Discipleship has become very ­popular among American Lutherans. One can hardly read a newsletter of the North American Lutheran Church (NALC) or Lutheran Congregations in Mission for Christ (LCMC) without finding an article on discipleship and seeing advertisements for upcoming "discipleship events." The word also appears in the advertising of various conferences and events in certain innovative quarters of the churches of the former Synodical Conference (LCMS, WELS, ELS).

Mark Mattes observes that discipleship among Lutherans copies "the neo-revivalist tactics of North American Evangelicals." Such discipleship is anchored "in a unique experience of God in worship and serves as the basis for specific practices designed to move 'nominal' members of the church into more disciplined lives of faith" (Mattes 2012, 142, 151-54). The specific practices include small-group Bible studies, methods of prayer, and types of fellowship designed to create congregational renewal. Often such congregational renewal begins with a discipleship event or retreat designed to be a psychologically life-altering experience in which church members receive motivation to move beyond church membership to discipleship through the prescribed techniques. Discipleship in this model, as Mattes notes (152), is merely contemporary Lutheran Pietism complete with Pietism's emphasis on experience.

Such neo-revivalism is closely related to what Phillip Carey calls "the new [American] Evangelical theology," a more rational form of Pentecostalism, which encourages Christians to find God's will for their lives as disciples of Christ. The "Lutheran" form of this theology often includes references to "being open to what God is doing," the alleged fact that "God is doing a new thing," "discerning the Holy Spirit," "letting the Holy Spirit work," and "truly believing in prayer" (e.g. NALC Discipleship moments, esp. March 31, April 7 and 14, 2015).

The first thing to notice about the word "discipleship" is that it is an abstract noun. It refers to no reality nor to any real disciple, but instead it refers to a concept. "Discipleship" is an idea and when an idea becomes a prescription, then the idea becomes an ideal. An ideal is a goal which one never reaches. When an ideal becomes the mediator between the eternal God and his sinful disciples, it means that God's final judgment must always and eternally be, "you have not arrived at your goal." In classical Lutheran terms, the law is an ideal. Martin Luther describes hell as having the law, an ideal, unfulfilled in front of you (WA 39I:350.3-4; Sonntag 141).

The gospel, in contrast, is always specific and particular. The gospel is even flesh and blood: Jesus Christ himself given to you, specifically into your own mouth, for the forgiveness of sins. When Christ's forgiveness reaches a sinner in Holy Baptism and whenever his promises are preached, it creates freedom from the law, which is now fulfilled (WA 39I:478.18-479.4; Sonntag 217). In Baptism the Holy Spirit is given in the word of God, not apart from it, and through Baptism the Spirit does his revealed work of killing and making alive in Christ alone (Romans 6).

What were the actual flesh and blood disciples of Jesus like? Just like God dealing with his chosen people in the Old Testament, Jesus often rebuked his disciples; he rebuked them for their lack of faith and for preventing little children from coming to him. Little children never practice discipleship and they are not pious, yet Jesus proclaims that in order to be his true disciples and enter the kingdom of heaven people must become like his beloved little children (Matt. 19:13-14, 18:3). In the end, Jesus' grown-up disciples betrayed him, denied him, and abandoned him.

Peter's story reifies discipleship; it shows us what happens when someone aspires to this ideal. On the night when he was betrayed by his own disciple, Christ announced to Peter the truth of the Holy Scriptures: "You will all become deserters, for it is written, 'I will strike the shepherd and the sheep will be scattered'" (Mark 14:27 quoting Zechariah 13:7). However, Peter did not want the scriptures to be true. He instead desired to practice his discipleship and be judged on the judgment day to be a true, loyal, and good disciple: "Even though all become deserters, I will not… even though I must die…" (Mark 14:29, 31). So Christ created a special discipleship event that very evening for Peter. Peter would practice discipleship by denying Christ: "Truly I tell you, this day, this very night, before the cock crows twice, you will deny me three times" (Mark 14:30). Like all the saints in church history and today, Peter was quite good at practicing this form of discipleship. And like the death given in Holy Baptism, this event destroyed all his self-righteousness and crushed him: "he broke down and wept" (Mark 14:72).

If any have been bewitched into believing that Jesus is not pleased with them because they have failed to complete a discipleship program-even one designed not to take much time out of the daily life of bourgeois Americans-imagine how angry Peter thought Jesus would be when he denied him the night before his painful execution after Jesus spent almost every day and night with him for three years? Yet when Jesus next saw Peter he spoke these words to him, "Peace be with you" (John 20:19).

