It started with Holy Communion.  When people ask me to share my experience with leaving the ELCA, the story begins where questions of church fellowship must always begin: the altar.

Following the churchwide votes of 2009, people started using “impaired communion” more frequently to describe the ELCA’s situation.  I particularly recall David Yeago using it to good effect.  To commune is to share something in common, and what the Church shares is Christ.  Not only the 2009 votes, but also the long trajectory of the ELCA’s doctrinal development, made it clear that differing Christs were confessed in the ELCA.

I remember a dedicated revisionist agreeing with me, already in 2003.  “Yes,” he said, “that would be the classical Lutheran understanding of our situation.”  Communion could not proceed as usual.  I realize that many people, including many conservatives, might disagree with that diagnosis.  But that’s where my experience began: the simple recognition that “impaired communion” impairs Communion.  It is there, at the altar, that impaired communion is either repaired, or it is not.

Our first bishop under this new circumstance didn’t like our perspective, especially when we informed him that we would no longer host the Supper at conference or synodical events, but he did not press us to change.  The second bishop was far less sympathetic.  Here I should pause and note that we’ve already encountered two key points about leaving the ELCA.  Having led two congregations out of the ELCA, and counseled and accompanied several others, I’ve seen these points prove valuable time and again.

First, start by asking what your dissatisfaction with the ELCA has to do with doctrine, if anything at all—determine if you disagree on the fundamental question of “Who do you say that I am?”—and distinguish those concerns from other, lesser ones (like, “We’re willing to bet we can get a pastor faster and cheaper somehow else” [unfavorable odds, honestly]).  Then, if you have a doctrinal disagreement, ask yourself how Jesus repairs that sort of thing.  Is it at the conference table, debating constitutions, or at His table, communing or not communing? 

At the very least, that sort of reflection will help clarify your thought.  Constitutions are works; Communion is grace.  Are your problems with the ELCA work problems or grace problems?  If grace is being misunderstood, then the place to begin the remedy (and, potentially, to begin changes in fellowship) is where grace is clarified.  Trying to address a grace problem through a works solution (i.e., trusting a constitutional rearrangement alone) won’t get at it, ever, because the problem is not disagreement about your works, but about the Lord’s gifts. 

Fumbling this distinction continues to hound the various departure movements, I would suggest.   Holy Communion is where Jesus forgives sins.  So, if we now disagree over what sins He forgives, how He forgives them, or who He even is, then we also disagree about what He does at His altar.  Burying that simple problem under layers of constitutional finesse will not clarify the situation to you or to the people whom you serve—and when I say, “the people whom you serve,” I include representatives of your synod, which brings me to the second point.

One bishop is not like another.  Like you and me, each is his or her own little bundle of insecurities, aspirations, and ideas half finished.  If you think it’s hard to be you, being you as an ELCA bishop would be ten times worse for everyone.  I don’t say so out of any animus towards those who hold the office.  We should sympathize with them.  The office as presently constituted is a nightmare, as if someone had found the corpse of a thirteenth-century bishop of Bangor and used an electrical storm to try combining it with Grok, only to find too much personality remained.  The point is: the bishops need your help.

The bishops and their representatives belong to a much larger organization that tries to solve grace problems with work solutions.  “Synod means walking together,” apparently, and each churchwide assembly tries to lock the step, but the differences only widen because they’re trying to heal a flesh wound with a welding torch.  Still, that’s the solution they have, and so the bishops and their representatives will come to you by way of constitution, not Communion.  If your beef is a grace problem, you will need to help them face it, not for the sake of justice or something like it (you’re a Christian, so there’s no room for revenge here), but for the sake of their own souls.  

They will not appreciate this idea.  It won’t be easy.  I call it “playing catch with someone who won’t throw back.”  Here’s how it went for me:

Bishop: “Well, Steve, thank very much for meeting with us today.  I appreciate that your time is valuable.  Why don’t we begin with you explaining to me what your concerns are?” [this starting point can be a trap, but that’s another article]

Me: [Explains my concerns.]

Bishop: [silence]

Me: [shrugs eyebrows]

Bishop: I’m not going to engage you on that topic right now.

Different words could be used. Sometimes no words would be used. There would simply be a long stare, followed by a deep breath and a change of subject.  At other times, there may be honeyed expressions of sympathy followed by continued denials: “That is not the problem.”  Or as one bishop put it to me, “I don’t accept what you’re saying, because I never learned that.”  He said so years ago, and it’s not a horrible answer in some instances.  But it is rather like being asked to play catch, and in good faith tossing the first pitch, only to watch the other person catch the ball, drop it in a bucket, and look back at you.

