The Branch Calls
the Tree Dead

What this is about

A church meets in a converted warehouse. It was founded in 1998. It has a band, a stage, a long sermon, a baptistry used a few times a year for adults who have made a decision, and bread and grape juice on the first Sunday of the month. Its statement of faith begins by saying it holds no creed but the Bible. Its pastor founded it and answers to a board he chose. And from its platform it is explained, more in sorrow than in anger, that the churches down the road with the steeples and the prayer books — the ones that were in that town before the warehouse was built — are dead.

The interesting thing about that claim is that it never comes with a test attached. A charge of death with no stated criterion of life cannot be checked, cannot be answered, and cannot be wrong.

So this page borrows a test from someone who had one.

The short answer

Read the last clause again: and has come to us from this source. Luther is saying that his own Bible, his own baptism and his own gospel reached him through the church he was fighting. He did not think he had found Christianity lying in a field. He thought he had received it, damaged, from a church that was still a church.

And the people he wrote that against were not Catholics. They were Protestants who wanted to start again from nothing.

“But Luther broke away too”

He did, and it is the obvious objection, so here is the answer.

Luther never claimed to be founding a church or restoring a Christianity that had disappeared. He claimed the church was a living body with a false gospel preached in it, and that his job was to apply the Bible to it. So he kept everything he did not believe Scripture required him to change: the three ancient creeds, the church year, the liturgy translated rather than abolished, infant baptism, private confession, the bodily presence in the Lord’s Supper, an ordained ministry, the old hymns. He quoted Augustine and Bernard against Rome, not against them. The Augsburg Confession of 1530 is a legal argument that the reformers had departed from nothing catholic: “there is nothing that varies from the Scriptures, or from the Church Catholic, or from the Church of Rome as known from its writers.”

A man who thinks the tree is dead does not spend his life grafting.

What a congregation inherits without noticing

Before the theology, a point about arithmetic. Here are things the warehouse church uses every Sunday and treats as simply biblical — and where each actually came from.

Only one of those eight is first-century. That is not an accusation of ignorance — hardly anyone knows these dates, including people in the old churches. It is a structural point. A church that holds “no creed but the Bible” still uses a canon fixed by councils, a doctrine of the Trinity hammered out over three centuries, and an English Bible whose vocabulary was made by one translator in the 1520s. None of that arrived in the warehouse by revelation. It came down the trunk. You can disagree with a tradition you did not know you had. You cannot be independent of it.

Baptism: whose act is it?

This is where Luther and the modern church differ most, and he is not a neutral witness — he wrote a book against the modern position in 1528.

The modern teaching, roughly: baptism does not save you; it is an outward sign of an inward decision you have already made; that is why we baptise believers and not babies; and if you were baptised as an infant, that was not really baptism, so you should do it properly now.

Luther denied every clause of that, in print. His hinge is the question of who is acting:

From that, everything else follows. If baptism is something God does, its validity does not depend on how sincere you were: “My faith does not make Baptism, but receives it” (IV.53). And so being baptised again is not a scruple about sincerity but an attack on the promise — because if it depends on the adequacy of my faith, and my faith is never adequate, there is no natural place to stop. “Nothing is lacking in baptism. Always something is lacking in faith.”

He is also not what people assume in the other direction. He says plainly that “without the word of God the water is just water and no baptism.” The power is in the promise attached to the water, not in the water.

The Supper, and the monthly table

Luther broke fellowship with fellow reformers over this, and only this. At Marburg Castle in October 1529 the Germans and the Swiss met to unite. Fifteen articles were drawn up. They agreed on fourteen — the Trinity, justification by faith, infant baptism, all of it. They split on the fifteenth, which was whether the body and blood of Christ are bodily present in the Supper. Luther chalked hoc est corpus meum — this is my body — on the table, covered it with a cloth, and uncovered it whenever pressed. The alliance failed.

Set aside who was right. The historical fact is that the memorial view — the bread and wine as symbols of an absent Christ, the meal as remembering — is the position Luther travelled to argue against and walked away rather than accept. It is also the usual view in the churches this page is about. You may hold it for good reasons. You cannot hold it and also say the churches with the older view have drifted from the Reformation.

The second difference is simple arithmetic. The Augsburg Confession says the Mass “is retained among us, and celebrated with the highest reverence” — every Lord’s day. Luther’s own service of 1526 has the sermon and the Supper in the same hour, with the whole congregation singing the Creed in between. And in the preface to his catechism he writes that anyone who “does not seek or desire the Sacrament at least some four times a year” is to be suspected of despising it.