Even after Christ's death and resurrection, the disciples did not suddenly become good. Peter drew back from the gospel of Christ's forgiveness, turning to circumcision and the law for his righteousness. He was forgiven and restored to faith when God sent Paul to rebuke him and to preach Christ's death to him (Galatians 2:11-21). Paul was the greatest apostle, probably because his sin against Christ and Christ's church made Peter's and Judas's sins pale in comparison. Yet Paul also was not a good disciple. He wrote, "I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do" (Romans 7:19). Is there any hope for such an awful disciple? "Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!" (Romans 7:24-25). These are the words of a true and bad disciple. A disciple is someone who is wretched and yet trusts in Christ's forgiveness, which delivers one from eternal death into eternal life.

God alone is good (Mark 10:18); there are no good disciples in reality, not even the prophets of discipleship. This is not to say that the gospel is "misery loves company," or "we're all sinners, so I'm ok, you're ok." Instead, the facts that God alone is good and that there are no good disciples remind us that the particular and electing baptismal gospel of Jesus Christ is not a discipleship program or system of discipline, but instead precisely and always the forgiveness of sins.

Martin Luther's sermon from Easter morning in 1529 tells us how to become "better" disciples for those interested in improving. Improvement comes not from discipleship or any attempt to follow Christ, but only from the gospel of Christ's death under the weight of the sins of the disciples and the world: "the less you look at the sin in you and see it only in Christ, the stronger Christ is in you" (Luther 126).

When "discipleship" advertises itself as a way to make you a better (stronger) disciple/Christian by teaching you how to defeat, or at least decrease, your own sins through various techniques, i.e. works, it has the opposite effect: "if a sermon comes along that goes like this: You have sinned; you must do this and that and by your own works take action against those sins… Is this not the devil's sermon and a blasphemy against God and Christ?" (Luther 124).

Like Peter, no disciple, however filled with the self-righteousness of discipleship, has mustered up the strength or faith to follow Jesus to the cross. But God, who always saves us against our wills, bound in sin, calls and uses other bad disciples to bury us with Christ by Baptism into death (Romans 6). Amazingly, Holy Baptism (even for infants), not "being discipled" or any other form of discipline or law, is how Christ and Holy Scripture tell us that God actually makes his own true disciples: "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.
Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and
of the Son and of the Holy Spirit" (Matt. 28:18-19).

However, when law and gospel are sharply distinguished, such as when Paul called Peter away from faith in the law back to Christ's freedom, Baptism produces fruit and all believers are given the gift of martyrdom one way or another. Their deaths testify to Christ's death (Bonhoeffer 44). This happened to Peter in a rather dramatic way (John 21:18-19). God not only provides Baptism but crosses, suffering, diseases, and death itself. This martyrdom obeys all Christ has commanded (Matt. 28:20). As Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote, "When Christ calls a man, He bids him come and die" (Bonhoeffer 44), rather than come and improve himself through discipleship. Mattes writes, "what is strikingly different between Luther and the new pietism is that the new pietism is a 'cross-less' Christianity. [This] is exactly the criticism that Bonhoeffer leveled toward American Christianity" (Mattes, 153).

God also provides neighbors, real
flesh-and-blood neighbors, who are not abstractions and whom one does not need a special program to find. Luther claims that disciples do good works for such neighbors "without the law,"
because "only faith in Christ justifies,
only it fulfills the law, only it does good works without the law… It is true that after justification good works follow spontaneously without the law, that is, without it either helping or exhorting any longer" (WA 39I:354.1-2, 5-6; Sonntag 239).

The law must be preached until kingdom come in order to preserve a little peace on earth and to remind Christians that they, like all people, are still sinners. Therefore, Lutheran piety comes from the Third Commandment: Remember the Sabbath Day to Keep it Holy. "What does this mean for us? We are to fear and love God so that we do not neglect his Word and the preaching of it, but regard it as holy and gladly hear and learn it." This means that piety revolves around the public divine service replete with the preaching of God's own word in the present, including the sacraments. Sacraments cannot be turned into programs or practices one uses for discipline, but they are God's unstoppable eternal promises given freely. The sacraments teach all Christians how to distinguish Christ from the law when preaching in the home.

This classical Lutheran piety, in which preaching properly distinguishes law and gospel, centered on the Small Catechism's summary of Scripture, struggles to compete in the consumeristic American religious marketplace eager for the latest brand names, code words, and programs. It is unpopular because rather than give disciples the false hopes of choice and control offered by American Evangelicalism, "discipleship" programs, and consumerism, sacramental Lutheran worship proclaims Christ's control and choice alone, "I am the vine, you are the branches." "You did not choose me, I choose you" (John 15:5, 16). Teaching the righteousness of faith in the gospel apart from the law (Romans 3:28) and letting Christ have the last word in God's relationship with human beings (Romans 10:4) has always been an uphill fight, but it is a fight that Lutherans must never give up. As Luther said in the Large Catechism, Holy Baptism into Christ (rather than discipleship) is the unsinkable ship [Tappert 446]. A

Nicholas Hopman is pastor of Peace Lutheran Church in Nevis, Minnesota.