They won’t engage you on theology.  They don’t think it’s a grace problem.

So if you have a confessional point you want to make, you will need both to confess the truth and to create a situation in which they slow down long enough to a) hear it and b) consider their own confession in light of it.  At its best, the process of leaving the ELCA is an opportunity for everyone to walk away knowing more clearly who they are and why.  There are some synodical leaders who understand this, and if you should encounter some, you’ll feel the difference and be thankful for it.  Either way, remember that what you’re doing is for their sake, not yours, since you are a Christian.  The goal isn’t for you to win, nor is it only for the congregation to leave, but also for the bishop and their representatives to grow in the faith.  They will not necessarily look at it that way—to many of them, you are the problem, and you will be fixed constitutionally—and so you must help them see it.

You’ll do so by starting with Communion, not the constitution.

With all that said, there is one particular way that the ELCA constitutions perform a strangely gracious function, though I’ve rarely heard anyone acknowledge it.  By including in its governing documents a method for leaving the ELCA, the ELCA acknowledges that leaving its fellowship is both permissible and potentially good.  Constitutions are works and seek to govern works.  By including among their works the ability to leave the ELCA, the ELCA constitutions confess that it’s a potentially good work to do so.  If you are part of a congregation considering leaving the ELCA, please make that point to your congregation: the ELCA believes it’s okay to do this.

You’d be forgiven for not realizing it.  I do know one bishop who acknowledged that leaving can be a good work, and she didn’t even mean it in a passive aggressive way.  The acknowledgement is rare!  But no matter.  It’s there in print, and no church should pass into law something it thinks is inherently sinful.  If it is—if a church thinks that leaving is inherently wrong—then it needs to take the process right off the page.  But if it stays on the page, and so far it has, then every congregation needs to know that even the ELCA thinks this process is a totally okay thing.  Sure, you’ll sin along the way—watch for it; repent of it—but so it goes for every good work.  Abusus non tollit usum: the abuse of a thing does not nullify its use.

Don’t look at the process as your enemy.  It’s a friend if you make it so.  “To the pure all things are pure” (Titus 1:15).  You agreed to that process by virtue of being in the ELCA, so follow it.  That’s part of love.  At the same time, you can always read the process closely.   To create a circumstance where you may press the confessional point and help everyone clarify who they are in the light of grace, you may find unexpected, entirely permissible ways to fulfill and participate in the process outlined.  These unexpected ways will surprise others, but just so, they may create, for the Gospel, a forum. 

The cool kids are now calling that sort of thing “interruptive,” and they make it part of their mission statements.  I’d suggest that you just call it “all in day’s work” and not think very much about it.  It can be done politely and kindly enough, even joyfully, the way you’d perform a Baptism or eat soup at a soup supper (yes, Baptisms are very different from soup-eating, but you doing the Baptism, and you sitting with your congregation and eating the soup, are not).  Other, cooler kids will have even more important things for you to consider than what I’ve written here, but this is what I’ve got: start (and end) with Communion, be prepared to play one-sided catch, work hard to create a situation where they at least catch it, and know that the ELCA totally thinks this is an okay thing to do.

Otherwise, it wouldn’t be on the page. 

 

If your church is following the three year lectionary, Lent begins on Ash Wednesday with 2 Corinthians 5:20b-6:10.  Officially, the pericope begins, “We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” (2 Cor 5:20b–5:21, ESV) In light of the fact that he is addressing established Christians, what Paul is obviously driving at here is the ongoing need for even the most committed Christians to realign their lives with the will of God.  “Be reconciled” implies that these already-converted Christian believers are not in a conciliar state with God; in fact, Paul is addressing them for a third time precisely because while claiming Christian identity, they are behaving in ways inimical to God.

At a recent gathering of primarily conservative clergy, I got some hostility but engendered much more fantastic conversation when I brought up the danger of Christianity being coopted by conservative politics. In the end, everyone agreed that Christians need to be on God’s agenda first, offering critique as well as necessarily-conditional support to any ideology, political party or strategy. This is what it means to be “the light of the world” and the “salt of the earth.”

