Life Was Not All It Could Be

“Well, I do watch a lot of YouTube videos.” The twenty-something young man sitting in my office said it to me with an air of pride — even conceit. We had spent the last two hours playing question and answer. He had asked me to make time in my day to talk with him personally after he had been away from the church since his confirmation, and I was only too happy to do it; pastors don’t typically get into this line of work because we have a burning passion for paperwork. It was clear from his slouched demeanor, unkempt dress, and his father’s concern for his persistent depression and “failure to launch,” which had prompted him to call me, that life was not all it could be for him.

I was concerned for him. I was happy to answer his questions, but it had become apparent after two hours of doing so that he was not genuinely seeking answers; for when I gave them or offered resources that might help him think through a question, he immediately moved on to ask a different question, seeming to hope that this would be the one that forced me to affirm without reservation the ideas he had gleaned from that modern day Oracle of Delphi, Google. He didn’t come seeking wisdom or even new data; he came seeking a reason to not change the very points of view that were giving birth to the misery that had prompted him to call me in the first place.

I began life as a youth minister. Four of the best years of my life were spent ministering to and with the youth of Zion Lutheran Church in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I not only loved that time in my life, but I continue to have such an abiding passion for youth that even when I was the senior pastor of a church and could partially define my own job description, I chose to make work with our high school students one of my primary responsibilities. Youth is a time when we make choices whose consequences shape our future in ways we can only guess at, but equally, it is a time when we can shift our convictions more easily than in later life, when we have so much more invested in the trajectory we are already on.

So momentous are the choices we make in our youth, we cannot guess at the significance we will attribute to them in later life. Whether and who we should date and/or marry, what kind of work will make up the bulk of our waking hours, how we will spend our time, money and effort, and what kind of mark we will make on the world — at least, our little corner of it — are all things that properly consume our energy and attention at this time of life.

All those aspects of life — and many more — are areas about which our convictions about ultimate things have something to say. They are things about which the Bible in general has a great deal to say and Jesus, in particular, has even more. During my conversation with the young man I mentioned above, he made rudimentary mistakes about the very Biblical stories about which he was questioning me, and his mistakes in reasoning were even worse; yet clearly, he considered himself something of a great thinker — the intellectual equivalent of the classic self-made-man.

Enough to Be Dangerous

Now, the truth is, I deeply respect such people when they are people of genuine skill and achievement. They often bring a necessary outsider’s insight to intractable problems in their field and are catalysts for true change. But Google and its internet ilk can give us the impression that we have achieved such status when, in fact, we have simply acquired just enough knowledge to be dangerous.

The sources of information on the internet are provided to you free of cost simply because the advertisers on the pages you frequent pick up the tab. They pay for a presence on these pages, not because they hope that you will be someone interested in their product in the same way as a billboard advertiser, whose advertising is equally available to people of every persuasion in the cars that pass their location, but rather because your search history has indicated that you are likely — perhaps very likely — to be interested in their product. You are what salespeople called a “qualified prospect.”

Sold

Your search history will also direct you toward resources that are “themed” along the lines of inquiry you are already pursuing and unlikely to challenge your established convictions. Why? Because you will likely linger longer on those pages and be exposed to the advertising that drives the monetary engine of the internet. To put it bluntly, the advertisers are not simply trying to sell you a product, the pages you visit are selling you — your eyes — to the advertisers. You are the product being sold on the internet.

Serious Research

What all this means is that the internet is a lousy tool for doing serious research into an important topic. You will not be exposed to the best contrarian arguments on any topic, and your natural human propensity toward confirmation bias (our tendency to not question data that affirms our current beliefs and discount data that would challenge them) will not be healthfully challenged, for that might interrupt the predictable flow of money.

By its very structure, the internet is antithetical to a serious search for the truth… and since the most important matters of our life are at stake in our choice of faith (and its attendant worldview), let alone potentially something as significant as eternal life, we can and should take the quest for religious truth seriously.

One recent trend on the internet has been celebrity “faith deconstructions.” In these personal pieces, public personalities share their often profoundly touching reasons for leaving the Christian faith in which they were raised. Many of these include somewhat detailed recounting of their intellectual journeys out of the faith, quoting scholars and/or former pastors and Christian leaders like Bart Ehrman, Rob Bell, and Bart Campolo. The problem is that they don’t often seem familiar with the most intelligent responses to and questions of their positions, and those watching their testimonies will not be helped to find them by the internet. Besides, despite the historic use of personal, emotional testimony by some Christian groups, our sympathetic response to a charismatic person is not a reliable means of evaluating truth.

Do This

You deserve better, and you couldn’t have more motivation to provide yourself with better. Seek wise counsel, read good, substantive books, take the quest for truth — and yourself — seriously, and finally, do one more thing: spend time talking to God in worship. The late Tom Hopko, Dean of St. Vladimir’s Seminary and priest for 50+ years, reflected on the inestimable importance of the question of God and religious truth, saying, “If you’re not sure, you stand in worship, listen, think, and address your prayers, ‘to Whom it may concern, if you’re there.’” He had recently been informed that his grandson, named for him, had at seventeen years old declared himself an atheist.

His Truth Will Make a Difference

As a young person, you live in a world dominated by memes and internet trends. It is unlikely that you will live your life without a serious challenge to the faith that the people around you have worked so hard to pass on to you and which I hope you have embraced deeply. When that challenge happens, or even better, now, before the challenge comes, take yourself — and more importantly, Jesus — seriously. He said of Himself, “I am the way, the truth, and the life,” and His truth will make a difference in the way you live your life.

