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Notes -
What does that mean, in this context?
A Lutheran belonging to a body which split from the main Lutheran body in his country over the belief that that body doesn’t embrace the Augsburg confession anymore. In the USA the main such body would be the Missouri synod, very common in intellectual conservative circles and big enough to be locally dominant in some areas- but all the self proclaimed confessional Protestants here seem to be reformed.
Missouri Synod Lutheran here. I do think I'm the only one on here, and I never post so it barely counts. Still, there's at least one.
Awareness of the confessional/mainline distinction is basically zero among non-churchgoing people that I've met in real life. Unfortunately, laypeople I meet sometimes hear "Lutheran" and think "ELCA."
I will say LCMS Twitter is surprisingly lively.
This is WELS erasure 😁
I only became aware of the various denominational splits years back when observing the Anglican Wars as they played out in TEC. As a Roman Catholic European outsider, it was fascinating to get any kind of look at American mainline Protestantism and how it tended to split along various lines.
How fascinating that you've even heard of WELS over there! I respect WELS. If it had more presence in my area, I might have ended up going there.
It is crazy how every flavor of Protestantism now has a mainline vs. confessional or evangelical division here. PCA/PCUSA, ELCA/LCMS (and WELS), UMC/GMC (which goes far beyond America); hours of Wikipedia article reading are available to the interested.
Lutherans talk casually about how in America, the big split was ultimately between "German Lutherans" who went to the LCMS, and "Scandi Lutherans" who eventually formed the ELCA; and about how each group's cultural personality informed the direction of their theology. Of course it's much more complicated than that, but there's an element of truth in it.
Ah, interesting. When I was writing my post about the meaning of the term "Evangelical" in Lutheran circles, I actually hypothesized that the split between the ELCA and the confessional churches had something to do with the German vs Scandinavian split, but it's interesting that I was actually on to something.
My great-great grandmother had a copy of Walther's hymnal, in the German of course, which is now in my possession. My mother often tells me the family story about her praying in German. The other family story about her German ancestry consists of her fastidiously sweeping the floor while her husband, a full-blood Scots-Irish good old boy, spat tobacco on the porch. But Lutheranism in my family was wiped out a few generations ago in favor of generic American evangelicalism, or Holiness Pentecostalism.
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Awareness of that distinction was pretty close to zero for me as a churchgoer growing up.
I think a lot about how much agency it requires to go hunting for the denomination you find the soundest or best, as opposed to just going to the church nearest your house, or that your family goes to. Because as you note, one really has to go out of their way to understand this stuff. Not that it's difficult - just that it's very opaque unless you happen to be a real nerd about the subject.
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I actually had to look up the Lutheran church I grew up attending... Evangelical Lutheran, apparently (which is, confusingly enough, not "evangelical"?)
All I know is, the pastor was insistent that nobody bring lutefisk to the smorgasbord, which always disappointed my grandmother. Dunno where that falls ecumenically.
In Lutheran circles, "evangelical" means "believes in the gospel according to Luther's understanding of the gospel," or in other words believe in salvation by faith alone. Luther originally wanted his followers to be called "evangelicals" becaue he believed that his understanding of the gospel, evangelion, was the most important element of his theology. By this definition virtually all protestants are "evangelicals," roughly speaking, and it has that meaning in some of the northern European countries where Lutheranism became the normative version of Protestantism.
The term has come to mean different things in the British and US context because of the history of great revivals with the goal of convincing mass numbers of people to have an emotional experience of surrender to the divine, which was central to their understanding of the gospel in a way that Lutherans/Calvinists/Catholics generally connected to sacraments rather than conversion experiences. Evangelicals (in that sense) also strongly defined themselves as popular preachers who wanted to make large numbers of people have a conversion experience, and felt that naming themselves after the evangelion was worthwhile because that was their message. You could make the argument that Anglo-American evangelicals were also evangelicals in the sense Luther would have meant it, but they just shouted it really, really loudly.
In that sense, Methodism, Pentecostalism, and most forms of the Baptists had major evangelical influences, and you can still find some Anglicans in the UK (a few) and the US (a few more) who would identify with the evangelical movement.
The "Lutheran" term came about because the common Catholic custom was to call a heresy by the name of its inventor, as in Arianism, Hussitism, Calvinism, and also the old-fashioned Christian term for Islam that hydro likes to use, Mohammedanism.
I guess the lesson is that the terms people call themselves rarely denote something concrete. "Democrat" and "Republican?" Their dispute isn't really over whether the US should be a democracy or a republic, though some particularly confused and pedantic Republicans like to claim "the us isn't a democracy, it's a republic!" like those aren't compatible, and the US is of course a Federal Democratic Republic and those terms lent their names to the first American party system (Federalists vs Democratic-Republicans) and to the current party system, while "Democratic Republic" on its own means communist, and "The Democratic Republic of America" is basically the "Man in the High Castle" of conservative fear fantasies. We live in a confusing world, and whales are fish.
Never in a million years would I have expected the word 'evangelion' to be brought up in such a context here or any other place. It's Old Greek supposedly?
Yeah, it's basically the roots eu- (good), angelion (message.) Shares a root with angels, who are the messengers of God.
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Presumably it means, “Lutheran, with conservative theology,” or in other words a Lutheran who believes in the real presence as a literal metaphysical belief and takes the Augsburg confession as a literal statement of truth about reality.
Though I’m not sure it’s true we don’t have any. I know we have some confessional Protestants who have positive views of Lutheran scholasticism. Presumably at least one of those is a Lutheran.
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