A wise mentor once told me that people’s politics are always influencing their theology, but that the great conversation that is the inner life of the church over time corrects—and when necessary, excises—the errors that people of any given time and place incorporate.  Because of the fractured nature of the Church’s communion and witness, amplified by social media, there is a real danger of these much-needed course corrections being significantly delayed or not even engaged in.

The solution to this is to heed Paul’s words to “be reconciled to God,” which is of course, what the season of Lent is all about. The difference between the orthodox Christian construal of these words and the progressive Christian one is that for the orthodox Christian, the Bible provides the content of what being reconciled to God looks like—a detailed road map for discerning where one’s life is out of sync with the life of the triune God.  Conversely, for the progressive Christian, the Bible provides abstract theological principles, but the content comes from elsewhere, sources deemed more relevant because they are more contemporary, scientific, progressive, or whatever.

The outcome of these two approaches is what yields at least some of the divisions observable in contemporary Christianity, where people united by confessional traditions like Lutheran, Methodist, Catholic, etc. have radically different ideas of what makes for faithful Christian living.  While both agree for the need to reconcile ourselves to God, one group sees God as telling us what would constitute alignment with God, the other believes that God is “just” or “forgiving” or “love,” but asserts that what those words mean is not what Christians have traditionally thought they mean, based on the witness of Scripture.

What this means in practice is that the progressive Christian lacks any tool whereby to critique their own politically-influenced positions, for they have no data by which to evaluate them.  As long as the principles they have gleaned from Scripture seem to be met by the ideologies and morays acceptable within their own narrow cultural conditioning, they are living as God intends and no reconciliation is necessary. Conversely, for the orthodox Christian, while perceiving one’s own biases is always notoriously hard, the Scriptures provide actual canons against which to measure cultural assumptions and political prescriptions… and the exhortation to do so.

Paul goes on, “Working together with him, then, we appeal to you not to receive the grace of God in vain.” It is important that we not consign the persistent warnings of the New Testament about spiritual disqualification to the dustbin based on our theological principles, no matter how venerable or new. We can receive the grace of God in vain, and only the lifetime of persistent Christian repentance (realignment) that Luther called for in the first article of the 95 Theses can stave off that terrifying reality. So, since we cannot hope to be perfected in theology, holiness, or piety, let us be perfected in repentance, and let the Scriptures dictate to us what that should look like… furthermore, let us start today. “For [God] says, ‘In a favorable time I listened to you, and in a day of salvation I have helped you.’ Behold, now is the favorable time; behold, now is the day of salvation.” (2 Cor 6:1–2, ESV)

 

Many thanks to Dr. Mark Mattes of Grand View University, Des Moines, Iowa, for the video recordings of the lectures he recently gave on how we can be sure of our salvation.  These lectures were given at Lutheran Church of the Master in Corona del Mar, California, where Russell Lackey serves as pastor.  Until recently Russell was campus pastor at Grand View.    

Mark Mattes has been a Lutheran pastor for 38 years.  He served congregations in Illinois and Wisconsin and has taught theology at Grand View University for over 29 years.  He has authored and edited numerous books in theology and has lectured both across the country and in various parts of the world.

Concerning the theological and spiritual significance of his presentation, Mark wrote, “Many Christians look not just to Christ for the assurance of their salvation but also to changed behaviors, such as a greater engagement with prayer, Bible study, and witnessing.  They have a ‘checklist’ for evidence of conversion and ask you to mark off your progress in spiritual growth.”

In this presentation Mark shows us that this approach is simply not scriptural.  “The Bible tells us that Jesus alone is sufficient for our salvation.  If we look to changes in our lives and not to Christ alone, we jeopardize our assurance of salvation.  Anxiety, not security, is found when we look to the quality of our faith or righteousness for comfort.  Growing in devotional practices is a good thing but it does not guarantee our salvation. Nothing other than Jesus can secure those consciences anxious about God’s judgment.”

After watching these videos and reading his book on the same subject, “Ditching the Checklist,” I told Mark, “What you are saying I wish I had heard sixty years ago.  It would have saved me so much stress and anxiety.”

Here are links to his two You Tube videos.

I first got to know the name James Nestingen through what I still believe is the best confirmation text ever produced — the first edition of Free to Be co-written with Gerhard Førde. (Jim was unhappy with the later revision of it by AugsburgFortress.)

