There are different religions, and even within a religion like Christianity there is quite some variety of beliefs... Some of those debates and differences can be crucial to what people believe and, for some, salvation.
How to decide what to believe... is it a matter of inspiration? Something in the heart? Logic?
***How do you decide? What criterion should you apply to your beliefs to discern if they are right?
One of the rallying cries of the Evangelical (i.e. Lutheran) Reformation was the Latin phrase
ad fontes, meaning "from the source". This was the reason why Luther and the other Lutheran fathers emphasized the Bible so strongly, and spoke of the Scriptures as the "unregulated norm" (Latin:
norma normans) of Christian teaching and practice. This wasn't a rejection of tradition in principle, but it does place other norms of Christianity as subject to Scripture; as such Lutherans refer to the Creeds and Lutheran Confessions as the "regulated norm" (Latin:
norma normata), meaning that the Creeds and Confessions are ruled over and regulated by Scripture. Scripture rules over tradition, and so tradition that confirms with Scripture is to be welcomed, while tradition that is contrary to Scripture is to be rejected.
That was the basis of Luther's reform movement: That the Church cannot stand or fall based on the words of Popes or church councils, but rather the Church must stand upon the word of God--the pure word of the Holy Gospel, as spoken by Christ our Lord Himself, and as taught in the Scriptures by the Apostles. The Creeds are true, because they inherit their truth from the truth already present and given in Scripture.
This is fundamental to the Lutheran way of being Christian. That the Church is identified, first and foremost, as a Christian people, and a Christian people because they possess, have received, God's word, and therefore preach that word. They are a Christian people, they are the Church, because this is where God's word is preached, this is the people who have received Holy Baptism, having been washed "with water with the word" (Ephesians 5:26), the people who have Christ's body and blood because the word makes bread and wine more than mere bread and wine, because Jesus
says, "This is My body".
So Lutherans believe that the Church is wherever God's Word is preached and the Sacraments administered.
Without Word and Sacrament, there is no Church.
So a rejection of the Word, a rejection of the Sacraments, is a rejection of Christianity in its most basic essence.
How did I become a Lutheran? How did I come to believe that the Lutheran expression of Christianity is true? That is itself a long story, but the very abbreviated version goes like this:
I came to realize in my late teenage years that perhaps there were things I had been taught and told about the Bible, and about Christianity in general, that might not be as true as I had always assumed. I had already been going through some searching for answers to questions I had, questions that didn't seem to be provided by anyone in the Christian circles I was part of. Questions about the early history of the Christian religion, like what happened between the New Testament and now? My historical knowledge was virtually non-existent. I also had no idea how the Bible came about, all I had been told was, "God did it" in a rather vague way, and many of the people I spoke to acted like as soon as John finished writing the book of the Revelation then the whole Bible was just there, already fully completed. I had questions, and I wanted answers, so I began reading, studying, and this led me to online discussion forums like this one where I could get a wide diversity of views from other Christians. A diversity of opinion that did not exist in the tiny Evangelical-Pentecostal echo chamber I lived in.
When I was 18 my mom passed away, and my dad had moved across state the year before for a job with the plan of my mom, me, and my younger brother moving when my mom started to feel better and after I graduated high school. My mom never got better, and she died in the middle of the night the summer between my junior and senior years in HS.
My mom had passed, my dad was trying to save money at his new job on the other side of the state, my brother chose to live with my dad while I chose to stay with my grandparents to finish up my senior year. I didn't have a car, or a driver's license at the time, and the church my family had gone to since I was eight was a 20 minute drive outside of town. The net effect was that I stopped going to that church, and by the time I was no longer attending many of the people who I had come to know since I was young had left anyway, the dynamics of the church had begun to change anyway, and it started to feel more foreign to me--like I was no longer really part of it anyway.
That was the beginning of what I often call my "wilderness" period. I continued to learn, study, seek answers to the questions I was having. These questions led me to taking more traditional forms of Christianity a lot more seriously than I had growing up. I became curious about Catholicism, I learned about Eastern Orthodoxy, I came to appreciate the tradition, history, and beauty of these historic Churches.
The moment that changed everything for me, however, was a discussion on a forum thread in which one of the Lutheran members talked about what the Gospel meant from the Lutheran perspective. It's hard to put into words everything that transpired in what was only a very tiny moment of time, but it was like someone flipped a light switch on, and for the first time I realized that I could be forgiven without having to earn God's affection.
It was like a thousand tons of existential dread suddenly melted away. God wasn't sitting up in heaven waiting for me to come to Him. God came down, to me, a sinner. The word "gospel" suddenly became this word of pure joy, a treasure that I could love.
I remember, sometime later, reading about Martin Luther's own "tower experience", he was wrestling with a passage in Romans chapter 1 where Paul writes that God's justice is revealed through the Gospel. Luther writes that he had, his entire life, hated that expression, "the justice of God" because for him it had been a source of existential dread--a just God who punishes us in this life and sends us to hell or purgatory in the next. That was "God's justice" as he had known it. But when he was reading here in Romans, he speaks of it as though it just came to him like a lightning bold, suddenly, that "the justice of God" here isn't talking at all about God punishing sinners. Instead "the justice of God" is that justice by which God justifies sinners by His grace.
Luther's theological breakthrough was that God loves sinners, and gives Himself to sinners in Jesus Christ. And suddenly, for Luther, the entire Bible finally seemed to make sense. At once and with this, the entire Bible came alive in a different light. The fearful, distant, vengeful God that Luther so dreaded was not dreadful in Jesus.
I identified strongly with Luther's own existential anguish. His fears and feelings of inadequacy, of doubt, of being afraid of God, of not measuring up to God, of being unworthy of God's love--and perhaps being an object of God's scorn, unsalvageable. I got that, I understood that at my deepest level. That was me, I was that person who was terrified of God. All of that inadequacy, all of that doubt, all of that existential pain of just wanting a God of love, I thoroughly understood that and saw that in myself.
So to have all of that existential dread come face to face with Jesus and His Gospel of a merciful God who loves and saves sinners, dread melted into peace.
As I began to interact with Lutherans more, and began to learn more about the Lutheran Confessions, the more I found myself recognizing that Lutheranism had the language and theological tools to equip me to read the Bible in fresh, vibrant, profound new ways--new to me I mean. What has consistently amazed me is how what was "new" for me as an individual has, in fact, been old. Reading Scripture and reading the fathers of the Church, and reading about the Creeds and learning the substance of the language of the Creeds continued to feed into one another, synergistically.
The result was that I became more Lutheran, almost seemingly by accident. I like to say that I tripped and fell into Lutheranism. Lutheranism was, arguably, the furthest denomination/theology from mine at the time, it was never even on my radar as far as looking for a new church was concerned. So the fact that I ended up Lutheran was either because I tripped over my own feet and stumbled into it by sheer accident, or else it was a gracious act of God's providence.
The more I study, the more I read, the more I find the theological and language toolkit of Lutheranism provides all the tools for me to read, hear, and believe Scripture.
To the point, now in fact, where much of the theological and religious experience and language of my younger years feels very foreign to me.
That, surprisingly enough, is the very abbreviated version of how I got to where I am now--I don't know how well that answers your question, but that is my story.
-CryptoLutheran
