Becker's Revelation Lectures
Pastor Johann Cauuwe has done us a great service by putting Dr. Siegbert Becker's Revelation lecture series online. This lecture series took place in the early 1980's, and he authored the book Revelation: The Distant Triumph Song, Dr. Becker wrote a paper on the book of Revelation which, on the very last page, lays out his seven-fold division of the book he describes in his lectures, including the seven visions which he noted can be difficult to discern in modern translations.
"But I wonder whether the Lord wouldn't also say about the Wisconsin synod, 'thou hast left thy first love' Are we as earnest and devoted to the Gospel as we aught to be? Are we as concerned about the Christian life as we aught to be? Are we a little bit careless in our way of living? I think this is true of us in many, many ways that we just are not what we aught to be, even though as I said the Lord would also say to us, 'you looked at the doctrine and you were very careful about the doctrine and you rejected those who preached false doctrine, but not everything is right with you' and there are a lot of things in out church that could stand a great deal of improvement, we need to repent."
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"Even though we may be proud in a good Christian way about the fact that we have a church that is faithful to God's Word, we have a lot of things to be ashamed of, we have a lot of things we aught to repent for, all of us, and we aren't as devoted to the Lord as we aught to be, and so the Lord says to us as he says to Ephesus: 'Remember the height from which you have fallen! Repent and do the things you did at first! If you do not repent, I will come and remove your lampstand from its place. But you have this in your favor: You hate the practices of the Nicolaitans, which I also hate'."
Dr. Becker may be hinting at a form of therapeutic antinomianism that has a distorted Gospel emphasis which, yes, places Christ front and center, but takes an egalitarian view of sin and stops short of exhorting the Christian to love and good works:
"Therapeutic-antinomian preaching follows a predictable pattern. Take any imperative of Scripture, tell the congregation how they are unable to obey that imperative, and then urge them to trust that Christ has obeyed it for them. Then end the sermon. Every sermon will be the same, no matter the text. The influence of the therapeutic mindset is seen in the fear that drives this kind of preaching: it is assumed that if the pastor insists that whole-hearted obedience is necessary in the life of the believer this will drive Christians to despair. In therapeutic thinking, nothing is worse than feeling bad."
Or perhaps he was inclined to agree that the WELS had wandered from what Paul Hensel considered the true root of Wauwatosa Theology: the idea of "faith-life" - which the Wisconsin Synod was wont to replace with the idea of exegetical sensitivity as being primary. In the article "False Doctrinal Authorities in the Lutheran Church" written by August Pieper fifty years prior to Dr. Becker's lectures (as translated in Vol. 4 of the Wauwatosa Theology), he wrote
"In general, aren't we always constantly in danger of accommodating all our ecclesiastical dealings, all out ecclesiastical institutions, to the spirit of the modern age and the American sectarian spirit surrounding us, and thus of permitting the natural 'common sense' and thee ever-changing views and customs of the times to have influence on the shaping of our church affairs?"
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