The Lutheran Difference: The Office of the Keys

  1. The Lutheran Difference: An Introduction
  2. The Lutheran Difference: Historical Background
  3. The Lutheran Difference: The Light Bulb Moment
  4. The Lutheran Difference: Indulge Me for a Moment
  5. The Lutheran Difference: The Backlash
  6. The Lutheran Difference: Outlaw, Knight, and Husband
  7. The Lutheran Difference: Augsburg and Beyond
  8. Martin Luther’s Antisemitism
  9. The Lutheran Difference: What’s the Source?
  10. The Lutheran Difference: Sola Gratia
  11. The Lutheran Difference: Sola Fides
  12. The Lutheran Difference: The Bondage of the Will
  13. The Lutheran Difference: A Matter of Perspective
  14. The Lutheran Difference: Sola Scriptura
  15. The Lutheran Difference: The Means of Grace
  16. The Lutheran Difference: The Sacraments
  17. The Lutheran Difference: Baptism
  18. The Lutheran Difference: Infant Baptism
  19. The Lutheran Difference: Bread, Wine, and “Is”
  20. The Lutheran Difference: Remembering Jesus
  21. The Lutheran Difference: You Are What You Eat
  22. The Lutheran Difference: Sacrament Wrap-Up
  23. The Lutheran Difference: Happy 499!
  24. The Lutheran Difference: Confession and Absolution
  25. The Lutheran Difference: The Office of the Keys
  26. The Lutheran Difference: Law and Gospel
  27. The Lutheran Difference: The Three Uses of the Law
  28. The Lutheran Difference: Lutheran Preaching
  29. The Lutheran Difference: Worship
  30. The Lutheran Difference: It’s the End of the World as We Know It
  31. The Lutheran Difference: Q&A
  32. The Lutheran Difference: Q & A — Luther vs. Calvin
  33. The Lutheran Difference: Q & A — A Word on the Word
  34. The Lutheran Difference: Q & A — The Different Lutherans

So let’s take a brief moment and talk about the Office of the Keys. If you’re not familiar with this term, it comes from Matthew 16, specifically this verse:

I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.

We see echoes of this idea elsewhere in the New Testament as well, such as in John 20:

If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.

We Lutherans believe that this special power, the ability for forgive the sins of others, has been given to all of Jesus’ disciples. Each of us have the right and ability to assure each other that our sins are forgiven because of what Christ has done for us on the cross. Borrowing from the imagery that Jesus uses in that passage from Matthew, we call this ability the “office of the keys.” It means that, while our sins may have been “locked” to us, Christ’s forgiveness allows them to “unlock” those sins and remove them.

Like I said, this ability is given to all Christians. But from the Lutheran way of understanding things, a local congregation can entrust these “keys” to a trusted representative to use them on their behalf. Those trusted representatives are called “pastors.”

So far as I know, most Lutherans require their pastors to receive special training to become one. That means schooling beyond college. Speaking for my little corner of Christendom, we require pastors to get a bachelor of the arts degree in…well, something (not necessarily theology or Biblical studies; personally, I majored in theatre). Then we move on to seminary, a graduate school. We require pastors to learn Greek and Hebrew so we can go back to the original languages and suss out as much as we can from the texts.

Basically, Lutherans believe that the pastor is the representative for the congregation, who operates with their authority on their behalf. We administer the Sacraments, we preach, we teach, we minister to those in our care.

I could probably go on, but again, my experience is kind of limited, especially when it comes to how pastors receive their assignments and so on. I can talk to how it happens in my synod, but that’s a limited sampling.

Maybe I should keep going, but I feel like moving on. Next week, we’re going to backtrack a little to cover something I should have talked about a while ago. We’re going back to the Word, and specifically, Law and Gospel.

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