On August 25, 2010, at a meeting of Lutheran CORE that would at its close give birth to the separate organization of the North American Lutheran Church (NALC), I wrote this in my blog:

What the upcoming internet broadcasts and book are sure to fail to convey, however, is the sense of hopeful expectancy that characterizes these proceedings. The Spirit is definitely doing something amazing, as seemingly just the right people with just the precise expertise needed to tackle the issues before us as a church have been assembled from the disparate corners of North American Lutheranism. Not only has this been an immensely satisfying—though extremely challenging—couple of days intellectually, it has also been so emotionally and spiritually. … Simply put, it is humbling to be here.

Because
I had just taken a call at an ELCA church whose statement of faith aligned with
that of Lutheran CORE but who needed to yet have the conversation about whether
they could maintain that position within the ELCA, I would not join the ranks of
the NALC for another 5 years.  When I
finally did become a pastor of the NALC, it felt nice to simply breathe easily
for a while; to not feel like I was fighting every aspect of the institution
that was supposed to help me proclaim the gospel just for the
opportunity to do so.

No More Easy Breathing

Nine years into the NALC’s
life, the time for breathing easy is over.

Oh, we seem to be handling
our inevitable disagreements healthfully, without a trace of the Politburo-style
ecclesiastical maneuvering we all experienced within the ELCA, where, to paraphrase
Orwell, it was clear that “some Christians are more equal than others.”  There is also no hint of doctrinal departure
from Great Tradition Christianity or the revisionist hermeneutics that breed
the same—yet.

I add the “yet” in that last sentence not because I see it happening now but can foresee it happening before my funeral liturgy.  I foresee this as I teach my confirmation class full of 7^th and 8^th graders and my Tuesday morning Bible study full of 70 and 80 year olds, because I see the vast distance between the experiential, intellectual, and imaginative worlds they inhabit.  The older group are largely unaware of how different the world the young live in is from the one they grew up in and they are shocked when I acquaint them with some of its contours.  The young are being trained by their schools, entertainment, and constant diet of technology to view the older as at best hopelessly out of touch with the self-evidently true and even scientifically “proven” categories of the new (liberal) orthodoxy.  At worst, they are being trained to view them as oppressors to be forcefully sidelined, re-educated—and if necessary, silenced.

Oh, the latter, rage-filled
part of that progression will largely not come until their thorough catechesis
into the new civic religion at the collegiate level, but the foundations are being
laid far earlier.  Six years ago, I had a
youth group member inform me that she was an “LGBT ally,” and many more former
youth group members have done the same. 
Some of these had attended the local evangelical Christian high
school.  Others were attending an
evangelical fellowship in college and were even engaged in active Christian
outreach on campus.

Could I have imagined such a reality, coming of age in the 1980’s?  Could my Bible study participants, doing the same in Eisenhower’s America, have imagined it?  Could the founders of the NALC imagine, less than a decade ago, that a local fire company would raise money by offering as bingo prizes not homemade jams and pies but sex toys or the billboard pictured with this article, planted in the heart of historically Pennsylvania Dutch country?  Could they imagine that people could be publicly shamed and careers summarily ended for even questioning whether a person’s experience of being in the wrong body could be anything other than an absolute and legitimate expression of identity?

It is a brave new world.

The Authority of Holy Scripture

I focus on the sexuality issues not because of any inherent interest in them, but because as Dr. Robert Gagnon noted so many years ago, you cannot espouse the new, affirming positions on these issues without evacuating the Bible of its authority as Holy Scripture and the Word of God.  You cannot affirm the authority of Genesis while espousing a “non-binary” (Trans) view of human sexuality.  As the ELCA has recently confirmed, without a high view of Biblical authority, you cannot assert the uniqueness and necessity of Jesus Christ for human salvation.  It was by reflection upon the books that we know as the canonical New Testament that the Council of Nicaea shifted from being predominantly Arian in its view of Christ to articulating the doctrine we know as the Hypostatic Union with near uniformity.  (Not surprisingly, Arius and a close personal friend held out for their own view against the assembly.)  It was fifteen years ago that an ELCA pastor brazenly asserted to me as a seminarian at a regional youth gathering that, “we only know about the Trinity from the Bible; God could easily be more like the Hindu idea of Brahmin, having countless avatar pseudopods to minister to the ‘endlessly diverse people’ s/he has created.’”

Without a high view of Biblical
authority, we can glean from its pages the sorts of vaguely inspiring ideas
about God that are largely our projections in the first place, but we cannot receive
revelations about God—or about God’s will for us, His creatures. 

Danger of Theological Revisionism

And that is exactly what theological
revisionism is all about; it is about recasting God’s revelations as human
conceptions, and once everything is a human conception, all is mere politics,
the rules of which we know well from Plato, Hobbes, Machiavelli, Nietzsche, and
Foucault… not to mention Marx, Lenin, Mao, and Alinsky.  In such a world, it is perfectly legitimate
for the philosopher-kings-and-queens to determine which views are “more equal
than others” and to eliminate cross-examination in the interest of “justice.” 