Which leaves a narrow observation, hard to answer. A church whose central claim about itself is that it takes Christ’s words more seriously than the old churches do offers Christians one of the only two things Christ actually commanded four times less often — or twelve times less often — than the churches it calls dead.

“God spoke to me”

This is the oldest quarrel of the Reformation’s second decade, and Luther gave the other side a name: Schwärmer — enthusiasts. The German is harsher than it sounds; it is the word for a swarm.

His objection was never that God cannot speak. It was that a claim of private revelation cannot be checked by anyone, and is therefore a weapon. If the Spirit told me, no text can correct me and no brother can examine me. His rule was about order — the outward first, the inward after:

Twelve years later he put it into the official confessions in the sharpest form he ever used, and the target was not Rome: “God grants His Spirit or grace to no one, except through or with the preceding outward Word… the old devil and old serpent, who also converted Adam and Eve into enthusiasts, and led them from the outward Word of God to spiritualizing and self-conceit… It is the devil himself whatsoever is extolled as Spirit without the Word and Sacraments” (Smalcald Articles III.VIII, 1537).

The reading of Genesis 3 there is the key. What the serpent offered Eve was not just disobedience but a better interpretation — yea, hath God said? — a private, superior access to what God really meant, against the plain word she had been given. On Luther’s reading, enthusiasm is not a modern excess. It is the oldest temptation there is, and it always arrives looking like spiritual advance.

To be fair about what this does and does not settle: it does not condemn a Christian saying that a verse struck him hard, and Luther says such things about himself. The question is not whether you have experiences. It is whether the outward Word judges the inward impression, or the other way round.

Nappies, glory, and the cross

Two more of Luther’s doctrines point the same way, which is outward and downward.

Vocation. He built it to destroy the idea that there is a higher, more spiritual class of Christian who withdraws from ordinary obligations. “If you perform your daily domestic task, this is better than all the sanctity and ascetic life of monks” (Large Catechism, Fourth Commandment). And from 1522: when a father washes nappies and is ridiculed for it, “God, with all his angels and creatures, is smiling — not because that father is washing diapers, but because he is doing so in Christian faith.” He aimed that at monasteries. It lands just as squarely on any church that measures a Christian by how intense his worship is rather than by whether his family, his employees and his neighbours are better off for his existence.

The theology of the cross. In 1518 he wrote that the theologian who reads God off visible outcomes “does not deserve to be called a theologian”; the true one “comprehends the visible and manifest things of God seen through suffering and the cross”; and “a theologian of glory calls evil good and good evil” (Heidelberg Disputation, theses 19–21). The definitive act of God in history was a public execution that looked, to everyone present that afternoon, exactly like failure.

Three things follow. Growth is not a verdict — and that cuts both ways, since a dwindling parish that treats decline as proof of faithfulness is running the same logic backwards. Feeling is not a verdict; the dry service may be the one where the gift was given. And prosperity teaching — that faith should produce wealth, health and success — is this error in its purest form, and needs no separate argument: Luther would have said that a man who teaches it has announced in public that he does not know where God is to be found.

The test

In 1539 Luther published a list of seven marks by which a living church can be recognised. It is the only fair way to settle an argument about deadness, because it applies to everyone equally and does not ask how anyone feels.

0 of 7 answered.

Where this page lands

And notice what is not on Luther’s list of marks. Not enthusiasm. Not growth. Not the age of the congregation or the style of the music. Not whether the people seem to mean it — which is the criterion actually being used when the word “dead” is deployed, and which no human being can assess in another. Every one of his seven marks is something you could observe from the back row on a wet Tuesday with no information about anyone’s heart. That is not an accident. It is a man who knew what the human heart is like, including his own, deliberately building a test that does not require anyone to read one.

Check it yourself

Five things. All but one are free.

1. 1. Luther, On the Councils and the Church (1539), Part III — the seven marks, in his own words, which are better than any summary. Luther’s Works vol. 41; the seventh mark is at p. 164. About ninety minutes.
2. 2. The Small Catechism (1529), free at thebookofconcord.org. Twenty minutes for the whole thing. Read Part IV on Baptism, Part V on the Sacrament, and the Third Article of the Creed.
3. 3. The Augsburg Confession (1530), free at Project Wittenberg. Forty minutes, and shorter than most modern statements of faith. Articles VII, IX, XIV and XXIV are the ones this page uses.
4. 4. The Smalcald Articles, Part III, Article VIII, free at thebookofconcord.org. Five minutes. Very short, very sharp, and the target is not Rome.
5. 5. Luther, Concerning Rebaptism (1528), Luther’s Works vol. 40; the key passage is at pp. 231–232. Not free, but in most university libraries. An hour, and it does more damage to the “dead church” argument than anything else on the list.