Thursday, April 21, 2022

David P. Scaer (Lutheran) on Baptism as a Fundamental Doctrine in the Lutheran Tradition

  

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)