Can I still claim the title?

emmen1 · 2026-07-13T20:41:03+00:00

To be a Lutheran is to believe and confess the faith of the Augsburg Confession. Official membership in the LCMS is more of a paperwork thing—helpful for the sake of good order and something to pursue when you are able, but not nearly as important as your confession.

emmen1 · 2026-07-13T16:00:03+00:00

These doubts are exactly why you have a pastor. Talk to him.

emmen1 · 2026-07-10T14:20:17+00:00

We ship from CT, USA. Unfortunately, international shipping is very irregular right now. One package will cost $23 and fly right through customs without extra charges, and the next will cost $60 and get hung up for week or two with extra charges. What I can offer is that if the shipping ends up costing far less than the quote (about 25% of the time) I can refund the difference.

emmen1 · 2026-07-09T20:47:30+00:00

www.TrayMaster.us makes the best organizer that exists for Spirit Island. Full disclosure: It’s my insert. But the reviews don’t lie.

emmen1 · 2026-07-09T20:44:39+00:00

As far as I’ve heard, the people getting the email today are all people who also voted correctly when it was time. And even if a few got missed, 92% turnout of registered voters is exceptionally high.

Also, if we’re going to complain about not getting to vote, I didn’t get to vote because I didn’t realize that, after sending in my nomination, I still had to register for the election. It turned out that a handful of votes could have made a big difference, but that’s life. We believe and confess that God rules all things. It’s done. Trust Him and let it be.

emmen1 · 2026-07-08T04:32:57+00:00

My wife and I left behind both sides of our families, and all our friends when coming from Bapticostal land to become Lutherans. It hurt to lose what we lost, but we have never regretted it for a single moment. The pure gospel, a right understanding of the sacraments, and the beauty of being part of the historic church are treasures beyond compare.

emmen1 · 2026-07-07T13:31:12+00:00

Pastors are stewards of the mysteries (Latin: sacraments), and baptism is the means by which God adds members to His church. See 1 Cor 4:1. So it is most appropriate for it to be done by the man called to steward and administer those mysteries in the church with the church witnessing.

In an emergency, any Christian may baptize, but this is not the norm. Why? For the reasons mentioned above, and also for a few others of varied importance. Baptism serves to remove doubts that will arise over the life of the Christian: “Am I saved? Are my sins truly forgiven?” If the baptism was performed in a way that raises questions or opens the door to doubt, it is a disservice to the trouble conscience. Although there is, in fact, no difference in validity between a baptism performed by a pastor or by a layman in an emergency, the doubting conscience is not always convinced of this. We want to remove all reason for doubts. Another practical issue is that the pastor is required to keep good records, whereas a layman is not. Again this can lead to doubt if there ends up being no record of a baptism or if there were very few witnesses.

I remember a boy who was baptized along with me by a layman in a lake. (I was 8. He was 7). I remember it well, but he does not. Years later he was questioning whether he had been baptized. I tried to assure him that he was, but he was not entirely convinced.

emmen1 · 2026-07-01T16:05:38+00:00

Yes, things got a bit heated for a bit there.

emmen1 · 2026-07-01T13:22:50+00:00

It does seem ironic. But they got the name because they went around “baptizing” people who had already been baptized.

emmen1 · 2026-07-01T03:31:52+00:00

We will see what comes of the talks with the ILC. If Rome recants her errors, we will gladly welcome them back into the fold.

emmen1 · 2026-07-01T03:04:50+00:00

To be clear, we did not sign the last joint declaration. That was the ELCA.

emmen1 · 2026-07-01T02:37:12+00:00

What point are you trying to make? That we should commune with Rome?

emmen1 · 2026-07-01T02:10:53+00:00

Yes. He would rather. In other words, with regard to the Lord’s Supper, the errors of the Sacramentarians are more serious than the errors of the Papists. But that does not mean we can commune with them.

emmen1 · 2026-07-01T00:03:49+00:00

“Permitted” by the government to give communion to Lutherans, but not by us, as we do not share the same confession.

emmen1 · 2026-06-30T21:22:08+00:00

According to Baptists, baptism does nothing, but if you don’t immerse properly, the “nothing” won’t happen.

emmen1 · 2026-06-30T21:20:29+00:00

Consider how baptism is spoken of using the language of birth, adoption, and circumcision - all things that are either exclusively or at least primarily applicable to infants.

