Orthodox and Heterodox Churches
If God has commanded fellowship with the orthodox Church — and that is the case, as we have seen — then this fellowship is our duty, a duty under all circumstances, and a duty for every Christian. God has, under no circumstances, given us a dispensation from the First Commandment, and has said to no Christian: You, for yourself, may cultivate church fellowship with false teachers, as though they were your brethren in the faith. Rather, God simply says: “Avoid them,” that is, avoid all who “cause divisions and offenses contrary to the doctrine which ye have learned.” Rom. 16:17. Accordingly, whoever has church fellowship with the heterodox is disobedient to God…
…Heterodox churches are such who cause divisions and offenses in Christendom. (Rom. 16:17.) Such Christians who are found in the heterodox churches support, without intending to do so, those evil works so strongly condemned in God’s Word. The heterodox churches, as such, are in a state of rebellion against God, because they will not follow certain parts of God’s Word. Now, those Christians who are in them strengthen, though unknowingly, this rebellion against God.
Finally: heterodox churches are in a continuous state of warfare against the orthodox Church, against that Church which, in conformity with the will of God, confesses all parts of the truth. Heterodox people revile and persecute those who abide by God’s Word. Surely, an evil work! For Christ says that He will regard that which is inflicted upon those who confess Him as being done to Him. Now, those Christians who are in heterodox churches take part in this evil work and persecute Christ in His confessors of the truth. It is, for example, very terrible that the Lutheran Church, because it has the true doctrine of Baptism and Lord’s Supper, is decried as “Catholic.” This attack against the true Church is no small matter. The Apostle, too, at one time before his conversion persecuted the confessors of the truth in ignorance, as he himself admits. But when he came to the knowledge of the truth, this grieved him very much; yes, it plagued him until his death. He says: “I am not meet to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God.” I Cor. 15:9. Therefore, we truly have every reason to thank God daily, to thank Him on our knees, for leading us into the orthodox Church, and for preserving us from the heterodox Church. We must regard it as the greatest favor of God, next to having come to faith in Christ at all when we find ourselves in the orthodox Church.
Is it not the circumstance, that the orthodox Church primarily in its doctrine is serious about God’s Word; that it, because of God’s command, does not remain silent in the presence of error, but condemns it; that it does not deal traitorously with the Divine truth, does not look upon truth and error as having equal rights? Is it not, furthermore, also a fact that the orthodox Church takes the Word of God seriously in regard to this life, that it impresses upon the poor, as upon the rich, that all who claim the Name of Christ have the duty to depart from iniquity, and that whoever conforms to the world will also be lost with the world? Yes, that is the practice of the orthodox Lutheran Church, and therefore it must often bear a servant’s form.
…Luther states further: “The impurity of doctrine which is not God’s Word, or is without it, is such a poisonous evil thing that even if St. Peter, yes, an angel from heaven would preach it, it would still be accursed, Gal. 1:8. Therefore false teachers and Anabaptists or fake masters of the Sacraments cannot be or remain in the Church, as Psalm I says, for they not only undermine the life, which the Church must bear, especially where this goes on under cover, but also the doctrine is undermined, which must openly be bright and shine, so that the life can be regulated according to it.” (E.A. 26,37.)
Excerpts from Franz Pieper’s “The Distinction Between Orthodox and Heterodox Churches”
