The disarmed sanctuary

For roughly three years, Dr. Joel Biermann, the Waldemar A. and June Schuette Professor of Systematic Theology at Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, has been answering concerns about his teaching on the Fifth Commandment, and for roughly the same three years he has been revising it. The scrutiny carries a sharper edge now that he has accepted nomination for LCMS Synod President and forced the race to a second ballot.

The written record begins with his 2023 essay, “The Fifth Commandment: Lawful, Lethal Force,” published in Luther’s Large Catechism with Annotations and Contemporary Applications by Concordia Publishing House, with a companion Issues, Etc.broadcast. His public positions have since evolved through a 2025 exchange with Pastor David Ramirez on Christian nationalism that spent roughly an hour on lethal force, a 2026 conversation conducted in the shadow of the synodical presidency, and a two-part February and March 2026 series with Dr. Jeffrey Oschwald for the seminary’s Tangible podcast. His most recent interview, with Dr. Jordan Cooper, is the most revealing of the set. Taken together, the sources demonstrate two findings that pull against each other.

What Has Not Changed

Throughout every publication and appearance, Biermann anchors force in vocational duty and neighbor-service rather than personal rights. He reads the Sermon on the Mount and the turn-the-other-cheek command (Matt. 5:39) as binding all baptized Christians rather than as counsel reserved for the spiritually ambitious. He consistently locates the magistrate’s sword, the Amt, as the legitimate locus of justice, restricting private citizens to derivative action. He denies that Scripture grants any right of self-defense or entitlement to bear arms, treating the latter as a purely American constitutional provision, and he makes the church’s witness before the watching world the controlling factor in every determination.

That foundational framework has held stable from 2023 through 2026, and characterizing Biermann as a pacifist or a crypto-Anabaptist substantially misses his position. He affirms the magistrate’s sword, the legitimacy of just war, and the appropriateness of capital punishment. When Ramirez pressed the charge of quietism in their debate, he rejected it without qualification, declaring Christian quietism always wrong. The framework is recognizably Lutheran two-kingdoms doctrine, and the actual controversy concerns application rather than core principle.

What Has Moved, and How

Nearly everything built on that foundation has shifted. In the 2023 annotated essay the position was absolute: lethal force “is never exercised for the sake of self, but always and only for the sake of the neighbor,” and the sword’s legitimate use “does not provide a scriptural foundation for a right to bear arms.” Confronted at the time with the household-defense argument, Biermann dismissed it as convoluted, comparing such reasoning to Samson, a biblical figure whose violence Scripture does not present as exemplary.

By 2025, sustained questioning from Ramirez had produced concessions. Biermann acknowledged that Luther permits lethal self-defense as a natural worldly understanding, while insisting the Christian need not exercise the option. He called the vocational argument for protecting one’s dependents “compelling” and “solid,” and declined to dispute it. By the 2026 Cooper conversation the concession had hardened into habitual speech: the husband who reasons that protecting himself serves his dependents was making, in Biermann’s own word, a “legitimate” argument, qualified only by a concern about overuse. Meanwhile, the whole framework acquired a new slogan, a “preferential option for nonviolence,” also rendered as pragmatic pacifism, a defeasible default where the 2023 text had printed an unqualified never.

Two features of the shift deserve notice before the divine-service question. First, the disputed ground has narrowed strictly to lethal force itself; Biermann now permits without hesitation every sub-lethal form of resistance, the tackle, the block, the baseball bat, which makes the perimeter he defends considerably smaller than the absolute language of 2023 suggested. Second, his renunciation of violence in defense of his own person and rights has intensified rather than moderated: in the Ramirez debate he expressed uncertainty about so much as bearing a sword as a private person, locating his protection in God’s providence rather than his own agency.

