This is Ben, and this is Main Street Lutherans. Keith's not with me this week. We're going to talk about authenticity, and Keith's schedule just got in the way for this week, and my schedule got in the way last week, so we're having to catch up with ourselves in this new year. So our topic for today is authenticity, and the reason we're going to do this is because we've got the map ahead of us as far as the podcast goes. We're going to start dealing with some issues about how the ELCA is true to its origins, true to its theology, true to the world around us. And that's an important thing. And we've already talked about that a bit. When we talked about the youth gathering, when we talked about some of the programs that we've covered, like the nature programs and our LGBTQIA programs in the church, we've been talking about how it's authentic. It's a reality that we do this, and so we talk about it. We're going to talk about some issues that are not so happy, that are not so positive. Some of our history has some bad stuff to it, and we'll talk about that. But we wanted to cover what it means to be authentic as a separate topic here, and we'll go over this real quick and be on our way, hopefully. I want you to know that if you've got thoughts on this, if you want us to do more deep dives on this sort of thing, give us a holler. Mainstreetlutheransmail.com is our email address. You can catch us on Facebook, on Instagram, on threads. We'd love to hear from you. Telephone call on our number. Nobody will answer. You can just leave a message. All those things will help us out. And if you share this with some folks and give them a listen, encourage them to interact with us, too. We want to hear what everybody's thinking about these things, so we can address any additional topics that come up here. Now, as far as on authenticity, it's kind of a cheap way to start on a topic like this, but often we just have to go to the dictionary definitions of these. So. Merriam Webster the dictionary defines authentic as not false or imitation, true to one's own personality, spirit, or character, worthy of acceptance or belief as conforming to or based on fact, conforming to an original so as to reproduce essential features. And what we mean by authentic in this case, I think, is. Is more toward the not false or imitation and true to one's own personality, spirit or character. When we talk about authenticity, when we've talked about it so far in the podcast, it's been in reference to what people want from churches. Part of the reason people are walking away from, from congregations, from denominations, from Christianity as a whole is often described as authent that something about their experience in the church is not authentic. Whether it is a church not dealing with an abuse of some sort within its congregation or within its structure. Sometimes it's a church not dealing with a social cause that seems important to the person and they feel like the Bible says that we should be doing something and the church is not. And also authenticity as far as recognizing people for who they are and allowing them to be their God created person. And so that's generally what we're talking about with authenticity as far as what people are criticizing us about not being authentic. When addressing authenticity for our purposes for the podcast, I want to talk about it in three modes. And these are, I think the three modes that the ELCA deals with authenticity as a denomination. And these three ways are going to be first, as Protestant Christian, a Protestant Christianity, what does it mean to be authentic? What does it mean to be authentically Lutheran? And what does it mean to be authentically a postmodern person? And we'll talk about all those three things. I think those are three areas that the ELCA tries to bridge together and tries to be authentic in all three ways. And sometimes those seem to have a conflict or many. And so let's start with what it means to be authentically Christian, particularly Protestant Christian. Now when we talk about Christians and Christian denominations and Christian people, our main definition of that comes in two forms. One form is what we call orthodoxy. That is the things that we believe and there's orthopraxy. Those are the things that we do because of our beliefs. And so we're going to talk about each of those two things with each of the three topics we've got here. So both on Christian, on Lutheran and on postmodern or present day people. So for Protestant Christianity, our orthodoxy is based around the creeds. Now I've recently heard someone say There are over 200 denominations or flavors of Christianity, of Protestant Christianity just in the United States. And so it's really hard to group all those people together if we, we say anything and we're likely to be leaving out some people. But when we, when we as a church consider other people Christian, we specifically look to the creeds. The creeds reinforce that we believe in a triune God, that Jesus was resurrected from the dead and will return to save God's people, and that we believe in the Holy Spirit and the continuation of the church. These are found in three particular creeds that the elca, other Lutheran organizations, but also other denominations hold true. And those are the Apostles Creed, the Nicene Creed, and the Athanasian Creed. All three of those creeds were developed in different forms, different ways to solve different problems. The Apostles Creed is what our congregation says every Sunday. Some congregations lean toward the Nicene Creed, which is a little bit longer and spells out a little more about the Trinity. The