And this is exactly what is
happening.  Consider this letter sent by
‘We, few of the Black students here at Pomona College and the Claremont
Colleges’ to the administration of Claremont McKenna College, who had dared to
permit conservative scholar Heather Mac Donald to speak on campus:

Historically, white supremacy has venerated the idea of objectivity, and wielded a dichotomy of ‘subjectivity vs. objectivity’ as a means of silencing oppressed peoples. The idea that there is a single truth – ‘the Truth’ – is a construct of the Euro-West that is deeply rooted in the Enlightenment, which was a movement that also described Black and Brown people as both subhuman and impervious to pain. This construction is a myth and white supremacy, imperialism, colonization, capitalism, and the United States of America are all of its progeny. The idea that the truth is an entity for which we must search, in matters that endanger our abilities to exist in open spaces, is an attempt to silence oppressed peoples.[1]

Unlikely Ally

Douglas Murray recounts the
incident in his recent book The Madness of Crowds.  If a gay intellectual from Great Britain
seems an unlikely ally of a Christianity that is both evangelical and catholic,
read the way he goes on to analyze this letter:

“‘The Truth’ is a construct of the Euro-West. It is hard to think of a phrase which can at one and the same time be so wildly misguided and so dangerous in its implications. If ‘the Truth’ (in scare quotes) is a white thing, then what is everyone else meant to live in and strive towards?” 

Stalin pithily noted, “Ideas
are far more powerful than guns. We don’t let our people have guns. Why should
we let them have ideas?”  Our young
people are being deprived of the most important idea ever, an idea that is not
white or black, gay or straight, Christian or otherwise; they are being
systematically deprived of the idea of truth.  Furthermore, they are being taught that the
pursuit of it is disloyal, bigoted, and dangerous.

Future Outlook of the NALC

As a fellow NALC clergyman noted to me recently, “The NALC was formed at the last possible moment it could have been, historically-speaking.”  This undoubtedly displays an admirable ecclesiological instinct, for it is indeed part of Great Tradition Christianity that the Church of Jesus Christ is “one, holy, catholic, and apostolic.”  It also sets forth the challenge clearly before us, as it was founded by people I would categorize as the last well-catechized generations.  Here I refer to their catechesis not only with the Church, but their cultural catechesis as well.  Most of us on the clergy roster of the NALC are still here because we underwent a migration made necessary by counter-cultural convictions.  What will become of the NALC as its first native-born daughters and sons rise to offices of prominence within the church?  Philosophy was once described as the handmaiden to theology because it provided categories of meaning that helped people do the very difficult work of theology.  What will happen to the church’s proclamation when its young pastors have not been formed in the fundamental categories of meaning that make clear thinking about the Bible possible?  What will happen to it if they are convinced by their primer school training that to even consider certain ideas makes them the moral equivalent of a Nazi?

Students of Christian history
can broadly trace the theological revisionism of our day back through the
social gospel movement of the early 20^th century to the “higher
critics” of the Enlightenment.  It is a
history of more than ideas; it is a history of people, of champions of ideas
who viewed themselves as the saviors of a movement with some social utility
(Christianity) whose convictions were hopelessly backwards and out of touch
with the “obvious truths” of the modern world. 
For all orthodox Lutherans, the NALC included, the challenge is to catechize
a new generation of theologians from elementary school age on up in an
intentionally countercultural way. 
We will need to be aware of the prevailing ideas and neologisms that are
being introduced in a deliberate ploy to undermine a worldview congruent with
that of orthodox Biblical Christianity. 
As Christians, we have no stake in Western culture qua Western
culture, but to the degree that what we know as Western culture is the product
of Christian theology, including its emphasis on truth as a fundamental
category of meaning, we need to advocate for what is in imminent danger of
being lost.

Written nearly thirty years
ago, in his classic book The Once and Future Church, Loren Mead noted
that the West was becoming the Church’s new mission field and that state church
traditions like Lutheranism, used as they were to cultural underwriting of
their religious project, were likely to have the most difficulty adapting to this
new reality.  It remains for us to
determine whether his words were merely cautionary… or prophetic.

We Must Teach All Our People

Most importantly of all, we need to communicate to our people from the oldest to the youngest how the orthodox Biblical teachings on creation and fall, judgment and grace, repentance and forgiveness, faith and obedience, spiritual bondage and true freedom are more compelling and truly loving than the secular narratives with which they are being daily indoctrinated.  We must teach them who God is and who we are meant to be as creatures made in His image but defaced by sin almost to the point of being unrecognizable.  We must teach them that because of that reality, no matter the strength of our emotions, our own narratives about our inner lives are not the most reliable story about ourselves, but rather God’s story about us, recounted in the Bible, holds primacy of place.

We must do this knowing
that our work is being undermined both by determined ideologues and
well-meaning people engaged in herd behavior, what Murray accurately deems “the
madness of crowds.”  We must be clear
with them that this dynamic is going to be part of their experience as
Christians in this culture without becoming reactionary or uncharitable toward
those who hate us. 

In one of the responses to my Postmodernism articles, I was accused of being a “reactionary theologian.”  I confess that I have never heard the term before, but it sounds like the sort of jingoistic turn of phrase intended to make the hard work of thinking through complex issues unnecessary—a word like “anti-revolutionary.”  On the August day in 2010 recounted earlier, Dr. Steven D. Paulson reminded the gathered assembly that Martin Luther had noted that “it is a characteristic of love to be easily deceived.”  We must highlight this reality and remind them that their love—especially their love of friends and the consequent alliances they make with them—like the rest of themselves, is fallen, disordered, and so, unreliable until it is conformed to the revealed Word of God.

The Frog

We all know the old saw.  How do you boil a frog?  If you put him in hot water he will jump out
before he gets too injured, but if you put him in cold water and turn up the
heat slowly, he will be boiled before he knows what happened to him.

