Co-missioners,
This week’s contribution comes to us from the yellowed copies of a typewritten manuscript by Richard Caemmerer, recovered from the papers of Willard Burce, my co-editor’s late father — pastor, teacher, missionary, and a one-time student of Caemmerer’s at Concordia St Louis. What you’ll read below is one section (number 7 out of 8) from a 17-page single spaced paper by the revered Homiletics professor on “The Life in Christ”. You can read the whole piece as a PDF in the Crossings library.
According to his own words from the foreword, this work is an attempt to describe what sort of life is at work in a Christian by the power of the Holy Spirit: “Christian doctrine is a body of information. The Christian man [sic], however, is infinitely more than an informed man. He is a man alive in Christ. He is a man who has God. God the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit dwell in him.”
As you can tell, the language is archaic, both in speaking of humankind (“man/men”) and of God. Nevertheless, the ideas expressed here are as fresh and vivid as ever. I hope you can catch some of Caemmerer’s passion. Chapter VII, a reflection on the place of growth in the Christian life, is transcribed below. This section felt particularly relevant to me, partly because we are preparing for a Crossings Conference next January that deals with what sort of difference the Gospel makes in how we live our life, and partly because the question of growth, or to put it differently, “sanctification” is an ongoing contentious debate among Lutherans. Sometimes, we Augsburg confessors are accused of not caring at all about change and transformation in a person’s life – but only about justification and salvation. As if they could be separated!
Caemmerer does a fine job, I think, of dispelling this notion while not falling into the opposite trap of legalism or works-righteousness. His description of growth in a Christian’s life shows that this, too, is all grace. Our growth as God’s children is growth not in some externally measured standard or an abstract concept of virtue – it is growth in faith, i.e. trust in God’s mercy. What increases in us is not our own righteousness, but the persistence and tightness of our grip on Christ’s. It is not our flawlessness so much as our constant return to the Lord (back and back again) in view of our great need. This kind of growth makes one simultaneously humble and cheerful.
May you be humbled and cheered by reading this!
Peace & grace,
Co-editor Robin Lütjohann
for the Crossings Community
The Life in Christ
Part VII: GOD HELPS LIFE TO GROW
by Richard Caemmerer
God envisions the life of the Christian as a growing thing. It is literally alive. It feeds on God like a growing thing; it becomes more and more useful and powerful; and it produces more and more fruits. (Ps. 1; John 15; Gal. 2; 5)
Life in Christ – recovered from the papers of Willard Burce
The life in Christ feeds on God. It does this by growing in the hold on Christ as the mediator; by growing in the possession of the Spirit through the Gospel and the Sacraments. It not merely hears the Gospel, not merely partakes of the Sacrament; but it uses the Gospel as the answer to the needs of the soul; it receives the Sacrament as the removal of every barrier between God and man and between man and man, and as the increase of the presence and life God in man. This power produces ever new powers for faith and Life. (John 6; 1 Cor. 11; Hebr. 12; 1 John 2)
The growth in the life in Christ is marked by an increasing trust in God the Father for the supply of every need. The Christian thinks of God as his Creator and Preserver. But the flesh in him is apt again and again to weaken his trust in God, to make him turn to himself for the answer to his needs and the solution of the concerns of God. To stimulate growth in the life of Christ, the Heavenly Father permits evil, in calculated amounts, to test the Christian’s faith. The purpose of these tests is to restore the awareness in the Christian that God is the sole supply of help for body or for soul; to make clear the vanity and folly of trust in self; to make the pressing nature of all unspiritual aims and goals and methods of attaining them; and thus to leave the Christian with a firm grasp on God’s grace as his one supply and help. Growing life in Christ thus means the growing conviction and experience that all things, both comfortable and painful, are in the plan of God and by God’s design a benefit to the Christian. Hence the Christian alive in Christ achieves a thankfulness under all circumstances, a sense of the nearness of God and of His indwelling, an awareness of the power of God’s resources at work in natural powers and in energies beyond experience such as the angels and the intervention of the Spirit. Under every thrust and test of trial the Christian is sure of God because of the redemption of Christ; and every test results in growth in the grace and presence of God. (Ps. 91; 103; 119 etc.; Job; Matt. 5-7; Rom. 8; 1 Cor. 10; 2 Cor. 12; Phil. 3; 4; 1 Pet. 4)
From Canva
The man in Christ prays. His prayer is at once a symptom and a cultivation of the growth in the life in Christ. By prayer we do not mean simply the inner reaction to implore help of the deity, or the mouthing of ritual in order to conform to prescriptions of religious duty. But the prayer described in the Word of God is a fruit of faith in Christ Jesus, a mark of the Spirit’s presence. The Savior sought to remove any concept of prayer which made it magic changing the mind of God, or ritual valuable because of the doing. He described it rather as the thought and statement to God of the goals and purposes of the Christian’s thought and life, expressed in conversation with God as a father, and his seeking of those goals. Hence the prayer of the man alive in Christ is a token of his confidence that God is His Father for Jesus’ sake; and it expresses the aims of the heart which is renewed by the Spirit and put into the direction of God’s will. The praying Christian reviews his intention and desire that God and the meaning of God should be wholly clear to him and wholly powerful in him. He puts before God the real nature of his true life, namely that he is wholly alive only through the power and Kingdom of God; he seeks God’s help in maintaining that essential priority of God’s own help for his life, and endeavors to concentrate in his mind and heart, with the help of the Spirit, on the intake of God’s Kingdom. He implores the power of God and presence of God in helping him to do God’s will, which means not merely conforming to God’s will on the surface, but from the heart and with the renewed heart wanting what God wants and equipping the entire self to be in accord with the will of God. He implores God to remove the barriers for trust and devotion to God, namely worry and insecurity about the body, a sense of unforgiven sin, resentment or hostility to others, and fear of the tests and trials of the faith, and asks God to make him sure of God’s supply for every need of body and soul. (Matt. 6; Luke 10; John 15; Rom. 8)
True prayer is the consciousness of faith and the request for more faith. In prayer the Christian attaches himself to the grace of God. Hence it marks the conflict of flesh and spirit in the Christian man and the conquering of the flesh by the spirit. It seeks to understand God’s ways of dealing with the Christian, to recognize God’s intentions in His trials and tests of faith. But its purposes are achieved through the gift of the Spirit Himself, by means of His tools for grace. Its success is marked in the Christian, therefore, when he comes to accord with the will of God and arrives at a new supply of the Spirit of God and of His Life, through the power of the redemption of Jesus Christ. Hence an outstanding quality of true prayer is its persistence. Just as faith is powerful only as the Christian is constant and unyielding in his hold on God’s supply of grace, so true prayer ceaselessly returns to the devices by which the Christian’s faith is strengthened. Thus prayer, to be true, results in a complete conversation; not only the Christian but also God, must speak. (Ps. 119; Luke 11; 18; John 15; Rom. 8; 1 Thess. 5)
