Nicholas Hunnius was the first of
many seventeenth-century Lutheran theologians to draw a distinction between
fundamental and non-fundamental doctrines. He further divided the fundamental
doctrines into primary and secondary ones. Robert D. Preus points out that
these distinctions, “arbitrarily worked out, tended, regrettably and
unintentionally, to obscure the articles of faith” (The Theology of
Post-Reformation Lutheranism, vol. 1 [St. Louis: Concordia Publishing
House, 1970], 147). Pieper places Baptism among the secondary fundamental
articles of faith, and so allows for the Gospel to be operative in the lives of
children in Reformed denominations. As helpful as the distinction might be, it
obscures the fact that where the sacraments are absent, there the presence of
Christ is curtailed, and so the church can be neither created nor nourished by
the sacraments. Luther does not know of this distinction, and Pieper may be
less than fully satisfied with it, as he does not include the word “secondary”
in the following sentence: “Hence the doctrines of Baptism and the Lord’s
Supper are fundamental doctrines” (Christian Dogmatics 1:85). (David P.
Scaer, Baptism [Confessional Lutheran Dogmatics 11; St. Louis, Miss.:
The Luther Academy, 1999], 157 n. 1)