Most reading this article have spent our lives watching the Lutheran frog being boiled.  Some of us felt the need to “go out and be separate.”  If we hope to not see our frogs boiled in the way other communions have unfortunately experienced, we will need to be intentionally countercultural.  Our catechesis and our sermons will need to be apologetic in tone, whether we are apologists by vocation or not.  We will need to listen carefully to a world that hates us so we may build bridges to their linguistics worlds of meaning and so that we can dismantle Trojan Horses meant to destroy Christianity and its necessarily attendant, coherent worldview from within.

In 1809, biographer Thomas
Charlton popularized the phrase, “the price of liberty is eternal vigilance” in
our newly-birthed republic.  The bloody
reign of terror had just recently ended in France, a cautionary tale for those
who might have complacently believed that the new order was enough to insure
against future tyranny. 

We ought to take a lesson from this page of history.  The price of the liberty that the true gospel of Jesus Christ alone can bring is free, but the price of preaching that gospel fully and faithfully is eternal vigilance.

Vigilance Required

On August 26, 2010, as the
theological conference transitioned to the constituting convocation of a
re-visioned Lutheran CORE, I reflected in my blog that “it was time to see if
this dog would hunt.”  Could the ideas we
had bandied about for two days now become incarnate, take on flesh in a living
institution that actually facilitated the living proclamation of “the eternal
gospel” in the ways God has ordained that it should?

As I reflect on the state of the Church and the
nature of its current mission in the wake of Reformation Sunday, I give thanks
that it could happen, but I note that we are sitting in water that seems to be
already getting warm.  Vigilance is
required.

---

[1]
Murray, Douglas. The Madness of Crowds . Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

The board of Lutheran CORE would like to thank Brett Jenkins for the time he has served on the board.  Brett is an ardent defender of the historic, orthodox Christian faith.  He has added greatly to the ministry of Lutheran CORE through the contributions he has made to the discussions at our meetings as well as the articles he has written.  Notable among these articles are the ones he has written about the post-modern worldview which is reflected in the ELCA social statement on “Faith, Sexism, and Justice.”  We wish Brett God’s richest blessings in his continued ministry and are very happy that he is willing to continue writing for Lutheran CORE.

I was pleased that my Postmodernism Gone Viral article garnered a decent amount of response both positive and negative from those who read it.  Though I have no doubt that my rhetorical hacking did not quite reach the “roots of evil” present in the document, that it instigated such responses may indicate that I was at least striking heartwood rather than mere leaves.  In this article I will respond to the criticisms I received as a result of publishing the initial article.  Because these criticisms were received as private correspondence rather than “letters to the editor,” I do not feel I can publish the full texts of them.  I will therefore try to faithfully capture the gist of the criticisms, though I will not reproduce the verbal abuse.

To be sure, the ELCA’s proposed social
statement Faith, Sexism, and Justice
is not a battleground I would have chosen or even expected to engage.  My mother was an original 1970’s feminist and
although as an adult I hardly walk in lock-step with her views any more than your
typical grown child, she raised all three of her boys to see the world in
fundamentally the same way.  I am in deep
sympathy with the impetus behind the social statement, which makes the timbre
of the accusations leveled at me in the negative correspondence more difficult
to bear.  Those accusations included being
motivated by “hate” (this, at least, was expected), not understanding
postmodernism, not having actually read
the proposed social statement (this was incredible), appointing myself the
gatekeeper of what it means to be Lutheran, and acting like an “angry,
resentful spouse after a bad breakup.”

Undermining the Faith Once Delivered

Although, along with the charges of sexism and a fear of white male heterosexuals losing their cultural hegemony, the accusation of hate was anticipated, it does not make it less painful or untrue; my article was clear as to my motivations.  Love, whether agape, storge, or philia, does not affirm or neglect when it finds the beloved to be in serious — let alone, grave — error.  The desire to pursue justice is noble, but the adoption of postmodern categories of meaning in the pursuit of justice (including those advanced by gender as opposed to equity feminism, a distinction I recognize) rather than the use of those categories revealed to us in Holy Scripture is, in my estimation, dangerous, undermining “the faith delivered once for all to the saints.”

It is fascinating for me to speculate on how someone could infer that I have not read the proposed social statement; how could I level the critique I do without reading the document in question?  I must say that it is the emotional timbre of some of my hate mail letters that strikes me as reactionary, imputing to me a lack of knowledge and poor motivation where none is in evidence in the actual text of what I wrote.  While my acquaintance with the reality of postmodernism dates from my undergraduate days in the arts, my acquaintance with its theoretical underpinnings goes back to the required reading assigned to my wife during her doctoral work in the mid-90’s.  I do not claim to be an expert in postmodernism (who can be with its deliberately amorphous categories of meaning?), but I am well acquainted with it.  We can disagree with one another without impugning each other’s character, knowledge, or motivations.

Gatekeeper? Yes!

Who made me “a gate keeper of what it
means to be Lutheran?”  Since the Lutheran reformers rejected the
authority of the Roman Magisterium, that is a responsibility that falls to all who call themselves Lutheran. 
It is our dialogue, what philosopher Charles Taylor refers to as our “web of
interlocution,” utilizing common theological reference points that defines the
“Lutheran family.”  The great majority of the Lutherans of the
Two-Thirds World have been warning us for a long time that we here in the West
are jumping off a theological cliff, departing from the theological fold, using
sophisticated language (that is, sophistry)
to disguise even from ourselves that we are becoming apostates.  I suggest
that it is high time we drop our neo-colonial sense of intellectual and moral
superiority and heed their voices.