Athanasian Creed is quite long, and usually we'll just save it for a special Sunday, particularly Trinity Sunday. I believe the other thing that Protestant Christians hold united is the Gospel, and that is that Jesus is the Son of God as recorded in the Gospels in the Bible. And this is probably a little bit of Lutheran bleed in here. And that is the sola scriptura, that everything that we know about Jesus comes from the Scriptures and everything we know about God comes from Jesus through the Scriptures. And so that's the important part. And those are the things that Christians to be authentically Christian, those are the things that we believe. And the definition of belief and the definitions of the words in the creeds and in the Gospel are often left to interpretation. But because we're defining a very broad group of people here, I think that's the safest way to leave it. Now, the orthopraxy of that, the way people live out their Christianity. I think it's safe to say that we would all agree that living like Jesus is. Is the way that we live out our Christianity. I think of the song. They will know we are Christians by our love. We will work with each other. We will work side by side. We will walk with each other. We will walk hand in hand. A good old camp tune that's made it into our hymnals, but also we've got some texts, so Micah6,8 is one of my favorite that defines what is expected of us. He has told you, O mortal, what is good and what does the Lord require of you, but to do justice and to love, kindness and to walk humbly with your God. And Then also Mark 12:29 31. The first. This is the first commandment is, hear, O Israel. The Lord our God is the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength. The second commandment is this. You shall love your neighbor as yourself. There is no other commandment greater than these. And so combine those two things, that we are to love God and love our neighbor, and that we are to do justice, to love kindness and walk humbly. And so those are what are expected of Christians. And so if we are authentic Christians, we are living our lives out that way. Let's move on to Lutheranism. So Lutheranism gets a little more complicated. All right, so we. Lutheranism, of course, is a subset of Protestant Christianity. You know, those of us who are very proud Lutherans would say it's the core of, of Christian, of Protestant Christian Christianity. But Lutheranism is based on the orthodoxy. We're going back to the orthodoxy. What we believe is summarized in the Book of Concord, which is a book that contains many books or documents really. I don't think they were specifically meant to be books aside from the catechisms. But the Book of Concord includes the catechisms. It includes the Augsburg Confession and the defense of the Augsburg Confession. It includes things like the small called articles and the creeds. And it includes the Formula of Concord is one of those things that was written after Luther and Melanchthon passed away. It's the second generation of Lutheran theologians hammering out their beliefs between each other, trying to, trying to be more specific about things. And you know how people are. They start arguments about things, specifically in the Book of Concord, in the Augsburg Confession in particular, it spells out our idea of justification by faith in Jesus. We are saved by grace through faith in Christ alone. It includes our beliefs about the sacraments. And we talked about baptism, we talked about communion and what we believe about it, about God's true presence, Jesus true presence in the sacrament of Holy Communion, in the Eucharist. It specifies how people have free will in everything except when it comes to salvation, because that is a free gift of God and that we don't have any control over it. As Lutherans, we also have a couple levels of talking about gospel. When we talk about Protestant Christianity generally, Protestants at that level, when we talk about gospel, we're talking about the actual books of the Bible. We're talking about the story of Jesus as told by the four books, the Gospels. But as Lutherans, we have two levels of the word gospel. One is the Gospels, the books, the stories of Jesus. But we also have this other gospel word, which is everything we can know about Jesus is in the Bible is from the Bible. And what we know about God through the Bible tells us about Jesus. Or let me put this the other way. So what we know about Jesus in the Bible is what we know about God. And so we look at the text, the scripture through the lens of the Gospel, the things that we know about God through Jesus stories in the Bible, which is more distinctly Lutheran than other things. We also have an authentic thing as the elca in our social statements and messages. We try to be authentic. We try to be in understanding with the social statements and messages about social topics in particular. And those are things about how we contemplate topics, how we discuss them, and what are maybe appropriate inappropriate actions for a Christian or for a Lutheran, and how we. We process those things. So those are how we. We are authentically Lutheran. And it's a lot of stuff there. It's a lot of references. If you want to go look at the Book of Concord and read the Augsburg Confession and the Defense of the Augsburg Confession, some of the history on that, I encourage you to. It's. It's an important part of our faith. We don't have a lot of time to do that, and we certainly wouldn't do that in catechism. But it's. It's a good thing to go look through a. As far as orthopraxy for Lutheranism, the walking, the walk, a bit of