"As the free church Lutherans in Germany have had to go their 'lonely way,' so the Lutherans in America have long been a lonely people within their culture [in ihrem Volk] and in the great Christendom of their land. And this remains so even today where they have remained true to the Confession of their fathers, even where English has become the language of the church. Moreover, there was a more difficult ecclesiastical fate. They were forced by circumstance and their faithfulness to more or less distance themselves from the theology of Europe. They have quite correctly left Ritschl and Harnack to other churches. Who would have been served if this theology had also flooded the Lutheran faculties of America? But the result of this isolation was that they have not really learned how to overcome these systems. They were able to guard the heritage of the fathers, to pass it down undisturbed from generation to generation, but they were unable to fight for it anew, to earn it in order to make it their own.
"But if there is anything in the church which cannot be inherited, it is its confession. Each generation must appropriate it in order to confess the faith in the great consensus of the church of all ages, with the fathers and future generations of the faithful. Parents cannot will the faith to their children; rather, the Holy Spirit performs His work anew in the younger generation. So, too, the Confession of the church cannot simply be passed on from generation to generation. It must be appropriated in living faith. Can I make its condemnation of heresy my own if I have never seen this heresy? The fathers fought against rationalism. For the sake of the Sacrament of the Altar, they rejected the Union and sacrificed their home and earthly possessions. But that has now become a part of church history and is learned from books. Where is the Confession in the present day? How could it have happened that none of the great churches of the New World, which were born of the struggle against the Union, raised their voice to express criticism when this same Union recurred in 1933 and 1948 in the form of the German Evangelical Church [DEK] and the Evangelical Church in Germany [EKiD]? It was not merely Christian tact which wished to avoid interfering in the internal circumstances of other churches. It was a deficiency of understanding. It was not only a deficiency in understanding of the facts and the theological principles according to which these facts are judged, it was blindness, that terrible spiritual blindness which fails to see the reality of the church and which belongs to the terrible sickness of modern Christianity. And in this case it was a consequence of the great isolation and transmission of the Confession as a doctrinal tradition.
"But with this American Lutheranism has fallen into a serious crisis. The sword with which the fathers once fought for the Lutheran faith appears to have become blunt. The Confession, which was for so long uncontested and which remains even today the theoretic basis of all these churches, appears in large measure to have lost its authority. There are great church bodies in which it is nothing more than a mere presupposition [Arbeitshypothese] by which a man identifies himself, just as in the Lutheran territorial churches of Europe. Thus American Lutheranism has fallen into a severe crisis, in which it stands in danger of abandoning that which was once its boast— in the sense of Gal. 6: 14 and 2 Cor. 11: 30. 'Lutheran' has become a denominational designation like 'Anglican' or 'Methodist.' Lutheranism, as in Swedish theology, is understood as one of the great families of Protestantism, one of the many expressions of the Christian religion. More and more it has been forgotten that what binds Lutheran Churches together is not familial similarity, not the common characteristics of a denomination, but rather the common Confession. It has been forgotten that there is properly speaking no 'Lutheran Church,' rather only a Church of the Unaltered Augsburg Confession. In a word: the Lutheran Churches of America are on the verge of losing their character as confessional churches."
Sasse, Herman. "Problems in American Lutheran Theology" (1953). Letters to Lutheran Pastors - Volume 2 (Kindle Locations 5928-5957). Concordia Publishing. Kindle Edition.
