God Is Our Father/The Church Is Our Mother by Carl E. Braaten Introduction The title I have chosen for this address borders on plagiarism. The idea to which it points is not original with me. The unified voice of the early fathers -- the consensus patrum -- affirmed that if you don’t have the church for your mother, you can’t have God for your Father. This places a high premium on the role of the church in conveying the saving knowledge of God. Twelve years ago I published a book of essays I had written over a course of many years on ecclesiology and ecumenism under the title, Mother Church.1 Some of my friends winced and thought I was about to turn Catholic. A decade prior to that I published a book entitled, Justification: The Article By Which The Church Stands Or Falls.2 That was a Lutheran thing to do, which goes to show that the doctrine of justification through faith alone can be combined with a high doctrine of the church. In Paul Tillich’s felicitous terminology, the Protestant principle can and must be united with the Catholic substance of Christianity. But I do have to confess that being an evangelical catholic in today’s Lutheranism the world over is swimming against the stream. For there are three types of Lutherans -- three paradigms, if you will -- for whom the catholic substance of church tradition is largely deprecated or at least depreciated. They are the non-
1 Carl E. Braaten, Mother Church. Ecclesiology and Ecumenism. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress Pub-
lishers, 1998. 2 Carl E. Braaten, Justification. The Article By Which The Church Stands Or Falls. Minneapolis: Augsburg
Fortress Publishers, 1990. 1