being Lutheran, I think, of what I believe. It was Carl Scrady at Capitol University when I was in college that said that. He said that Luther said this. And I haven't seen Luther, actually, I haven't seen where he wrote this, probably in a sermon, but something about when a Christian meets a Christian on the street, Christ meets Christ. That we are to be. We are to be Christ in the lives of the people around us and that the people that we, all the people that we know our neighbors, are Christ to us as well. And so that also goes in hand in hand with the priesthood of all believers, that we are all called to ministry and our approach in daily life of grace, forgiveness and freedom, freedom, particularly to sin boldly to know that God has our back. There is nothing I can do so horribly that I will not be able to receive the grace of God. And that's very important. It's very Lutheran. Specifically things like we. There's nothing we can do by works to earn forgiveness that can earn God's grace, God's justification. There's nothing that we can do to earn that. That's an important part of our Lutheran identity and being authentically Lutheran as we are a church and as people in that church. Now, moving on to the postmodern idea. Now it starts probably before postmodernism begins. There's a break in the church, there's a break in society. It actually happens before the 1920s. But the church, the Protestant church, really goes through this beginning in the 1920s, and it will continue for the Lutherans up until about 1974, which is a result of the Enlightenment, that people begin to have information about how the world works in a way that's very different from what we had say in the Dark Ages and in the early times and in the early church years. We start to have science in particular as postmodern people, as people who are living in the 21st century. We know that science is real and that we have different methods of history that look at things in a particular way. And we have many different approaches to history. We also believe in social systems. We believe that people as a organization can do things to make the world a better place, but also a worse place. And we believe that humans have an impact on our planet in good ways and in bad. We think of climate change, we think of curing diseases that wouldn't be possible without people organizing to make that happen. We also believe, as postmodern people, in free knowledge. The Internet is a mighty, mighty thing. Back in Luther's time, for instance, it would have been nearly impossible for someone to have much more information than their parents had. These days, it takes a quick search on your telephone that you carry in your pocket to find nearly any kind of information, whether it's true or not, whether it's accurate or not, whether it's authentic or not. The idea that knowledge is available to everyone at a very low cost, if not free, and that is, that is something that we believe in, and we, we organize our lives around that. So there are no people that have. Have more access to general information than anybody else. Now, there are specialists, certainly, that have specific information, but we believe that knowledge is available to everyone. So how do we live out our lives as postmodern people? Well, when it comes to the church and the things that make this important and that show some differences in how our churches act authentically postmodern. One thing is that postmodern folks accept all people as natural and as people. There is a tendency to make the other, to turn them into not people, people who don't count. I recently heard someone comment that just about all of Gen Z and Gen Alpha identify in some way, shape or form as queer. Now, as a Gen Xer myself, that was really hard to hear because to me, queer in particular is a bad. Was a bad word, not one that we would use. We would be scolded for using A word like that. But it is now an identity that is very common among, you know, as a 50 year old man, I'm going to say kids, that this we can't other people like that. It's that people are now all seen as natural. And so it is a change in our postmodern ideas that is different from say the 1970s, 1980s even. We also people of the postmodern age, we individually grapple with evil that's in our past and in our present. People are quick to demonstrate. We have lots of examples from the 60s and 70s and the 1920s when it comes to women's suffrage. For sure, the idea that individuals can make a change by protesting and that we can grapple with evil in the past and present, that we can deal with the sins of our forefathers, say slavery, say racism, any of these things. That we have the tools to be able to grapple with that as part of our past and that we can strive to improve on our ancestors past, but also on ourselves. That we can make change in ourselves and we can make change in the world to improve the world. Now these are all things that our church tries to incorporate into how we are authentic. We are authentic to Christianity, to the creeds and to the Bible and to Jesus. We are authentic to what, what our faith leaders have said over the years. And I say specifically about when we talk about Lutheran, we talk about the Book of Concord, which is our core. But we're also true to people like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, to Paul Tillich, to the theologians that have come before and helped us define these things in their time and place so that we can then do the same for ourselves. And then we try to be true to our postmodern lives, believing in science and history and the way that we approach those things. When