http://www.cls.org.tw/lib/logia/Journals/04-4%20Sa sse.pdf

Most of you have probably read the fine Logia issue linked above cover to cover. Pretty much any questions I have had in the past about the trajectory of contemporary Missouri theology were definitively answered in these pages. In short, we are no longer strictly the synod of Pieper, but also of Sasse.

Norman Nagel answered my question about the dismissal. Yes, it’s different now. The 1539 Saxon liturgy read:

“The body of Lord Jesus Christ, given into death for you, strengthen and preserve you in the faith to eternal life, amen.
“The blood of our dear Lord Jesus Christ shed for your sin, strengthen and preserve you in true [recht] faith to eternal life, amen.”

The Sasse-inspired 1973 LCA dismissal, from which our contemporary dismissal comes, reads instead: “The body of our Lord Jesus Christ and His precious blood strengthen and preserve you in body and soul to life eternal.”

The change came about due to Sasse’s study of doctrinal and liturgical history, following Lietzmann’s “Messe und Herrenmahl” of 1926. Ignatius of Antioch had confessed the sanctifying property of the body and blood, which had come through early Christian liturgies via John 6. Nagel quotes Luther in the LC and FC SD VII’s approval of Ignatius to identify this as also the correct confessional view. Sasse had a dim view of the progression of Aristotelian Lutheran orthodoxy, which led by Hollaz’s day to “a view of the sacrament any Calvinist could accept.” Hence, the rectification of the dismissal in our own day. This also explains why one can hear the claim that we are more confessional now than at any point since 1580.

Pieper, of course, followed the course set by Lutheran scholasticism, which Sasse claims was problematic even in Pieper’s day. Elert and Schlink had the compelling answers for contemporary Lutheranism, not Pieper. Pieper did not have the same views on the sacrament, the church, and inerrancy as Sasse and the German Lutherans. Hence, at Bad Boll and beyond, Missouri was won over by the intellectual force of the contemporary German theologians. It is still an uneasy balance, as Sasse predominates in the above differences among confessional theologians today.

Sieck and the other CSL professors who balked (but acquiesced) to Sasse teaching there based this on his pessimism and the above listed theological differences. What’s interesting about Nagel’s article is that there is no reflection on why the Saxon dismissal reads as it does. Here the emphasis, as in the early LCMS, is on faith as strengthened and preserved through the pledge and seal of the body and blood given for the world’s forgiveness and salvation. The body and blood are a Testament, as Chemnitz’s definitive book on the Supper states over and over. And so Nagel’s quotes of Ignatius et al. can be read in a Lutheran sense, as medicine of immortality, but also in a catholic Sasseian sense as “eating the flesh in the sacrament forgives sins and raises you to eternal life by virtue of the flesh.”

One way that Nagel/Sasse come to this view as confessional is through select approving quotes in the LC and SD. But this is akin to reading the approving quote of the Wittenberg Concord in SD VII and not realizing that there is a Bucerian and a Lutheran reading of the WC. Similarly, Melanchthon is not defending transubstantiation when he approves of the Roman and Greek understandings of the Real Presence in the Apology. Rather, it is part of a larger, longer argument. An argument with ultimately different conclusions.

As the 1995 Logia shows, the legacy and theology of Hermann Sasse shaped and continues to shape the views of the confessional wing of the LCMS today. I would have to revise my earlier statement that Pieper is the most influential theologian of the 20th century. Pieper is the culmination of orthodox LCMS Lutheranism. Sasse, however, reigns as the 20th century Lutheran theologian who guides our confessional thinking today.