Dr. Eric W. Gritsch

The Challenge: 

Although Martin Luther lived and taught 500 years ago in Germany, his name still invokes to us to remember that the Church of Jesus Christ is in need of continuing reformation.  His movement not only had impact on the Church of his time, but on culture in general – business, politics, education, language, and science. 
Change does not come without difficulties.  Luther and his followers encountered many, but he reminded us that where Christ is, there He always goes against the flow.

Today we are living in confusing and frustrating times which are also significant achievements in our society.  You are challenged to consider the role of the church people in this current period.  By searching the words of Luther and the scholar, Eric W. Gritsch, present two possible paths as we participate in the coming Reformation always keeping in mind that Christians are people of HOPE. 

In fact, Eric Gritsch considered this four-letter word the strongest one in our language!

Shane R. Brinegar
Gritsch Writing Contest 2016

1st Place  

The Lutheran Sacramental Principle and the Public Witness of the Church In The Future 

     As we approach the 500^th anniversary of the Reformation and reflect on what it means to be “people of hope” in a “reformational church” today there are two  key aspects of Luther’s sacramental theology that will serve to strengthen our public witness as the body of Christ in the world.  In his groundbreaking treatise, The Babylonian Captivity Of The Church (1520) the Wittenburg reformer challenges the works righteousness of late Medieval monasticism and recovers

the centrality of the sacrament of baptism in the daily life of the Christian.  Luther writes, “Vows should either be abolished by general edict, especially those taken for life, and all men recalled to the vows of baptism, or else anyone should be diligently warned not to take a vow rashly.  No one should be encouraged to do so;  indeed, permission should only be given with difficulty and reluctance.  For we have vowed enough in baptism, more than we can ever fulfill;  if give ourselves over to the keeping of this one vow, we shall have all we can do.”[1]  In these words, the reformer affirmed that all Christians are all of equal dignity and rank by virtue of their baptism and that all vocations are a holy calling.  Since baptism

is the primary sacrament the work of a janitor or bus driver is just as holy as living a monastic life.  In fact, the vocation of the janitor or a bus driver because in their daily work they are serving the neighbor rather than cloistering themselves off from the neighbor.  Commenting on the revolutionary nature of Luther’s recovery of a baptismal spirituality that Gritsch and Jenson observe, “the entire Christian life is clothed in the garment of baptism – a penitential struggle between good and evil.”[2]  This struggle between good and evil, the continual process of dying and rising in Christ is not simply about the internal moral and ethical struggle of the individual believer, instead the baptismal life is about tuning outwards to the suffering neighbor and bearing a word of a hope to the marginalized in our midst. 

It is because of Christ’s gift to us in baptism that we are set free to serve the needy ones in our midst.  We sinful, needy, and undeserving as we are have been claimed by Christ in this sacrament and given the promise of forgiveness, mercy, life, and salvation.  Having been washed in word and in water, we are now free to serve others in word and in deed.  The recovery of Luther’s baptismal spirituality in renewed liturgical practices and our catechesis and preaching will aid in the renewal of our sense of mission in the world.

     The second aspect of Luther’s sacramental theology that will renew our sense of church at work in the world is his Eucharistic ethic.  In his 1519 treatise, The Blessed Sacrament of the Holy and True Body of Christ and the Brotherhoods (1519), Martin Luther might give us a glimpse of what it means to be a public church in the world today. The reformer writes 

When you have partaken of this sacrament…..you must in turn share the misfortunes of the fellowship as has been said.  But what are these?  Christ in heaven and the angels, together with the saints have no misfortunes, except when injury is done to the truth and to the word of God.  Indeed, as we have said, every bane and blessing of all of the saints on earth affects them. 

Here you heart must go out in love and learn that this is a sacrament of love.  As love and support are given you, you must in turn render love and support to Christ in his needy ones.  You must feel with sorrow all the dishonor done to Christ in his holy word, all the misery of Christendom, all the unjust suffering of the innocent, with which the world is everywhere filled to overflowing. You must fight, work, play and-if you cannot do more have heartfelt sympathy.  See, this is what it means to bear in your turn the misfortune and adversary of Christ and his saints.[3] 

     In these words, the Wittenburg professor reminds us that the sacrament of the Eucharist is a profoundly sharing in the free gifts of Christ’s body and blood for the forgiveness of sins, life, and salvation.  The communal reception of these gifts, free as they are, has profound ethical implications as we see ourselves as the body of Christ to each other and the body of Christ in the

world.  By receiving the sacrament, we are grafted to Christ and grafted to our suffering neighbor in the assembly.  As a sacramentally grafted under the cross, we are called to bear each other’s burdens as sisters and brothers in Christ recognizing our need for one another , our need for the mercy of God, and the need for our sinful, absorbed agendas to be slain under the cross of Christ.  It is by and  under the cross of Christ that we are freed and called as public church to serve our neighbors outside and on the margins of our liturgical assemblies.  Called to feed the hungry, strive for justice and equality, stand with those on the margins in solidarity and protest, and testify to the in-breaking of God’s kingdom in our midst.  However, in our work and witness to the coming of God’s reign, we must constantly return to the sacramental sign and presence of Christ’s body and blood and His cross so that we are continually slain and reminded that it is only by God’s mercy and in spite of our self-centeredness that God uses us as agents and grace in the world.  An ecclesial life rooted in this cross-shaped vision will enable us

to provide an alternative word of mercy to the morality that pervades much of American Christianity.  As Gritsch asserts, “Fundamentalism and/or American evangelical Christians developed a primitive, naïve moral uniformity based on the principal biblical inerrancy.  It is well illustrated in the selection of passages suited for the favorite fundamentalist sins, whether

abortion, homosexuality or other “evils” condemned in the Bible. If every word in the Bible were authoritative, the manger in which Jesus was born would be a divinely mandated place of birth!  Is this uniformity at the price of liberty?”[4]  In response to Biblicalism, moralism, and legalism, the Lutheran sacramental principle and its continued renewal can offer the reformational tradition an ecclesial vision of hope for the future.