it comes to history, it could be the search for the search for the historical Jesus. It could be the looking at how our church has made it through different times and how we've interacted with the people around us. And sometimes not so great, but all these things we put together. So the ELCA, and I'm going to say the main lines generally aim to be true to all of these classifications. Of course the Presbyterians aren't going to try to be Lutheran, they're going to try to be Presbyterian and go to their core documents. But I think all the mainlines share this, that we try to be true to our Christianity and to our 21st century existence with our flavor put into the middle. But being authentic as a church or as an individual isn't easy. Being authentic because of this postmodern thing means that there's a lot of change. We recognize that things that we thought were true last week, last year, last decade aren't necessarily true now, and they might not have been true back then. And we have to understand how to deal with that, to forgive ourselves and to move on, and how to explain that to people who see us as a solid, as a constant force without change. Also, this idea of trying to be authentic makes us a target. It makes us a target. From inside the church, there are possibly unattainable goals. None of us can be perfect. An institution certainly can't either. And so trying to strive for perfection, we will not achieve it. Or maybe the goals move once we get close because we can do even better. I think of I had a little bit of training in Six Sigma, for instance, and the there's always room for improvement. And so we can be criticized for not going far enough. Also from inside, we can be criticized for not for going too far for people who don't want to adapt to what we know about ourselves. Also from outside, people outside of our denomination have different definitions for the words that we use. They have different values sometimes based on that language. And they might have different goalposts. Think of, say, we want to be environmental stewards now. What. What works for one congregation might not work for another. And, you know, if we try to recycle, say, maybe we're not. Maybe some churches aren't recycling enough for some organizations, and so there will be different goalposts. But trying to be authentic to ourselves and trying to do our best can often make us a target for criticism. And so it's not easy, but it's important. It's important that we deal with our authenticity first of all, that we make it public. One of the things I think this podcast is showing to me and to Keith is that it's important to be able to make clear to folks on the outside as well as on the inside what our true nature is. That we try our best to be all the things we most want to be, but we also recognize that we have faults and that we do our best to do something about it. And the best way to start at doing that is, of course, to recognize where our faults are. And then we can look at it as a way to make things better. And so that's authenticity. As we look at our theology, as we look at our history as a church, hopefully by the end of, maybe by the summer, we'll talk about Native American schools that have happened within the elca. We'll talk about some of our immigration programs, see where we are doing our best and where we have done our worst and see where we can make things better. Because we want to be true to ourselves and we want to be honest with the people that want to join us or the people who are looking for somebody who's trying to be honest. And so there we go. That's authenticity. Our next episode will be almost certainly something a little more entertaining. We'll have more voices, and I hope that you'll listen in. Before that, though, we're going to end with a catechism question. So our last episode, the question was who was Deborah in the Old Testament book Judges? We had Deborah's nurse. We had a wise counselor to Solomon. We had the correct answer, which is a prophet, judge and military leader. And we had the last option, which was the designer of the Ark of the Covenant. And that, of course, the true answer was the prophet, judge and military leader. I'll tell you that Rebecca's nurse was named Deborah. So that wasn't wrong. It just wasn't in the Book of Judges. And the wise counselor, that would be Debbie, Keith's wife. She's a professional counselor and my wife is an engineer. And that's why we get the designer of the Ark of the Covenant. And so those were calls out to Debbie, Keith's wife, and Deborah, my wife. All right, so this episode, our question is related to the Book of Concord. And my question is what is considered by Lutherans to be the primary document of the Book of Concord? And by primary, I mean what, what is it that that Lutheran churches, part of the Lutheran World Federation? What is the bare minimum of the Book of Concord that those churches extend, accept as the the primary document of Lutheranism? Is it the catechisms? Is it the unaltered Augsburg Confession? Is it the creeds? Or is it the formula of Concord? Now, you can respond by email on social media or even our phone number. Our email is mainstreetlutheransmail.com so you can get to that real easy. You can find us on Reddit on I'm Bjorn74B J O R N74N Reddit and you can find us on threads and Facebook and Instagram. Main Street Lutherans is hosted by Keith Fair and Ben Fote, and the show is produced by Phote Media Productions. You can find all of our contact information, you can find links, and you can find a transcript in the episode notes. Until next time, go in peace. Serve the Lord. Thanks be to God.