A student stopped me after a conversation about churches and asked which Lutheran church he ought to visit. Then he added, "They're all pretty much the same, right?"
They are not. And in this town that isn't a technicality, because all three of the major American Lutheran bodies have a congregation here.
Three synods, three different answers
The Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod holds to biblical inerrancy, subscribes the historic Lutheran confessions without reservation, does not ordain women, and practices closed communion. The Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod is stricter still — it does not practice prayer fellowship across denominational lines, does not ordain women, and holds the same closed table. The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America is a mainline body. It subscribes the same confessions, but reads them more as historic witnesses than as binding norms, permits a range of critical approaches to Scripture and generally does not hold inerrancy, ordains women and LGBTQ clergy, communes openly, and is in full communion with several other mainline denominations.
So when somebody tells you they're Lutheran, the kind thing to do is ask which kind. It's not a gotcha. The three bodies would tell you themselves that they differ, and the deepest difference between them is the one this whole series keeps circling: what stands over what.
Where they're closer to us than almost anybody
Let me say this before I say anything else, because it's the biggest true thing in the post.
On the one question the entire thing hangs on — how a guilty sinner gets right with a holy God — a confessional Lutheran and I are saying the same sentence. Grace alone. Faith alone. On account of Christ alone. Works follow justification necessarily and contribute exactly nothing to it. Luther called it the doctrine on which the church stands or falls, and he was right, and there is no evangelical alive who hasn't been fed by somebody in that stream whether he knows it or not. Some of the clearest sentences ever written about a guilty conscience came out of that tradition.
Add to that the Trinity, the incarnation, the virgin birth, the bodily resurrection, the return of Christ, and — in the LCMS and WELS — a full-throated doctrine of an inerrant Bible. And add the Lutheran doctrine of vocation, which says the man running a line at the plant and the woman raising four kids are doing holy work, not second-tier work. In a county where most people work with their hands, that is a better word than most of us preach.
The Book of Concord
Lutherans hold sola scriptura — Scripture is the sole source and norm of doctrine. Alongside it they subscribe the Book of Concord of 1580: the Augsburg Confession and its Apology, the Small and Large Catechisms, the Smalcald Articles, and the Formula of Concord. LCMS and WELS pastors subscribe quia — "because" the confessions agree with Scripture, an unconditional subscription. Others subscribe quatenus, "insofar as" they agree, which is a much looser knot.
A Lutheran would push back on me here, and it's a fair push. He'd say every church has a tradition; his is written down where you can check it against the Bible, and mine is unwritten and therefore unaccountable. That lands. So we publish what we believe too. The difference is where it sits. Nothing stands over the text. If our statement and the Scripture ever disagree, the statement moves, and it moves that week. The Bereans searched the Scriptures daily to see whether the preaching was so, Acts 17:11, and they were commended for it — not for checking the preacher against a document, but against the Word.
Baptism, and what Lutherans do not teach
This is the sharpest single difference between us, and it's also the one most often described wrong by people in my own tradition. So let me state it the way a Lutheran pastor would.
Lutherans baptize infants, and they hold that baptism is regenerative — that in it God actually works forgiveness of sins, delivers from death and the devil, and gives eternal salvation. But they are emphatic about why. It is not the water that does it. It is the Word of God joined to the water, and the faith that trusts that Word. Baptism is God's act on a passive recipient, which is precisely the reason an infant is a fitting candidate — the baby brings nothing, contributes nothing, and cooperates in nothing, and neither do you. Baptism is not a work you perform for God. It's the opposite of a work.
Two more things people get wrong. Lutherans do not teach that an unbaptized person is automatically damned; the historic language is about contempt for the sacrament, not the mere absence of it. And they do not teach that a baptismal certificate saves a man who has walked away — baptism is to be lived in by faith, which is why a Lutheran pastor counseling a struggling member will tell him to return to his baptism.
