Drawn from Robert David Preus, “The Doctrine of the Call in The Confessions and Lutheran Orthodoxy”1
1. According to the Lutheran Confessions theology and practice are a complete and inextricable unity…In respect to any and all articles of faith, if the doctrine, practice, or worship is errant or not in joint, all will be errant and out of joint (2).
2. This inexorable fact is especially clear in the case of Augustana XIV, which speaks of the divine call of suitable men into the public ministry of the Word. Article XIV of the Augsburg Confession presents a doctrine of the call…a practice which comes down from apostolic times (2).
3. The author, the causa efficiens, of the call is God. He is the only subject of the action. It is His call, His office to which He calls … With His Word He creates the church, with His Word He creates the preaching office…Romans 10:15 (5-6).
4. What is the office to which a person is called? It is known by many titles in the Confessions: pastor, elder, teacher, preacher, minister, occasionally bishop…all the terms, taken from Scripture, speak of the same one office, from different points of view. Our Confessions recognize this when they equate all the titles (Treatise on the Power and Primacy of the Pope, 61ff)…(10-11).
5. Preaching and teaching the Gospel: the two terms are interchangeable. This activity, along with the administration of the sacraments (which is included under this activity), constitutes the marks of the church. And it is this activity alone to which the minister and teacher in the church is called (12).
6. [I]f one is placed in the ministry and does not carry out the office and ministry of the Word, he has no call and no ministry. This is the point made by Luther in his many writings against the papacy…The entire hierarchical system is a pretense…The Confessions do not recognize ranks (status) by divine right among ministers, as was taught and practiced in the Roman church (17-18).
7. We are not being picayunish when we say that our [LCMS] constitution says that supervisors of doctrine and life throughout the synod “must be,” not “must have been,” “ministers of the church.” Thus we have the anomaly of supervisors over ministers of the Word who do not hold the office of the ministry of the Word…Something really ought to be done about this (24 footnote).
8. The call is always permanent…It is permanent and irrevocable, unless God Himself intervenes. Chemnitz states the Lutheran position, “…as long as God endures in the ministry His minister who teaches correctly and lives blamelessly, the church does not have the authority to remove someone else’s servant” (33-35).
9. “Theology moves”…Sometimes it moves in a definite progression. [This] has happened in Lutheran circles in regard to the doctrine of the call into the ministry (37).
10. Ministers are deposed and put out of the holy ministry or restricted without cause from being called. This aberration in practice which in fact denies the doctrine of Augsburg Confession XIV occurs in a multiplicity of ways (41).
11. [For example, a] district president may place a pastor who is in office or who has been deposed from office, either rightly or wrongfully on “restricted status.” If this is done prior to due process (Deuteronomy 19:17; Treatise on the Power and Primacy of the Pope, 51, 74, 75), it is a per se violation of the minister’s call according to Augsburg Confession XIV or of his right to receive a call, and constitutes a tyrannical imposition of the lesser ban (41).
12. In reference to the doctrine of the call our synod [LCMS] is in a fragile state of confusion and danger (47).
13. The proliferation of “ordained ministers” who have no legitimate call, according to Augsburg Confession XIV, to the public ministry of Word and Sacrament, and who often hold ranks by human right above those of us who are doctors and teachers of the church, is bound to cause mischief (49).
14. Ranks among the ministers of the Word have always been ranks among those who are rightly called; and superintendents (district presidents, or possibly visitors today) have always been premi inter pares, first among equals. But how can that be if such superintendents and other supervisory officials do not in fact hold the office of the ministry (49)?
15. Can one who holds only a strictly de jure humano office [that is, a position “only according to human bylaw,” GPS] superintend those who are rightly called to the one office of the public ministry of the Word (49)?
16. I am just asking searching questions, occasioned by the bulging ecclesiastical bureaucracy in our synod. A somewhat similar situation in the papacy in Luther’s day elicited similar questions (49).
Rev. Gregory P. Schulz, D.Min., Ph.D., Professor of Theology and Academic Dean, The Lutheran School of Theology, Kenya.
- John A. Maxfield, editor, Church and Ministry Today: Three Confessional Lutheran Essays The Luther Academy, St. Louis, 2001. Permission sought on 15 July 2025. The parenthetical numbers at the end of each thesis are from the first essay in this book; however, the selections and arrangement for this Lutheran Disputation are my own. I have replaced abbreviations with complete titles and created the Disputation title. Apart from that, the timely and confessional propositions are verbatim from Prof. Preus’s 1991 essay. ↩︎