The Christian Faith we practice is a gift from God. It is sacred. It is Holy. We Baptise, confirm, live, and bury our dead in this faith. This is the “one holy, catholic, and apostolic” faith which our Lord Jesus Christ has once and for all delivered to the saints, and which the gates of Hell will never overcome. Christian faith is not for us to define, but for us to accept from the Lord who gave it to us. Christ defines our faith. At Trinity we are “Confessional Lutherans” that means that we can tell you what we believe, teach, and confess. Those beliefs come only from the Holy Scriptures, and are described faithfully in a collection of writings that we call the Confessions of the Lutheran Church, compiled in the Book of Concord. This faith is the “Faith Alone” of the reformation. Sadly, in recent years, as we look at Christianity in America, we have seen that faith abandoned piece by piece. From the unwillingness to confess the scriptures as inerrant and bindingly so, which led to our leaving the ELCA, to a new phenomenon of stepping away from the confessions of our faith, particularly the Nicene Creed that we have always confessed. It has become common in recent years for theologically liberal denominations to either officially remove, or to permit the use of the Nicene Creed, omitting the part which confesses that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son.
Lutherans have always and only ever confessed the Nicene Creed in the form which we do today here at Trinity. The proper name of this Creed is the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed; a name derived from the two councils where the creed was formulated and adopted. Our Lutheran Confessions bind us to the three Ecumenical Creeds, the Apostle’s, the Nicene, and the Athanasian Creeds. Both the Nicene and Athanasian Creeds teach the Procession of the Holy Spirit from both the Father and the Son as necessary articles of Christian faith. The matters of the Lutheran confessions are the same as those of scripture. They are not open to our modification. Things are only sacred when they cannot be manipulated. Who would be ok with mistreating our sanctuary, let alone the confession of faith that led to its construction?
I point this out to you because this matter, the degradation of this Holy Faith continues today as it has in recent years. Your Pastors and leaders here at Trinity are committed to preserving these Holy Things, the Scriptures
and Confessions of our Faith, to the very end. I encourage you to pray for Christ’s Church throughout the world as we stand firm together in the faith once and for all handed down to the Saints, in our day, those Saints
are you and me.
In Christ,