Range of Emotions

As for acting like an “angry resentful
spouse after a bad breakup,” while the metaphor is faulty (I initiated the
separation, so the breakup wasn’t “bad” for me), I will own what I
imagine are the emotions of someone in that situation in the following manner:

I am angry that what I describe as a “viral” ideology, foreign to the mind of the church catholic and the Lutheran tradition, largely eclipsed solid confessional theology within my own seminary and professional experience within the ELCA; had I not had theological colleagues and conversation partners with broader experience and advanced degrees, I might have entirely missed the great voice of Christian orthodoxy speaking its Gospel wisdom down the ages.  (I wrote about this in a Forum Letter article in 2010.)  It upsets me that many bearing the name of Lutheran do not (or cannot) distinguish Law from Gospel in a way that engenders sorrow, contrition — and yes, terror — for sin in the hearts of people, that they have no idea that Two Kingdoms theology is inseparable from the broader tapestry of Luther’s thought, and that they do not understand why Luther so stridently rejected all “theologies of glory.”  I confess that I view all forms of “liberation theology” as theologies of glory because they seem to believe that humanity, whose best possible ontological condition is simul iustus et peccator, possesses the insight, wisdom, and character to forge a just system in anything more than the most provisional of ways.  This includes a functional theology that treats our necessary pursuit of justice as a form of realized eschatology.  “God’s Work: Our Hands” is the last motto any church bearing the name Lutheran should ever have considered, let alone adopted.

In my view such people—many of whom I love
deeply at a personal level—are Lutheran by connection to historically Lutheran
institutions rather than historically-conditioned theological conviction. 
It is why they work so hard to redefine or “re-imagine” Christianity
as a thing no Christian prior to their own historical moment would recognize as
bearing any resemblance to their own.

I resent what the ELCA is
increasingly becoming because in my estimation it besmirches a solid
theological tradition. I love many, many people who gather at its Communion
rails and I am afraid for them… afraid that they are being convinced that an
alien cultural ideology can be “baptized” and made authentically
Christian.  And because this ideology often takes the place of authentic
proclamation of the Gospel “whereby sinners may repent and have
life,” I am afraid that the salvation of such people may even be imperiled,
for faith means nothing without its object.  As Pr. Tim Keller (a Reformed
theologian) puts it succinctly, “Strong faith in a weak branch is
infinitely inferior to weak faith in a strong branch.”

Theologians Call Out Theological Errors

The first great theologian of the Church after Paul was Irenaeus, and his seminal treatise was entitled Against Heresies.  Augustine fought against the error of Pelagius, and Luther disputed both the Roman Curia and the Anabaptists.  It is part of the catholic tradition of the church to call out theological error when one sees it with a force in accord with the depth of the error perceived.  Because the categories endemic to postmodernism undermine and effectively preclude the Church’s traditional theological discourse as a thing engaged with categories of Truth rather than mere political power, it is quite possible that my article may actually have been too tempered and moderate in its timbre.  Theology is not mere “word games” nor is it predominantly “metaphorical” as Sally McFague would have it; it is the use of words with real referents to describe (or attempt to describe) genuine realities.  Theology is properly understood as “the queen of the sciences,” not some sort of “me too” liberal art that can hope to do no more than follow gratefully where her social and intellectual betters, philosophy, anthropology, and psychology, lead the way.

Fatal Flaws

One piece of negative mail I received ended by asking me “in the Love of all that is Holy, [to] read the document (FSJ) with an open mind.”  It seemed to assume that the only reason an open-minded, Gospel-motivated individual would fail to embrace Faith, Sexism, and Justice was a predisposition against it.  I remember David Mills once writing something to the effect that, “A person properly opens their mind for the same reason they open their mouths; to bite down upon something.”  I bit down upon FSJ and found it wanting in both substance and taste; I have explained my reasons — I hope persuasively — so that some with open minds will be persuaded to vote against it or at least amend it to correct the worst of what I view as its fatal flaws.

So, I end this series of articles by paraphrasing
my critic and begging people, for the love of Jesus, who with the Father and
the Spirit alone is Holy, to read
again my critiques with an open mind… and read the work of the French
Structuralists I referenced to see whether I have misrepresented the
implications of their work.[1]  If I understand them
right, postmodernism is acid to the foundations of Christian theology and faith…
and is to be utterly rejected in all its forms.

---

[1] As an introduction to the topic of
postmodernism, I suggest the book by Frederic Jameson of the same name with the
subtitle The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism; it is an oldie but
goody.

I originally intended my Postmodernism Gone Viral article as a one-off, but the response (both positive and negative) has been so strong that I realized there was a bit more to say on the subject.  Furthermore, that article was based on the draft document, and since I wrote it, the final proposal that the ELCA will consider for adoption has been issued.  Before my brother and sister Lutherans in the ELCA adopt Faith, Sexism, and Justice (FSJ), there is another issue that could have immediate, direct ripple effects into the other Lutheran bodies.  I will address this most serious issue in this article and then take on some of the criticisms I have received in a final installment, which won’t be published until after the die is cast regarding the adoption of FSJ.

Despite a few obligatory pious gestures to convince us that it is in fact “drawing on the deepest strands” of the faith tradition it largely critiques, it is clear that FSJ views the Christian and Jewish traditions as primarily providing impediments and challenges to its objectives.  It is therefore unsurprising that the document is significantly out of step with the Christian (and Jewish) traditions of 2000+ years. 

Goodbye to Sound Doctrine

A ready example is provided in the document’s first treatment of Scripture; here what is jettisoned is the tradition of sound exegesis guiding doctrine.  Since poor exegesis can take on a life of its own, getting copied and re-used by others beyond the bounds of the ELCA, I felt that this should be addressed prior to the ELCA deciding whether to give FSJ canonical status.

