Encore Post: It sometimes happens at a wedding reception, a dinner party or other social event. You are sitting near someone you’ve never met before. During the polite small talk, you learn your new friend belongs to a church you’ve never heard of before. If you are a curious person, you might ask about it. After learning a few surface details, you move on to another topic. When you get home, you are quite confused and cannot figure out how it all fits together. You’re not alone. Unless you have some place to begin to make sense of it all, it is easy to get lost when talking about what a church believes — including your own!
The teachings of a religion are almost always connected one to another. A pastor, priest or other religious leader can begin at virtually any teaching and explain all the rest of what they believe in terms of it. If you look at several formal books of theology — especially systematic theologies — you will notice they begin at different places. Some begin with talking about God and His traits (in theological language attributes), others begin with definitions and other concepts needed to understand what Christians believe (prolegomena). Some begin with Christ, still others take up salvation first. Where they start can tell you a lot about who they are in and of itself.
When I’ve spoken to others about what Lutheran Christians believe, I’ve found it useful to begin with the Formal and Material Principles of Lutheranism. A formal principle is the source that a faith turns to as its ultimate authority on what to teach and how to live. A material principle is what a faith is made of — the central principle which explains everything else that it teaches.
For Lutherans, the only source and authority for what a Christian should believe is the Holy Scriptures, the Bible, alone. Our Material principle is all about God’s grace and how Christ earned for us salvation. The disadvantage of beginning here is it starts without explaining sin, how people got lost in the first place, who God is and what he’s like, and many other truths. The advantage is it majors in the majors.
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When Martin Luther visited the churches of Saxony, he discovered that everyday people knew very little about the Christian faith. To help pastors and parents learn the basic truths of the Christian faith, he wrote a little book called