“Confirmation and Extreme Unction are rites received from the Fathers which not even the Church requires as necessary to salvation, because they do not have God’s command. Therefore it is not useless to distinguish these rites from the former, which have God’s express command and have God’s clear promise of grace.”

Here Philip Melanchthon says that confirmation is not commanded in the Bible. So where are you getting your information on Lutheranism, Frank? This is going to be very hard if you are calling us to defend views that not only are not ours, but are contrary to what we have written.

One thing to know about us. We are a confessional body. We are bound to our confessions. Not to our dogmaticians and theologians, and not to Luther himself. (Except where he wrote the confessions and we’ve subscribed to them. Or is quoted in them.)

[1] baptized into Christ
[2] preached to as if lost
[3] united to the church by confession in confirmation”

No it doesn’t go like that.

Rather:
[1] baptized into Christ
[2] preached to as if a member of the congregation. That is, Law and Gospel sermons like everyone else gets.
[3] They are united to the church by baptism, if we mean this theologically. Confirmation is a churchly rite whereby a person receives certain privileges of church membership. But these are the man-made privileges, not the God-given ones. So we have a man-made rite to receive man-made privileges.

Communion privileges are often given at confirmation, but some pastors will give those earlier upon the child showing some understanding of what communion is.

Great recommendation, Forde’s book, ‘Where God meets Man’. (when I get up there, wherever there is, I’m going to look up Forde)

I too am an ELCA Lutheran. While there are many things that I do not agree with that come from our synodical leadership, the openess and freedom that comes from our doctrine of the Word is an inexplicable joy.

Sorry for the late response.

In addition to John’s pastor, I’ve got to tell you that I have never heard better law/gospel preacing than from my pastor, Pastor Mark Anderson.

We aren’t very adept at keeping up with all the larest technologies but we are slowly coming around at lightofthemaster.com
There are sermons and short articles by p. Anderson on the site.

If you have trouble getting to the site, there is a link on my blog ‘the old Adam lives’.

I’ll have to check out Tim Keller’s sermons. I may have heard him before (I’m getting old – or at least my brain is).

Some of my friends had me to listen to some sermons that they said were great law/gospel sermons,(a couple were pretty good) but often the gospel was followed up by the law again, and what was given by the right hand was taken away by the left, leaving you once again to your own devices.

How do we explain these wacky paradoxical viewpoints? Certainly, we can dive into a long theological excurses, systematically arguing each point. But, no matter how concise or convincing, there will always be a rebuttal from the gentle person on the other side of the aisle.

I like to explain it more simplistically: “God comes to me.”
- God comes to me in the Word…in the water…in the wine…in Emanuel. And the tension is that God comes to me “First,” with Grace…even though I don’t deserve it…didn’t earn it…or do something to get it.

As an ELCA Lutheran, it is this “tension of opposites” that uniquely equips me to be in fellowship with other Christians even though we have theological disagreements. No baptized believer is kept from the communion rail or told they can’t become a member of our church. It matters not whether they were splashed as an infant or drowned as an adult.

A “must read” for all Lutherans wanting to see this tension in a different light is Gerhard O. Forde’s Where God Meets Man.

PAX

It’s funny; I read through John Piper’s latest sermon manuscript earlier today (Colossians 2:11-15 as an argument for credobaptism/against paedobaptism), and I oddly found myself confirmed even more in my Reformed-paedobaptist beliefs.

But you don’t do that, and even Luther wouldn’t do that. So what you mean has the problem of somehow explaining what you do.

The Baptist version — Luther’s scorn all noted — looks like this:

[1] preach to the lost
[2] those called will come
[3] baptized into Christ
[4] united with the church

The paedo view you espouse goes like this:

[1] baptized into Christ
[2] preached to as if lost
[3] united to the church by confession in confirmation

And I dare you to find confirmation in the NT.

The lost — those not baptized as infants — have a different path, even if it is a Christ-centered path as you describe it.

So you can rattle your systematic sword against us “annabaptists”, but it rattles because the workmanship is worn out of it.

I think – from very little observation – is that the main difference between Lutherans and other groups, is that they are happier to allow scriptural paradoxes to lie where they fall, rather than attempt to wrestle things towards one or other extreme. This certainly seems to be the case with some of the language and arguments used with baptism from Baptists.

Disclaimer – I attend a Baptist Church. This issue became a hot button one for me when there was a vote (successful) to stop people who had not been baptised as adults from becoming members of the church. In fairness there were legal complications, as Baptist churches in the UK are set up as mutually owned trusts with constitutions that are virtually set in stone. However, I did think it sent the wrong message, especially as the church we work with most is the local evangelical Anglican church.

Who would you recommend in terms of getting law/gospel correct in sermons? Generally I’ve found Tim Keller quite helpful – as Jesus always shows up at the end of his sermons