Proof?

Some rather dubious translation and exegetical footwork is engaged in to “prove” that the text of Genesis 2:7 shows God originally forming an un-sexed human being.  The proposed social statement uses a translation of this text rendered by Phyllis Trible in her book God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality:

“then Yahweh God formed the earth creature [hā-’ādām] dust from the earth [hā-ʼͣdāmȃ]
and breathed into its nostrils the breath of life,
and the earth creature [hā-’ādām] became a living nephesh [being]” 

[FSJ 419-422: I will reference excerpts from Faith, Sexism, and Justice using its own study numbers.]

Relying on Ms. Trible’s work based upon this tendentious rendering of the text, the document goes on to assert that:

In Hebrew, the word for “Adam” means “earth creature;” it is not a proper name but a poetic play upon the Hebrew word for earth. English translations of Genesis refer to “Adam” being formed first and refer to this earth creature as a male, but the original language never suggests that a man was created first. Rather, it recounts the creation of all humanity. Only later does the text refer to distinct bodies, called “Adam” and “Eve.”

[FSJ 423-427]

New Assertion

Of course, noting the relationship between the words hā-’ādām and hā-ʼͣdāmȃ is covering no new exegetical ground, but the assertion that hā-’ādām refers to “the creation of all humanity” is new… and it ignores several striking contra-indicators about the canonical text.  First, it ignores that in its canonical position, this story serves as a complement to Genesis 1:27, “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them,” which clearly refers to the creation of all humanity.  In its canonical position, the Genesis 2 account adds a layer of narrative detail to the rather sparse account of Genesis 1.   

Poetic Word Play

The assertion that hā-’ādām is, of course, “not a proper name but [only] a poetic play upon the Hebrew word for earth” is not sustainable in the face of the remainder of the Genesis 2 narrative.  It ignores that hā-’ādām never undergoes a formal naming as does his wife in verse 3:20.  A consistent use of Dr. Trible’s hermeneutic should then have us logically declare that Eve is not a proper name, but rather only a poetic trope upon the Hebrew word for life.  Are we to believe Adam (and the rest of the creatures in the Genesis story) are not alive until Eve receives her name in verse 3:20?  The proposition is ludicrous in the extreme.

All of this means that hā-’ādām [Adam] is the name of the first human, and that this name is apt precisely because it is descriptive.  This last point is especially important given the dramatic contours of that happen next; Adam goes on to name “every living creature,” a task that requires that apt, descriptive names be found for each even as his own name is apt and descriptive.  The dramatic significance of Adam’s name crescendos to a climax when the Lord pronounces His judgment over the disobedience of Adam and his wife (not yet named) by proclaiming “By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground [hā-ʼͣdāmȃ], for out of it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” (Genesis 3:19)

Clearly Male

That the first human in the Genesis 2 story is clearly male is indicated by the manner of the woman’s creation in verses 2:21-25.  The creation of the woman from Adam’s bone indicates (among many other things) that Adam is male and his as-yet unnamed wife is female.  The narrative climax comes in Adam’s doxological hymn, “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman (ʾiš·šā(h), because she was taken out of Man (ʾîš).” (Genesis 2:23)  That the woman is different from the man sexually is the very basis of her identification and clearly marks out Adam as different from her—that is already, prior to his wife’s creation, male.  Furthermore, Adam’s thanks is proffered because the woman is the essential “helper” that Adam needs.  Hence the apt, descriptive naming of her in accord with her creation; a naming after the same manner as Adam.  However, what the text pushes us to recognize is that her telos as “helper” is made possible by the very fact of her sexual differentiation from Adam, whose sex is already determined and unchanged by her creation.

Far from the social statement’s contention that Genesis 2:7 portrays the creation of humanity in general, the actual text of this verse shows the creation of a singular human nephesh (being), while the creation of humanity (human community and a species capable of being “fruitful and multiplying”) is not accomplished in the Genesis 2 story until verse 22. 

Sexually Differentiated Humanity

Both the Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 accounts therefore show God creating humanity in a sexually differentiated complementarity, a fact that the document wishes at all costs to avoid recognizing because it wishes to achieve a “reading of the Scriptures [that] promotes an understanding of human diversity that is not limited by either a binary or a hierarchical view of gender.” [FSJ 457-458]  The authors of the document must have realized the evident meaning of the original texts, because one of the things that changed from the earlier draft provided for commentary and the one to be considered for adoption at the ELCA’s upcoming churchwide assembly is the next line of analysis:  “The differentiation of humankind into male and female, expressed in Genesis 2, communicates the joy found in humans having true partners, true peers” of the earlier draft document has become in the text proposed for adoption, “The differentiation of humankind expressed in the creation stories communicates…”  In the original draft statement, the authors had inadvertently fallen back into exegesis—reading the text according to its clearly intended meaning—something that needed to be course-corrected in the document to be adopted by the church as official teaching.

Conflagration of Influences

Such unadulterated eisegesis of the most ham-fisted variety should be expected in any document that is deeply influenced by the conflagration of deconstructionism, post-structuralism, Marxism, and reactive, sophomoric cultural analysis that fits under the umbrella of postmodernism.  This is because, as I asserted in my last article, postmodernism views integrity to the data—coherence—as utterly superfluous to the true purposes of communication. 

