Frank Senn: "I'll Stay Here, Where I Stand"

A growing number of distinguished Protestants and theologians and pastors are entering into full communion with the Catholic Church -- particularly Anglicans and Lutherans. As recently noted, Dwight Longenecker, a former Anglican priest, was recently ordained to the Catholic deaconate, and Al Kimel, also a former Anglican priest, was recently ordained to the Catholic priesthood.

As to Lutherans, we have also noted the reception of Rev. Phillip Max Johnson, former Senior (head) of the Lutheran Society of the Holy Trinity, into the Catholic Church this past summer, and in March we posted an article on the reception into the Church of Leonard Klein (former editor of the Lutheran Forum) in 2003. Last July we posted an article on Lutheran theologian, Carl E. Braaten's open letter to ELCA Bishop Mark Hanson about Lutheran converts & the ELCA "brain drain".

Now Richard J. Neuhaus, himself a convert from Lutheranism, observes that the growing number of Lutheran theologians and pastors swimming the Tiber has provoked Frank Senn, himself a distinguished scholar, pastor in ELCA Lutheranism, and head of the Society of the Holy Trinity, to write a piece (he doesn't say where) entitled "I'll Stay Here, Where I Stand." Neuhaus writes:

He is particularly disappointed that Phillip Max Johnson, the head of the Society of the Holy Trinity, a group of "evangelical catholic" Lutheran pastors, has become Catholic. Senn succeeded Johnson as the leader of the society and wants it understood that he's not going to follow his bad example. He takes aim at the conventional wisdom among evangelical catholics that Lutheranism was originally not intended as a separate church but as a reforming movement within the one Church of Christ. I admit that that is the understanding of Lutheranism that I, as a Lutheran, did more than my share to advance. Senn writes: "Of course Lutheranism was a reform movement in the 1520s. But then it produced a confession of faith in 1530 that was adopted by the churches in some territories. At that point churches became Lutheran. Within the Holy Roman Empire these churches attained equal ecclesiastical status with the papal church in the Peace of Augsburg in 1555. One by one the churches of other lands adopted the Lutheran Confession of Augsburg and reorganized themselves accordingly. This reform of the church of the city, territory, or land was initiated by decisions of city councils, at the instigation of princes and kings, and sometimes by a decision of the church itself -- as when the Church of Sweden adopted the Augsburg Confession in 1593 against the Catholic confession of its king, Sigismund II Vasa. We contemporary Lutherans have not come out of a movement. We have come out of the churches that were the Catholic Church of their place." That is a nice touch, that Lutheranism was established "sometimes by a decision of the church itself." Senn concludes: "My concern to be faithful to my ordination vows does not depend on the faithfulness of my church to its confessions. I have the ministerium that is the Society of the Holy Trinity to support me in remaining faithful. And in my congregation, at least, I don't have to fight a cultural battle to raise the level of liturgical music, such as several former Lutheran pastors have experienced in Roman Catholic parishes. That's got to be some benefit of this decision!" The whack at Catholic music is fair enough.

But then comes the more substantive reflection and coda of Neuhaus himself:

As for the larger argument, it is true that Lutheranism was politically established as "the church" in various principalities. What importance that has in the theological reflection on ecclesiology, however, is far from evident. In Catholic Matters and elsewhere, I have written about the problems inherent in trying to maintain "catholic enclaves" of parish and associations within ecclesial communities that are set upon being permanently separated Protestant denominations. I have no doubt about the sincerity of Pastor Senn and others similarly situated. In many cases, family and other obligations quite rightly enter into their reflections about whether or not to become Catholic. But, as Dominus Iesus, the 2000 statement of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, makes clear, it really will not do to claim that what Lutherans -- or Anglicans, Presbyterians, Methodists, et al. -- mean by church is theologically symmetrical with what Catholics mean by the Church. As Cardinal Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict) pointed out to Protestant critics of Dominus Iesus, they should not complain when the Catholic Church agrees with them that they do not and should not claim to be the Church in the same way that the Catholic Church claims to be the Church. (In these discussions, the Orthodox Church is quite another matter.) For Pastor Senn and others, declining to become Catholic should not be justified by implausibly elevating the ecclesiological status of a reforming movement that transmogrified in some places into established churches but by addressing -- and, if so convinced, attempting to refute -- the ecclesiological claims of the Catholic Church.

[Acknowledgements: Neuhaus quote from a single paragraph in First Things (December 2006), p.68f.)