But while I heard him speak from time to time, the first occasion I spent at length with him was the Lutheran CORE Conference at Lindenhurst, Illinois, on September 28, 2007. Many of Jim’s friends and students describe him with the word “prophet,” and he was certainly in full prophetic mode at that event regarding the directions the ELCA was taking. The event gathered those of us who would lead the response to the sexuality decisions that would be made a few years later, leading to the change in strategy of Lutheran CORE and the formation of the North American Lutheran Church.

Jim represented a somewhat different version of Lutheranism than I had grown up with in my eastern LCA context, and I found it enlightening and refreshing, not to replace but to supplement the ways I had come to understand the faith. I learned from him to say with regularity, “we sinners,” as I would preach and teach. Jim would tell us that we should always listen for a confession in conversations with people. He understood the brokenness of our fallen world, and exulted in the Word of absolution that we dare to speak on the authority of the Son of God Himself.

Not that Jim ever claimed to be anything other than one of “us sinners.” And he could sin boldly from time to time. For him, theology was not an abstract intellectual enterprise, but God’s life-saving intervention in the world with the Word of Life we are empowered to speak through Jesus. He stood on “grace alone,” knowing that even our repentance is God’s gift through the Holy Spirit, channeled through the Word and the Sacraments.

Jim was not given to moderation, because his life was a huge love affair with Jesus. He and I had one difficult time when he demanded that Lutheran CORE rescind our invitation to a speaker with whom he had personal and theological conflicts. When we refused, our relationship was tense for a while, but we both moved beyond it. Lovers sometimes over-react, and Jim threw his whole being into the service of the Lord he loved. He was indeed a jealous lover of the Lord who he knew loved him with the same intensity.

As a speaker, nobody could hold the attention of an audience, lay or clergy, as well as Jim could. His repertoire of Sven, Ole, and Lena jokes along with often-scatological humor (which prevented most preachers from stealing his material) interfaced well with his profound theological insights, always centering on the Word of forgiveness Jesus proclaims through us. His North Dakota Scandinavian farmer persona helped humanize his brilliant teaching, and he could share personal stories of his encounters with real people and how the Word of forgiveness encountered them. Often he and all his hearers were in tears as he recounted these stories, even stoic Germans like me.

I still remember his story of visiting a dying friend, whispering in his ears as he was leaving this life, “The next voice you hear will be Jesus.” That is how real and concrete Jim’s faith was, and I know I became a better pastor because of my contacts with him.

Jim has been bothered these last years by painful ailments, and while he limited his travel he still managed to make it to NALC conferences and events, and to serve on our Commission on Theology and Doctrine (CTD). He arrived early in Dallas for the CTD meeting in November as my deans’ meeting was ending, so we got to spend a little time conversing together. While he was in obvious pain, somehow he found a way to fly there and continue to offer his guidance to the church body he helped bring into existence. I remember with thanksgiving these last conversations I had with him until we two redeemed sinners meet again around the Throne.

His death was sudden, and there was evidently nobody to whisper in his ear, “The next voice you hear will be Jesus.” But Jim already knew the voice of the Good Shepherd whom he loved and served so faithfully, and he surely knew Who was welcoming him into his heavenly home.

More than an internship, a community for leadership formation!

Faith Lutheran Church, in Hutchinson, MN, is excited to be launching a new initiative to address the need for future leaders of the Lutheran church.  Because our old leadership-training institutions can no longer be trusted, and because many of the new online institutions are not as ideal for young interested leaders, Faith Lutheran is cultivating an environment and community for learning and formation. 

I have a gifted daughter who is about to graduate from college and is interested in pursuing a Master of Divinity degree.  But where can she go to get that degree?  Our old Lutheran institutions are no longer truly Lutheran, and while the new online seminaries are great, she hardly wants to get her M-Div. while living in her parent’s basement! 

We need to cultivate quality learning environments, opportunities, and communities that will attract and accommodate young seminary students and other young adults interested in congregational ministry.  Our friend, Pastor Nathan Hoff, has one such intern community at Trinity Lutheran in San Pedro, CA, and Faith Lutheran is now creating another in big-town rural Minnesota.

Faith Lutheran began to aggressively pursue this vision in the summer of 2021.  We challenged the congregation to give towards the initiative and received $75,000!  Then, after a Sunday morning update on the vision, a member was so inspired that he and his wife donated $100,000 to help secure housing.  The Lord continued to move this last summer, when an old home a block-and-a-half away from the church came up for sale.  We presented our vision to the sellers and were able to purchase the house for $20,000 less than the list price!  We have named the house “The Ansgar House,” after the Apostle to the North and the patron saint of Denmark.  Recently, a group of young adults have started gathering there every Thursday night for food, fun, Bible study, and worship.