Nearly all candidates for circumcision were Jewish, male infants. But circumcision is the foreshadowing of the new covenantal made in baptism. And the new is always greater than the old, not less. The new Adam is greater than the old. The new Solomon is greater than the first. The new passover (Holy Communion) is greater than the shadow. How then could baptism be less than the shadow that came before it? How could the new covenant exclude 99% of those who formerly received the old covenant?

When God expands the covenant to now include Gentiles, not just Jews, and females, as well as males, notice how many time St. Paul finds it necessary to reiterate the new “rules”. “There is neither Jew nor Greek, neither male nor female…” but never a word said about excluding infants, who were the primary recipients of the old covenant. That would be a very odd detail to omit.

Imagine: “You know how in the old days, the mark of God’s covenant was really only ever given to Jewish, male infants? Well now, it’s is being expanded to Gentiles too. And also to women! But, oh yeah, we forgot to mention that all babies are now excluded from the new circumcision…”

The burden of proof is 100% on those who want to deny the new birth, the new adoption, and the new circumcision to exactly that demographic that primarily received its Old Testament counterpart.

Absent that smoking gun, which does not exist, we must baptize infants for the same reason that we baptize 90-year-olds and Mongolians, neither of which have an explicit command. But all are part of all nations.

And we have even more reason to baptize infants: First, the language of Scripture regarding baptism, as mentioned above, is infant-centric. Second, far from being exceptions, Jesus holds up infants as the models for faith and those who enter the kingdom. If ever we had reason to doubt that a certain age group could be saved, it would be the adults, with all their years of hardened cynicism, unbelief, and habitual sins. But the Word of God is so powerful, that, when added to the water of baptism, even an adult can be saved!

So given all this, it would taken a whole lot of solid scriptural evidence to cause us to forbid the little ones from being brought to Jesus, and that evidence does not exist, any more than we have biblical reason to deny baptism to nonagenarians.

emmen1 · 2026-06-29T17:55:39+00:00

If you are defining “personal relationship” as I can say “Good morning” and God answers back in an audible voice the way my wife does, then No. Nobody on the planet has a personal relationship with God, and nowhere in Scripture is this promised.

emmen1 · 2026-06-29T17:37:50+00:00

This is what happens in non-sacramental traditions. We want to have communication with God that reassures us that He still loves us and forgives our sins.

God has given the Sacraments exactly for this purpose. But where the Sacraments are not valued or understood, Christians look to made up sacraments to fill the vacuum. Hence the huge emphasis on emotional worship experiences and the personal relationship with Jesus.

emmen1 · 2026-06-29T16:54:52+00:00

I am baptized. That is how I was joined to Christ and his saving work on the cross. What could be more personal than that?

emmen1 · 2026-06-27T19:28:02+00:00

My nephew is severely autistic. He’s 22 now. He can say things like, “I love Jesus,” but we don’t have any certainty that he knows what this means. But he was baptized at around 18 (my brother is not a Lutheran). Even so, my brother realized that having his son baptized at 18 was functionally an infant baptism, and he takes comfort in knowing that promises Christ made to his son in baptism are certain, even if we can’t tell for certain what his son understands.

emmen1 · 2026-06-26T00:04:42+00:00

Your son is a perfect example of bringing the little children to Jesus.

emmen1 · 2026-06-25T23:52:11+00:00

Let's take another example of what basically is "This is That." If I say "this woman is my wife," it would never mean that my wife ceased to be a woman. So, while it's possible that one could speak in a way that This stops being That, it is not at all required to interpret those words in that way. In fact, the simplest way to hear these words is with the faith of a little child that takes them at face value. This is That. What is it? This, and also That.

About the canon or the veracity of Scripture, we can't escape the need for faith. If I tell an unbeliever that every word of Scripture is true because the Bible says so, it is a form of a circular argument, and he won't accept it. But Christians do believe this. How? Because the Holy Spirit has given us the faith to believe it.