That last point is the hinge, and the subsequent record confirms it. In the February 2026 Tangible episode, Oschwald read back Biermann’s published statement that the Christian’s task is to accept his place in the community rather than defend his rights, then asked whether the Christian ever puts himself first. Biermann answered that he had not changed, that he now holds the point more firmly, and that the answer remains never. Consequently, the principle that the Christian dies to self and claims no rights has grown more absolute, while the application that once flowed from it, the prohibition of lethal self-defense even to preserve one’s own life, has narrowed and acquired qualifications. The drift hardens the rule while loosening its sharpest practical consequence, frequently within the same season and occasionally within the same paragraph.

Premature

The pattern should concern the church’s leadership because of where it started. A theologian may revise himself in public conversation as the evidence warrants, and the church benefits from watching it done well. However, the 2023 formulation was not offered for discussion. It was declared suitable for publication by the LCMS Commission on Theology and Church Relations and printed as catechetical teaching alongside the Large Catechism, and the “never for the sake of self” formulation was therefore taught with borrowed institutional authority to readers who reasonably treated it as settled Evangelical Lutheran doctrine.

Set that against the subsequent record. The absolute position of 2023 has, by 2025 and 2026, conceded the very argument it was framed to exclude, narrowed its prohibition to lethal force alone, and been described by its own author, repeatedly and to interviewers, as an account he is still sharpening with loose ends remaining. A teaching cannot be finished enough for catechesis and unfinished enough for three years of continued public revision at the same time. The trouble is not that Biermann reversed himself; on the governing principle he has done the opposite, and says so. Nevertheless, an application still in formation received Confessional packaging and distribution to the church’s laity and teachers as something fixed, merely by being bound together with the Large Catechism.

That raises a serious question about the doctrinal review that received Biermann’s section and let it stand as catechesis without asking whether its author had finished thinking. His continued public revising is the strongest evidence that the sentence should never have appeared in that context.

The Still Firm Position

On one matter alone Biermann has conceded nothing: the divine service must remain a place where the faithful are disarmed. Congregations should not arm their own members, should not deputize ushers, and should not meet threats to the worshiping assembly with their own lethal force. Protection, if it is wanted, should come from outside, from local police, the sheriff, a patrol car, the magistrate’s appointed personnel. The home he treats as a different and more permissive case. The sanctuary is absolute. His rationale is theologically substantial: the divine service is the hour and the place where the church most fully shows who Christ is, the people of God gathered around word and sacrament, willing if necessary to be defenseless and to trust him.

The motive has merit; the mechanism does not survive scrutiny. The difficulty appears the moment one asks what the imported officer actually does. Biermann forbids congregational lethal self-defense because such force, deployed by the body of Christ at worship, would compromise the witness and make the church look like every other frightened institution fighting for its own preservation. He then instructs the same congregation to arrange precisely that lethal force, supplied by a uniformed individual, of what confession no one asks, stationed at the door. The trigger mechanism is identical; only the hand and the conscience change. To the attacker, and to the watching world whose perception is the entire point of the argument, an assembly that stations an armed officer to kill in its defense has not displayed a willingness to be helpless. It has displayed a willingness to be gun-defended while carefully avoiding the bad optics of holding the weapon itself.

Under even gentle examination, the arrangement Biermann offers as congregational trust in God’s providence becomes providence with a uniform and a duty roster. The witness he aims to protect becomes invisible precisely to the watching world he claims to address, perceptible only to the congregation’s own conscience.

The obvious reply, that the officer belongs to the left-hand kingdom and merely executes the magistrate’s God-given work in its proper sphere, does not rescue the distinction, because the act under examination belongs to the congregation and not to the officer. The congregation has procured lethal protection for the worshiping body as surely as if it had armed an elder. Two-kingdoms doctrine explains who may bear the sword; it does not convert the deliberate hiring of sworded protection into an act of helpless trust.