Here's where we go a different direction, and it's the order that drives it. In Acts 10 the Spirit falls on Cornelius and his household while Peter is still preaching, and only after that does Peter say, can any man forbid water. The salvation happened, then the water came. When they believed Philip preaching, they were baptized, Acts 8:12. They that gladly received his word were baptized, Acts 2:41. Paul tells the jailer to believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved, and the baptism follows, Acts 16:31. By grace are ye saved through faith, and that not of yourselves, not of works, Ephesians 2:8 and 9. Even Colossians 2:12, which is about as close as the New Testament gets to tying the two together, says buried with him in baptism, wherein also ye are risen with him through the faith of the operation of God. Faith is the instrument in the sentence.
So we baptize believers, after they've trusted Christ, by immersion, because that's the pattern and because Romans 6 makes the picture a burial and a rising. And I'll grant the Lutheran instinct is guarding something we also want to guard: that salvation is God's work and not yours. We just don't think the font is where he does it.
The Supper
Lutherans hold that the true body and blood of Christ are truly present in, with, and under the bread and wine, received orally by every communicant, believer and unbeliever alike. They reject transubstantiation — they deny that the bread stops being bread — and they don't care for "consubstantiation" either; the term they want is sacramental union.
That's why 1 Corinthians 11:27 through 29 has teeth for them, and it's why LCMS and WELS practice closed communion. That practice offends people, so hear the reason: it isn't snobbery and it isn't a ranking of Christians. They believe the Table is a public confession of shared doctrine, and that letting a man eat to his own harm is not hospitality. You can disagree with the conclusion. Don't misread the motive.
We hold the Supper as a memorial. This do in remembrance of me, Luke 22:19. As often as ye eat this bread and drink this cup, ye do shew the Lord's death till he come, 1 Corinthians 11:26. But a memorial isn't nothing. Ask a widow. Christ meets his people at that table by his Spirit and we've all felt it; we just don't locate him in the bread. Our table is open to any believer who's walking with the Lord and has dealt with what needs dealing with.
Law and gospel
Lutherans read the whole Bible through law and gospel: the law shows you your sin and drives you to Christ, the gospel gives you Christ, and a preacher who mixes the two either crushes people or flatters them. That's a good tool. I use it. Anybody who preaches without it eventually hands his people a to-do list and calls it grace.
Our difference is smaller here and it's about how much weight one grid can carry. Run everything through it and the commands given to an already-saved man start reading like law crushing him — walk in the Spirit, put on the new man, put off the old. Those aren't a courtroom. That's a Father teaching his kid to drive.
Who runs the church
Here's something most Baptists don't know. Lutheran congregations own their own property and call their own pastors, which makes them more congregational than a lot of people assume. But the synod certifies and places clergy, disciplines doctrine, and can expel a congregation that departs from it.
We have no synod. TheWay is self-governing, led by a plurality of biblically qualified elders, and answers to Christ and to Scripture. Paul and Barnabas ordained elders in every church, Acts 14:23; Titus was left to ordain elders in every city, Titus 1:5. And I'll be honest about the trade: their arrangement catches a bad pastor faster than ours does. Ours just has to catch him earlier, with more men in the room.
Where This Lands
There's a Lutheran instinct I wish more of us had. They ground assurance outside the believer — in God's promise attached to something God did — rather than in how the believer feels about his week. That's the right direction even where I'd point at a different anchor. Feelings are weather. A promise is a promise.
So if you've never trusted Christ, quit waiting to feel saved. You won't feel your way into it. The whole message is that God did something outside of you, in public, in history: his Son died for your sin and rose again on the third day, and that happened whether you feel anything about it this morning or not. Call on him. Ask him to save you and mean it. He's never turned one away.
And to the believer, one thing this week. The next time the accusation comes — and it will, probably in the truck, probably around ten at night — don't go rummaging around inside yourself looking for evidence that you're really saved. You won't find enough. Go to the promise instead. Say it out loud if you have to: sealed with that Holy Spirit of promise. He said it. That settles it.