Course Correction

And this gives me the chance to course-correct a failure of my first article—my failure to state explicitly the observation that led me to draft the article in the first place.  FSJ is more than disingenuous, it is hypocritical because it uses privileged communication from a position of hierarchical advantage to promote the ideology of egalitarianism.  In a technocratic meritocracy like our own, positions purportedly based upon “scholarship” or “expert testimony” like the aforementioned work of Dr. Phyllis Trible carry undue weight and have disproportionate influence.  The inclusion of the transliterated Hebrew words helps bamboozle the nominally educated and those who “just want fairness” (a noble predisposition) into thinking that the contentions of the social statement are supported by solid, relatively incontrovertible scholarship.  This leads inexorably to the conviction that there can be no principled reason to oppose the social statement, and that those so opposed must be of bad character, prompted by despicable (dare one say, deplorable?) motives.

We All Suffer

I have had the opportunity to experience firsthand this resultant dynamic in the less-than-thoughtful, reactionary responses to some of my articles over the years.  I will address some of the correspondence I received over part 1 of this article in the next issue of CORE Voice, but I end this article by noting that all of us suffer when the methodologies employed by FSJ are utilized.  Many have bemoaned the current state of political discourse in America, but few have noted that postmodernism, by removing all objective reference points and reducing all social interactions to mere exercises of power, necessarily forces our philosophical, moral, political, and theological discourse to this extremity.  For a Sola Scriptura tradition like Lutheranism, solid exegesis is the objective touchpoint that prevents our theology from becoming mere tribalism and enables it to retain its character as an expression of the “one holy catholic and apostolic faith.”  On these terms, FSJ not only fails to be an aspect of this faith, but it hypocritically attempts to use privileged internal mechanisms of that faith — Biblical exegesis and church governance structures — to establish a purportedly egalitarian ideology.  These are just two more reasons for its rejection by any church that hopes to remain part of the Church of Jesus Christ.

by Brett Jenkins, member of the board of Lutheran CORE

Editor’s note: Originally called “Draft Social Statement on Women and Justice,” the document which was developed by the ELCA Task Force on Women and Justice and which has been approved by both the ELCA Conference of Bishops and the ELCA Church Council for consideration by the 2019 ELCA Churchwide Assembly is called, “Faith, Sexism, and Justice: A Lutheran Call to Action.” The ELCA Churchwide Assembly will take place in August 2019.

“Ah! Words! Just words!” the person shouted to the man at the lectern whose speech had just concluded. “Who told you culture is a search for coherence? Where do you get that idea from? This idea of coherence is a Western idea.”

Coherent or Incoherent

I heard Ravi
Zacharias tell this story.  With a
quickness of wit that I can only marvel at, he responded to the person (whom he
later learned was transgendered) by saying, “Before I answer you, Madame, let
me ask you this, then: would you prefer that my answer be coherent or
incoherent?”[1]

---

It is a dangerous proposition to write about someone else’s writing; history is full of literary, philosophical, and political critiques that were complete misfires (often cleverly worded) because the author misunderstood what he was reading. They did this because, not being part of what Charles Taylor would aptly deem the “web of interlocution” from which the original document arose, they misunderstood what was being proposed in the first place.

Having left the ELCA, grateful for the friendships and even some of the formation I enjoyed there but much more grateful to leave behind the posture of defensiveness that necessarily accompanied my ministry as a self-consciously orthodox Christian within it, I wondered actively about the idea of writing this article. I even resisted the pressure of colleagues to do so. I am a pastor of the North American Lutheran Church, and this newsletter has already featured one excellent critique by another NALC pastor, Rev. Cathy Ammlung as well as a critique by ELCA pastor, Stephen Gjerde. Both articles were detailed and incisive, so what can I add to them?

Analysis of the Introduction

Actually I can add one thing: an analysis of how the introduction of the ELCA’s proposed social statement Women and Justice represents the broader conflict of worldviews active within our culture, of which I am, indeed, still a part.

Rev. Ammlung noted in her critique numerous points on which the draft social statement was not only out of step with the Christian (and Jewish) traditions of 2000+ years, but even seemed internally incoherent, out of step with itself. Indeed, as Rev. Ammlung noted pithily, “It’s hard, though, to see in this draft how God’s revealed Word is greater than the sum of feminist, intersectional, and ‘gender/sexual justice’ language.”

Impossible

It is not hard to see—it is impossible to see, for there is no evidence to the contrary in the document, nor should we expect there to be. The constellation of “feminist, intersectional, and ‘gender/sexual justice’ language” emerges from a larger worldview wholly at variance with the Scripture’s line of sight, that of postmodernism.

Gender Feminists

In 1994, doctoral candidate in Women’s Studies at Wellesley, Christina Hoff-Somers, recognized that a foreign ideology had hijacked the equity-seeking feminism of the movement’s progenitors, separating the movement into what she deemed “equity feminists” and “gender feminists,” the latter being the product of postmodern thinking married to the aims of feminism. The feminism with which most readers will be familiar from their time as an undergraduate, on a seminary campus, or from the shriller, attention-getting voices on the nightly news is of the gender feminist lineage, which frequently claims that those Hoff-Sommers characterizes as “equity feminists” are not feminists at all, for they do not share the postmodern presuppositions that undergird their narrative and analysis.

Power

To whit, rooted in the work of theoreticians like Derrida and Foucault, postmodernism sees all social interactions (like the proposed social statement) as “word games,” and word games with only one goal: the exercise of power.