We have a house.*  We have a young adult community.  And we have a plethora of opportunities for aspiring young adult leaders to plug into!  Now we are praying for the Lord to call some interns!  

Faith Greenhouse is an intentional intern community.  An opportunity for young adults to enjoy intentional Christian community with one another, plug into a thriving confessional Lutheran congregation with a large variety of ministries, and explore how they are gifted for ministry.  Interns receive free housing for 20-25 hours/week of church engagement.  Interns will be mentored in theology and ministry, and will gain valuable experience and guidance in pastoral, children’s, youth, seniors, and worship ministry plus much more.  The internship is designed to run September through May, with a summer option.

Are you, or someone you know, interested or do you have questions?  Please contact me at [email protected].  You can also support this ministry financially by sending gifts to Faith Lutheran Church, 335 Main St S, Hutchinson, Mn, 55350.

*The house with the green roof above is a stock photo.

by Ethan Zimmerman and Luke Ratke

Executive Director’s Note: Many thanks to Ethan Zimmerman and Luke Ratke for telling us about their experiences at NEXUS this past summer.  Ethan and Luke are both NALC college students and are planning on attending the NALC seminary after graduation.  They have also made a video about NEXUS, which is posted on our website.  A link to that video can be found here.

NEXUS is a vocational discernment institute rooted in Lutheran theology hosted by Grandview University in Des Moines, Iowa, and it is a week full of blessings! High school students who are contemplating their vocation, what God’s call for their life is, come to NEXUS and experience fellowship with other young Christians who are going through similar journeys. Morning and evening worship, classes on the Old and New Testament taught by solid Lutheran professors, small group discussions led by college-age mentors, and lots of prayer are all part and parcel of what NEXUS is, learning where God’s call meets your life!

Hi, my name is Luke and here are some of my thoughts on NEXUS: NEXUS is a great organization, because God makes it one! I loved being able to be a college-age mentor and a leader for the high school participants at NEXUS. Furthermore, I also liked being able to learn about God at NEXUS with and through the high school students.

My favorite thing about NEXUS this year was getting to meet and talk to Christians I had never met before or only briefly. I was able to talk to pastors, professors, and other Christians about Christianity. For myself, who someday wants to do full-time ministry as my career, working at NEXUS let me have conversations with other college-age students and high school students who think their vocation is full-time ministry. I also was able to practice and learn skills that will someday help me when I am doing full time ministry because I was a college-age mentor at NEXUS. Such skills were helping lead a small group, writing/giving a devotion, talking about the Bible with other people, etc.

Hello all, my name is Ethan Zimmerman, and this is my perspective on NEXUS!

NEXUS is something truly special, something that I don’t think happens anywhere else. NEXUS is not just another church or bible camp; discipleship and vocational discernment happen, and bonds of Christian fellowship that will stand the test of time are forged. My time as a NEXUS mentor was truly a blessing, and as my fellow mentor Chris put it, good for my soul!

The topic of discipleship is something that has been on my mind for quite some time. I have wondered how I can disciple the people around me while I am at college, and being at NEXUS showed me how! Even though we were only with the participants for a week, we lived life with each other, we worshiped together, learned together, ate, laughed, and cried with each other. God showed me that this was how discipleship happened, in the nitty gritty little things of life, right in the trenches with people as they go through things and think about what God has in store for their life. Are they to be pastors? Missionaries? Youth leaders? Being there with these young participants while they pondered these questions and sought to answer what the Lord has called them to was truly a blessing and an eye opener as to what discipleship could look like.

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I left NEXUS feeling encouraged, not just because I saw what discipleship and vocational discernment looked like in the lives of young folk, high school students, but because of the friendships that I left with. From the late nights discussing theology with the other mentors, to the goofy laughs shared with the participants, I left encouraged that there are other young Christians out there yearning to pursue God and answer the call He has given them in their lives, and that not every young person is all about decadent hedonism, but faith is still alive amongst my generation. I praise God for NEXUS, for the lives changed by it, for the doors opened because of it, and for the continued ministry it will have in the future!

