among
the German princes, a genuine persecutor of Luther’s cause and
reformation, although it is suggested that he became at least

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Lesson 18 of 24 Luther’s Doctrine of the Church

somewhat reconciled with Luther’s message and reformation

on his deathbed. Luther wrote against Heinrich of Braunsheid
Wolfenbiddle in a rather scurrilous tract entitled Against Hans
Wurst (Against John Sausage). In this tract that is better forgotten
for much of its content, he again lists marks of the church,
repeating those marks of the church that he had laid out in On the
Councils and the Church, but adding a few more. He begins where
the Holy Spirit begins in the Christian life. His list here begins not
with the preached Word but with baptism. He adds to the marks
of the Word as preached and the holy ministry, that the church is
marked by the Apostles’ Creed, the church confesses one faith.
He singles out the Lord’s Prayer as the kind of archetype of the
whole life of praise and thanksgiving. These two elements of the
catechism may also point to the fact that Luther was reinforcing
his understanding that the teaching of the centrality of prayer
and of God’s revelation of Himself as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit
also stands at the heart of the church’s identification of itself.

The church is also marked, Luther says in Against Hans Wurst,

by its upholding of the temporal powers. Luther was very proud
of himself that he had supported temporal government at the
same time the papacy was always trying to dominate it. Luther
also said the church is marked by the exaltation and the support
of Christian marriage, practiced according to God’s design. The
papacy, on the other hand, had suppressed marriage, made it of
lesser worth by forbidding it to the most important people in the
medieval church, the clergy. And Luther said the church is not
only marked by the cross it suffers but also by its rejection of
[and?] persecution of any and all of its enemies.

In conclusion, we might observe also that we have said almost

nothing here about questions of church polity, about the form
of the church. Luther was quite indifferent to the form of the
church. He spoke of congregational leadership and congregational
responsibility for the life of the local congregation. He also
ordained one of his close friends, Nicholas von Omsdorf, as a
bishop, as a successor to a medieval bishop. As a matter of fact,
he worked within a church that lay outside the control of the
medieval bishops who continued to hold their posts in much of
Germany, governing the church through the agency of princely
government (which he labeled an emergency bishop) and largely
directly by, in the case of his own Saxony, by the theological
faculty at the University of Wittenberg. Luther was convinced
that there is no guarantee of the gospel in any particular form of
the church. Only the gospel could restore the gospel. And so the
church as an institution must continue to repent.

So Luther saw the people of God, not so much as an institution

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Lesson 18 of 24 Luther’s Doctrine of the Church

(though he believed institutional forms were absolutely necessary),

but instead he saw the people of God as a remnant, persecuted
and under the cross. His survey of the history of the church saw
Satan always attacking the church with heresy, with doubt, with
persecution, but he saw the history of the church as the history
of God’s remaining faithful to His people as He regathered them,
as He restored the Word to them (as He was doing, for instance,
through Luther Himself).

For Martin Luther, the church of God is simply sheep listening

to the Shepherd. His ecclesiology is an ecclesiology of Jesus
Christ gathering His people. His ecclesiology is a doctrine of the
church which emphasizes the speaking of the Word of God and
that call of that Word to the whole people of God, individuals and
as congregation. The call to repentance so that the Word may be
repeated again, so that the gospel may go forth to continue to
build, to edify, to preserve the people of God as God’s children
singing His praises and proclaiming that Word.

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Transcript - CH509 The Theology of Martin Luther  12 of 12

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