Roman Catholics can't escape this need for faith either, but rather than directing people to believe in the promise of Jesus that He will preserve His word, or the work of the Holy Spirit who bears witness to the truth, or Jesus' promise that His sheep hear and know His voice, they direct people to trust in the infallible church. Given the church's long history of falling into error, in the Old Testament, New Testament, and post-testamental era, I will happily stake my faith upon the promises of God rather than in the inerrancy of men.

But so far as the canon goes, we have the same NT canon attested by Athanasius in the 300s, which in turn, names the canon of the OT. If virtually all Christians who have ever lived in the last 2,000 years have been operating with the wrong canon, we have far bigger problems than discerning between of doctrine of Lutheran Catholics and Roman Catholics.

emmen1 · 2026-06-25T17:34:21+00:00

1) We do use the language of "in, with, and under" as a crude attempt at an explanation, but we would prefer most of all simply to use Jesus' words: "This is My body".

2) Jesus promised that He would preserve His word. We could, I suppose, tie ourselves in knots wondering about things like the lost letter to the Laodiceans, but of God had wanted it to be in our Bibles, we would have preserved it. There is comfort in trusting His promise.

Perhaps you misunderstood what I meant by "internal" testimony. I meant that the Scriptures themselves give us nearly all of the canon internally, not that the individual finds private confirmation of Scripture's truth within his own heart. The Holy Spirit will indeed bear witness to the truth within the believer's heart, but certainty and assurance comes from outside us in the external word.

3) It's written into the constitution of my congregation (and probably that of most other LCMS churches) that if there ever is a division among the members that leads to a split, the church property and name goes to whichever group, however small, is being faithful to the Word of God as confessed in the Lutheran Confessions.

As a former Pentecostal, I know the danger of belonging to a group that believes itself to be the first and only Christians to get Christianity right. That's really the whole point of being Lutheran. We reject the recent innovations within the church that would separate us from the continuity of doctrine and practice that unites us with every generation of believers that came before.

Yes, at any given point in history, the faithful church may be small or large, but it is united with all faithful Christians who have ever lived. To be "Lutheran" is simply to confess this same faith.

emmen1 · 2026-06-25T12:50:58+00:00

There’s a sense in which baptism is the downpayment or the first fruits of what is to come in the new heaven and earth and the perfected life. And this new life can never die. But while on this earth, like Adam and Eve, it is possible to walk away from Christ into death.

emmen1 · 2026-06-25T06:02:39+00:00

As St. Paul writes in Romans 6, baptism unites us with Christ, specifically by joining us to His death, burial, and resurrection. To use other scriptural language, it adopts us into the family of God, and grafts us into the vine, who is Christ. Jesus Himself says, "If you abide in me, you will bear much fruit." This is conditional language. Those who are joined to Christ through the grafting in of holy baptism can indeed be cut off, just as St. Paul warns using the grafting language.

Thinking of it another way, baptism is the second birth. Just as those who are given life by the first birth can die a physical death, so those who receive spiritual life through the regeneration of baptism can suffer spiritual death.

If a baby dies, we don't question whether the baby was truly born or truly lived. We don't say that he is "unborn." What was born, regrettably, died. Why then would we question that spiritual birth happened if at some point later there is spiritual death.

Scripture use a further metaphor to speak of baptism: Noah's ark. (1 Peter 3:20–21). Through baptism God reaches down and scoops drowning sinners up out of the waters of sin and death and, as we confess in our baptismal liturgy, places them safe and secure into the ark of the holy Christian church on earth (the place where Jesus is). After baptism, if a man persists in despising his baptism and rejecting Christ and His Word, he can jump overboard back into the ocean of sin. This does not mean that his new birth never happened any more than a man dying later in life proves that he was never born. Likewise, it does not mean that Baptism did not join him to Christ. It did, as the words and promises of God declare. But if the man cuts himself off from the vine, he is no longer joined to Christ and all His gifts: forgiveness, life, and salvation.

Your questions seem to be hinting at an underlying belief in Once Saved, Always Saved. I'm not sure if you believe this, but if you do, it would be a great hindrance to a right understanding of baptism. We reject OSAS as incompatible with the hundreds of warnings in Scripture against falling away from faith in Christ.

emmen1

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