We both think that every high school student that is a strong Christian should pray and think about coming to NEXUS next summer. Every high school student should think about going to NEXUS, not just high school students who think or know their vocation is full time ministry. We want to thank Lutheran CORE for financially helping The NEXUS Institute. And last but greatest of all, we want to thank God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit for NEXUS! 

Editor’s Note: The conclusion of this article will be published in a second post on or about September 18, 2020.

Critical Theory—in particular, Critical Race Theory—has recently captured the Church’s attention, and in some corners of the Lord’s vineyard it seems, more significantly, Her imagination.  (For those unfamiliar with Critical Theory, this article will serve as a necessarily incomplete introduction.)  Springing from the same philosophers and theorists (Foucault, Derrida, etc.) who brought us postmodernism, Critical Theory seems to be suddenly taking the whole Western world by storm.

This is an illusion.  Though all but Liberal Arts majors would likely be unfamiliar with the Frankfurt School or even the phrase “Critical Theory,” everyone who has received an undergraduate education in the last thirty years has been familiarized with (and in many cases, indoctrinated into) its basic terminology and the categories of meaning by which it makes sense of the world.  For instance, for every one of my acquaintance at my own undergraduate alma mater of Penn State, the obligatory “professional writing” requirement for non-English majors was used by the professors as an opportunity to force-feed undergraduates Critical Theory.  As an example, a business writing class for music majors taught participants to write personal reflections on books like Stone Butch Blues, a lesbian coming of age story, instead of memos, letters to parents, and departmental requisitions.  Even if you think the exposure salutary, it demonstrates the tactics of Critical Theory, which, as its exponents readily affirm, “contains an activist dimension. It tries to not only understand our social situation but to change it, setting out not only to ascertain how society organizes itself along racial lines and hierarchies but to transform it for the better.”[1]

Solid introductions to Critical Theory by both its proponents and opponents are now widely available, and I encourage the reader to consult at least one of each to familiarize themselves with its outlines; otherwise, as commentator Phil Blair demonstrated in his response to a recent Christianity Today article, we may find ourselves employing it unbeknownst to ourselves.

Heresy

Though articles abound that are critical of Critical Theory (hereafter referred to as CT) from a Christian perspective, as mine is, I hope to explore the topic from an at least slightly different perspective; I propose that while CT may properly diagnose some elements of our cultural ills, it necessarily misaddresses these maladies because it is in fact a secularized Christian heresy.

The Critic Is Often Right About What Is Wrong, But He Is Nearly Always Wrong About What Would Be Right.

I want to start by acknowledging what CT—and progressive ideologies more generally—often get right.  One of the functions of the people in a society that are typically deemed “liberal,” “left,” or “progressive” is to point out injustices when they accumulate.  Any meritocracy (where achievement or talent is rewarded with social and/or economic upward mobility) periodically and predictably accumulates inequity and unfairness at its margins.  At a biological level, talent and giftedness are inborn traits that often run in families.  Sociologically, families pass on habits and knowledge that maximize (or minimize) inherent capacities for greater achievement and reward.  The greatest patrimony that a family passes on in a meritocracy is not their wealth—though that certainly has undeniable advantages—but rather their knowledge and skills in accessing or leveraging the power structures of the meritocracy.

This does not mean that a meritocracy is inherently immoral. (What would we want, a system where lack of talent, industry, and skill is rewarded?) But it does mean that for all the good it may produce, it is a system that can put real people at a real disadvantage in accessing the social and economic rewards deemed legitimate by the value system at its foundation; it is a system that needs a watchdog that calls for course corrections when the process whereby “the rising tide that lifts all boats” creates eddies and riptides that prevent people from weighing anchor and setting sail.

In his book The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt contends that in the same way all the complex flavors of the world’s cuisines are composed of the tongue’s four basic tasting capacities—sweet, sour, salty, and bitter—the great diversity of moralities to which people ascribe are woven from the five basic “cognitive modules” with which we define and evaluate morality and justice.  Defined in terms of their antipodes, these modules are care/harm, fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and sanctity/degradation.  Haidt names this Moral Foundations Theory.

