Cavriani scribbled another response: Lutherans do. Maybe not where you came from. Or when you came from. But they do here. Or now. Whatever.
Cavriani flipped over to a largely empty page. It’s the old “laudable custom” maneuver. Luther threw out five of the seven Catholic sacraments in the sense that he defined them as “not sacraments.” But since the people were attached to them, they turned into “laudable customs” and kept hanging around. That’s why we proper Calvinists think they’re still half Catholic. Confession is a laudable custom; marriage ceremonies are a laudable custom; ordination of ministers is a laudable custom; confirmation is a laudable custom. I think some of them still perform last rites.
Professor Osiander, at the podium, was not showing any sign of winding down. “Anyone who does not wish to commit to the definite form of pure doctrine, and shrinks from subscribing to the Formula of Concord as the symbol of the orthodox Lutheran church founded in the Holy Scriptures, may not be admitted to holy communion. Unless such a person drops his erroneous opinion and harmonizes his beliefs with those of the church, he must and shall be excluded. A minister who so excludes a person who denies the omnipresence of the Body of Christ—as the Calvinists do and as these crypto-Calvinists who are a malignant growth within Lutheranism do—acts in a manner that is clearly pleasing to God.”
Dramatically, Ed thought, this would be a fine conclusion, and a really good place for Professor Osiander to stop and let everybody else get some lunch.
Professor Osiander, however, was drawing another breath. He clearly did not approve of people who thought for themselves in matters of religious doctrine, “being carried away according to their own judgment in matters of faith.”
Ed thought that this was a distinctly peculiar opinion on the part of someone who claimed to be a successor of the man who started the Protestant Reformation by insisting that he had to rely on the conclusions of his own conscience and not on what someone else told him. Evidently, for Professor Osiander, the “priesthood of all believers” didn’t have room for all of “all.”
Gary Lambert, again, was nodding solemnly. His up-time opponent Carol Koch, Grantville’s ELCA representative to the colloquy, on the other hand, was scribbling madly, trying to keep notes.
* * *
Ed thought for a moment. He didn’t think that Grantville’s ELCA Lutherans had deliberately chosen Carol as their delegate in order to “make a statement” about the role of women in the church. There just weren’t many up-time Lutherans in Grantville. None of them were natives of the town. It hadn’t been a Lutheran kind of place before the Ring of Fire. Gary was the only one who had belonged to the Missouri Synod except for his wife, who had been at work at the hospital in Morgantown when it happened. The ELCA—Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, to use the full title—had had a grand total of ten members. Ten adults, anyway, and three teenagers who had to be pretty close to eighteen by now, if the Kochs’ two weren’t already older than that.
According to the story Ed had heard, the ELCA bunch, however many, had met at the Sutters’ house. Billy Nelson and Melvin Sutter had declined the honor of presenting their case—before the Ring of Fire, Billy had been a truck driver and Melvin had run a filling station. Ron Koch, the only mining safety engineer in town, clearly couldn’t be spared for a week or a month—he didn’t have a deputy. Those three were the ELCA’s sum total of adult men. There really was only one person who could take the time. Ron’s wife.
“You’ll just have to do it,” Roberta Sutter had said. The victim—umm, nominee for the honor—had been looking appalled. Roberta had reached into the armory that was available to her in her secondary role as president of Grantville’s genealogy club. “Your mother’s father was a minister. Your mom was an organist. You’re bound to have inherited some kind of a knack for it. You’ll have to do it, Carol.”
* * *
When the colloquy finally—finally!—broke for lunch, Ed saw that Benny Pierce was once more established on his herring keg in the market square. The girl who had been selling the sheet music yesterday was singing. She had a high soprano, a little reedy, but with good carrying quality—a mountain kind of voice. Ed waved Cavriani to go on to the beer stand and wandered over. She was singing “Lorena”—not the soupy Civil War ballad, but Mother Maybelle’s “The Sun Shines No More on Lorena,” in which a slave, taken to Kentucky when his master moved, hears many years later that his wife has died back in Virginia. She was singing it in German: “Und man sagt mir, Lorena, Du bist tot.” The more sentimental members of the audience had tears dripping from their eyes. Ed never ceased to be astonished at how smoothly a lot of English verse, such as, “And they tell me, Lorena, you are dead,” went into German, and vice versa.