A second difficulty concerns warrant rather than mechanism. Biermann grounds the disarmed sanctuary in the imitation of Christ, in the congregation appearing as Christ appeared. Yet when the cohort came for Christ in the garden, he neither summoned the temple guard nor accepted the armed defense his own disciples offered. He rebuked the sword drawn on his behalf (Matt. 26:51-52) and submitted to an illegal detention and trial. The Lord who models the disarmed assembly did not contract his protection out to the authorities, and a congregation following Biermann’s counsel does exactly what the garden narrative forbids: it secures, through the magistrate’s sword, the safety Christ declined to obtain through anyone’s intervention. Pressed honestly, the imitation argument condemns the very arrangement Biermann has constructed.

A third difficulty arises from the location itself. The Gospels record Jesus using physical force in exactly one setting: the temple courts, the precincts of the house of worship, which he cleared with a whip of cords while overturning the tables (John 2:13-16) in zeal for the purity of his Father’s house. Whether the cords landed on backs is left unsettled here; that the action was forceful, disruptive, and located in the sanctuary is not disputable. The sanctuary is therefore not a precinct from which force is categorically excluded. It is the one precinct where the Gospel record shows the Lord himself wielding force in defense of pure doctrine.

A fourth difficulty dissolves the stated rationale altogether. Biermann does not finally forbid congregational action; he forbids killing, and presumably only killing by weapon. He permits the tackle, the block, the bat, the member who throws himself in front of the bullet, and he says so plainly. Yet a tackle is not helplessness, and an assailant flattened on the nave floor has not been granted a martyr. Must the member recuse himself if he is trained in the martial arts, which raises the likelihood of a lethal outcome? Which is to say: the willingness to be helpless was never the operative rule of the sanctuary; the operative rule is lethality itself. And a lethality line cannot be defended by the witness argument, because the witness argument cannot explain why the imported officer’s lethal force leaves the witness intact while the identical force from a deputized member destroys it. The watching world sees an armed guard either way. The helplessness is rhetorical, and Biermann crossed his own line the moment he invited the sheriff through the door.

Bonhoeffer Against Himself

Biermann does not rest the witness argument on his own authority alone. He grounds it explicitly in Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Ethics, specifically the manuscript “Christ, Reality, and Good,” and in Bonhoeffer’s warning that a church which fights for its own survival has ceased, in that moment, to be the church. The warning is real, and the instinct sounds right on first hearing. The problem is that the body of work Biermann invokes condemns his conclusion.

The center of Ethics, in contrast with The Cost of Discipleship, is not non-resistance but responsibility. The Christian answers for the flesh-and-blood neighbor placed in front of him, and the work of worldly life is the preservation of actual life. Bonhoeffer names two ways to fail: grasping at earthly security as if it were ultimate, or despising earthly life and throwing it away for something higher, which he calls radicalism. The person in the pew beside a child whom an attacker intends to molest or kill is exactly Bonhoeffer’s case, a concrete neighbor, a life to be preserved even at the assailant’s expense. Taking the attacker’s gun barrel and placing it against your own forehead while singing “Take My Life and Let It Be,” solely because you happen to occupy the divine service, is the pious radicalism Bonhoeffer wrote against.

Ultimately, Biermann’s central objection appears rooted in an opposition to the Second Amendment, a point echoed in his peculiar conception and distortion of American Christian nationalism, which will be addressed in a forthcoming analysis.

Conclusion

Biermann’s critics who read the 2023 paragraph plainly, as a denial that the Christian may use lethal force to preserve his own life, read it correctly, and his steady retreat from that paragraph across the subsequent years vindicates rather than refutes them. The one position from which he has not retreated, the disarmed divine service, is the one that collapses most completely under even light examination, for a congregation guarded by a paid and imported gun is a contradiction without meaning if the highest value of the divine service is a cheek turned so far that it may cost your neighbor a needless death. Biermann has been honest in revising his position in public, and that honesty is precisely what raises the question the church cannot now avoid: why the CTCR’s doctrinal review allowed an undercooked Fifth Commandment essay into the catechism of the church in the first place.