One need not agree with Haidt’s thesis about the origins of these cognitive modules to see their utility as an interpretive grid.  In analyzing the political application of the theory, Haidt, who identifies himself as a liberal, discovered that those who measured as the most “liberal” registered highly in the care/harm and fairness/cheating categories but little to not at all in the other three.  Though caring and fairness were also the dominant categories for those who registered as the most “conservative,” people with these political leanings showed a near convergence with the other three concerns of loyalty, authority, and sanctity:

What this means is that if it seems that the proponents of Critical Theory are “tone deaf” to some of the moral concerns expressed by other, more “conservative” people, it is because they are.  For the “liberal” adherent of CT, the mere presence of inequity is all the proof needed that injustice is occurring.  Questions of whether people have demonstrated the social virtues of developing skills (that is, demonstrating loyalty to the system’s values) are largely not considered, or if they are, the need to do so is defined as part of the oppression inherent in “the system.”  Likewise, the need to “pay one’s dues,” which recognizes the system’s authority, is construed as more evidence of injustice rather than a period of necessary apprenticeship during which there is predicted inequity between those who have acquired the sought-after skills and resources and those currently acquiring them.  Finally, the need to exhibit sustained effort with or without immediate reward—the most sanctified value in a meritocracy—is despised most of all as the mechanism of systemic injustice because, although such effort generally yields overall improvement in the socio-economic position of a given class of people, there is no guarantee in any particular instance that the effort so exerted will result necessarily in equity.  The moral concerns of three of the five moral cognitive modules are not only temporarily bracketed to focus analysis on the issue of fairness, for the “liberal,” they quite literally do not register as things worthy of assessment and for the critical theorist, they are merely attempts to obfuscate the real issue, which is measurable equity.

Moreover, the proponent of Critical Theory does not need to provide measurable criteria whereby to evaluate the claims of their analysis.  The existence of the inequity natural to and predicted by a system that rewards merit is the prima facie evidence that revolution is needed.  Whether the proposed system could actually create the desired equity and whether that equity would be balanced with other moral concerns  (everyone living in social and/or economic squalor is, after all, a type of equality) need not be seriously contemplated, because the only value in view is equity, which is defined as fairness that provides the necessary care for everybody.

This is how these critics can be right about what is wrong (that is, in Critical Race Theory, the form of CT most affecting the life of the Church at present, racial inequities), but so wrong about what would put these wrongs right; their theories are not based upon a morality with a complex enough palate, capable of fine enough distinctions.

Eschatology and Anthropology

This is also in part why Critical Theory is a comprehensive worldview; in merely noting inequity, it believes that it has accounted for all the most significant moral variables—the only ones that count.  It must then flatten all human experience into the narrow interpretive grid it deems the only valid one.

Four Fundamental Questions

The late Ravi Zacharias helpfully delineated at least four fundamental questions of human life to which any worldview must propose an answer: human origin, meaning, morality, and destiny.  Because of the 1925 “Scopes Monkey Trial,” the issue of origins has dominated the intellectual landscape of the Western Church for the last 100 or so years.  First, it dominated the popular imagination as “yet another case” of backward religionists resisting reason’s inevitable march of progress in accord with the Enlightenment’s self-narration.  (Yes, this was first. Scopes deliberately implicated himself so that a trial would need to be held and Darrow deliberately had the trial played out by a sympathetic urbane media in the court of public opinion as part of his legal strategy.)  The attempts to condemn Intelligent Design as veiled religious dogma are the intellectual descendants of that controversy.  Secondly, it precipitated a growing crisis within the Church between Fundamentalists and Modernists, who believed a dating of the age of the earth to greater than 7,000 years was congruent with orthodox Biblical interpretation.  The inheritors of that dispute are the Young Earth versus Old Earth Creationist debates of today.[2] 

“Your theology can never be better than your anthropology,” was one of the favorite axioms my Prophets professor in seminary passed on to us from his mentor.  Of course, being self-consciously orthodox, I thought that axiom got it exactly backward; our theology—specifically our Christology and soteriology—necessarily defines our understanding of human nature, so our anthropology can never be better than our theology.

Unfortunately, the Western Church’s obsession with origins has led to a relative neglect of the way our understanding of who Jesus is and what salvation fully entails informs our understanding of what human beings are (our meaning), how we should live (our morality), and our purpose or telos (our destiny).  The preaching of Jesus predominantly as life coach, social activist, friend of sinners, prophetic preacher, social reformer or even atoning sacrifice for sinners, has led to the neglect of the consistent preaching of Jesus as the God-Man or Theanthropos, a new species in God’s economy of salvation.[3]  “God became man that man might become [like] God,” exulted Irenaeus of Lyons in his second century classic Against Heresies, going on to declare as the soteriological significance of that teaching that “the glory of God is a [hu]man fully alive.”