Language of Justice,
Science and Religious Truth

In such an account of the world, there is no way to discern good from evil, truth from falsehood, for all such language is merely a ruse, a “word game” to disguise the naked aggression of one person or group against another. In the view of postmodernism, we are all possessed of worldviews incommensurate with one another and irreconcilable, so our only alternative is civil war through our word games. The intersectional feminist gender-fluid activist by their own reckoning uses the language of justice, science, and religious truth but is merely a campaigner for their own peculiar position—just like everyone else.

Civil War Through
Word Games

Postmodernism allows for temporary alliances but not ultimately the pursuit of jointly-held truth or justice. Witness the growing voices within the gay community expressing relief in the fact that they came of age before the rise of transgenderism because they believe if they were coming of age now they would be forced into hormone therapy and miss out on the adult identity they now espouse. Because postmodernism believes in no higher truth or objective reality to which language correlates but only the exercise of power, it can never be more than a sophisticated exercise in narcissism, an assertion of self over-and-against everything and everyone else.

Sophisticated Narcissism

“Everyone else” necessarily includes God, of course… at least if God is purported to do anything other than underwrite our own self-perceptions and exercise of power through our word games. The postmodernist can use the language of “the Word of God,” but they cannot mean by it what Christians have historically meant—a revelation of something we could not have known without the active initiative of God. Nor can they mean by it what Lutherans have meant by it when they distinguish within that Word Law and Gospel. For both Law and Gospel reveal to us a self so impoverished and depraved it is impossible to affirm, the Law by revealing our inability to be righteous and the Gospel by revealing that we can only be saved by Christ’s righteousness, one utterly alien to ourselves.

Incoherence of
Postmodern Thought

There is a reason why the great theologian Augustine defined sin using the phrase in curvatus in se—“being turned in upon oneself.” When we turn within, seeking something affirmable by God, we cannot find our prelapsarian innocence, and what we produce is the incoherence that characterizes all postmodern thought, including the ELCA’s proposed social statement Women and Justice. The founders of postmodernism actively sought to reject the “Logo-centrism” of Western culture, that is, the logic—the coherence—born of a worldview flowing from a belief in the Logos, belief in an ordering principle within the world that does not take its cues from autonomous human actors.

God Brings Order
and Love

Of course, in the case of Christians, that Logos “became flesh and dwelt among us.” (John 1:14) God’s first act in the Book of Genesis is to call order forth from the primordial chaos, and He uses His Word to do so. The God revealed by the Scriptures is the bringer of order, of coherence.
The amazing news of the Gospel is that this bringer of order does not look upon our profound disorder—our sin—and simply destroy both it and us. In the words of one of my favorite LGBTQIA+ authors, “It is not the perfect but the imperfect who have need of love.” The Gospel is that God knew this long before Oscar Wilde and “so loved the world, that he gave his only Son”—the order-bringing Logos—“that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.”

Order is Inherently
Hierarchical

Unfortunately, the God who brings order and coherence to not just the created order but our own lives in spite of us is necessarily antithetical to the worldview underlying the ELCA’s proposed social statement, for order is inherently hierarchical; it privileges truth over falsehood and so some narratives over others. This God also calls us away from the contemplation of ourselves—away from seeking affirmation of any sort, no matter what we find within our experience—and to the contemplation of Jesus Christ, in whom alone we are to find our un-hyphenated identity. Far from the postmodern de-legitimization of distinctions inferred by postmodern exegetes, Galatians 3:27–28 (“For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”) teaches us that only Christ is acceptable to God and so we are to find our true identity in Him, not in any other identity, real or imagined.

ELCA Anti-logic

The unity gestured to by Paul as he ends this thought is not incidental. Just as the word adhere means “to stick together,” so the word cohere means “to form a whole.” The unity in justice that is to characterize the Body of Christ and claims to be sought by the ELCA’s latest social statement cannot be pursued using it as the mechanism, for its own internal logic is anti-logic; it reviles any coherence that would not privilege every self-perception and self-identification.

Viral Attack

A virus uses the body’s own self-defense system to undo an organism. The ELCA’s proposed social statement Women and Justice is necessarily incoherent because, in ways I assume its authors may not even be aware of because they have probably not read the primary texts that gave birth to postmodernism (Foucault and Derrida are, after all, inordinately difficult authors to plow through), it appropriates the language of truth and justice, sin and righteousness, Law and Gospel, and uses them virus-like to hobble and, if possible, undo the order-bringing work of God’s Word, inverting its meaning as necessary in order to serve an agenda not born of the Word itself. Women and Justice is an example of postmodernism gone viral within the Body of Christ, seeking to destroy it, and if the ELCA hopes to remain Christian in a way that will permit them to be recognized as such by other Christians not held captive to the postmodern mindset, they must not only reject it, but the worldview that informs it.

Moreover, all Christian communions functioning within the increasingly-postmodern West must be on guard against the same virus that has so deeply infected the ELCA and other mainline, revisionist Protestant bodies as well as (smaller) sections of the Roman Catholic and even Orthodox churches. It is in the water around us, and we must fortify our immune systems against it if we hope to not have our health compromised… or worse, to die as non-Christians mouthing Christian-sounding words.

Justice can and must be pursued for not just women and minorities but all people without de-privileging the truth or re-writing the Word of God. The Logos—coherence Himself—demands it.

[1] https://www.rzim.org/read/just-thinking-magazine/an-ancient-message-through-modern-means-to-a-postmodern-mind

Image [of virus attacking cell] by Darwin Laganzon from Pixabay

Photo [Protest]
by Peyton Sickles on Unsplash

Editor’s note: The article below by Pastor Brett Jenkins originally appeared in the July 2018 newsletter.

Click here to read this very short and helpful article.