Great Tradition Christianity proclaims that the ultimate destiny of redeemed humanity is not merely to avoid hell (Jesus as the cosmic get-out-of-jail-free card) or to emulate Jesus as the finest example of a fully self-realized or perfectly moral human person, but rather to become “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4).  Through our Sacramental union with Jesus, who was fully God and fully human, by faith in His promises, we are drawn into the perichoretic inner life of the Godhead, the most Holy Trinity.  As the Theanthropos, Jesus is the “firstborn among many brothers” (Romans 8:29), not the only-born to be admired and worshipped, but whose life remains fundamentally distant from our own.

This teaching about the implications of salvation through Christ for our destiny as human beings thoroughly conditions and shapes all other elements of our theology.  In other words, remembering the fullness of our destiny as human beings in Christ has far more impact on our understanding of what is the meaning of human life and the morality by which it is to be lived than our understanding of our origins.

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[1] Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic. Critical Race Theory: An Introduction. (New York: New York University Press, 2017), page 8.

[2] If you speak the first article of the Nicene or Apostles’ Creed without crossing your fingers, you are a creationist of one stripe or the other; it is important that non-fundamentalist Christians be absolutely clear on this point and think through the consequences of that position as distinct from a functional Deism.

[3] Justification by grace through faith—forensic justification—may indeed be the doctrine upon which the Church stands or falls as Martin Luther declared, but it was never meant to be preached denuded of the very Christology that makes it so powerful and poignant.

Back in my college days, I was on the debate team. We would be assigned a general topic for the year, and a two-member team from one college would offer a proposal within the topic, while a team from a different college would oppose it. We didn’t know until a few minutes before the debate started whether we would be advocating the affirmative or negative side, nor did the negative team know how the affirmative would frame its proposal.

One of the tricks was to frame the proposal in terms that made it difficult to oppose. Probably we spent more planning time on that than the merits of the ideas at stake.

I have watched how those holding the revisionist position on sexual ethics have brilliantly re-framed the debate in ways that put those of us holding to traditional biblical ethics at a disadvantage in convincing others. They managed to frame the debate in such a way that any opposition to their positions seemed unjust or even sick.

This has been done in two ways. First, sexual orientations and behaviors were turned into issues of civil rights. Think how you see the = sign on bumper stickers; “All we want is the same right you have to be married to the person we love.” And since, as the argument goes, sexual orientations are not a matter of choice but perhaps even good things which God has created, gender identity and sexual orientation should be a protected civil right. So, it is stated as proven and obvious fact that sexual orientation is like race or ethnicity — a matter about which we have no choice. Even though science has failed to find a so-called “gay gene,” the statement that “we are born gay [or whatever]” has been repeated so often that it is generally accepted as true [see Orwell, the “big lie”].

I first heard this contention back in 1983 (yes I am that old) at a Conference on the New Lutheran Church at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago. Karen Bloomquist, who at the time served in the social affairs office of the LCA (and would later be the primary writer of the first ELCA sexuality statement, the one that went down in flames) was giving a presentation with a list of groups of people who should be protected, and included along with race, gender, and ethnic origin the matter of sexual orientation. I challenged her, and I still remember Prof. Robert Jenson sitting in the back of the room, grinning I suspect at my naïve surprise at her linking of these topics, for it had been done in the wider society long before I first heard it.

We all have sinful orientations. The Church calls it “original sin.” St. Paul speaks of it as “the flesh,” to which “the Spirit” is opposed. Not all of us are tempted in the same ways, but on other matters nobody will say, “God made me this way, so you have to celebrate it and be proud of me.” For instance, there is a proven genetic connection to addictions including alcoholism, but we would not celebrate drunkenness in an alcoholic. The ethical choice for an alcoholic is not to drink; it isn’t to go around proudly claiming, “God made me this way.”

Once we turn sexual orientations into civil rights instead of behavioral issues, we have been placed at a significant disadvantage in defending the biblical view of sexuality. And that is exactly what has happened.

A danger of seeing sexual orientations as civil rights issues is that this paves the way for the power of government, especially its power to tax, to be used against groups including churches which do not accept this new definition of justice. Already the Supreme Court has declared (I believe disastrously) that tax exemption is not a right but a privilege bestowed by the government to organizations that share its values (the case involved Bob Jones University, and a similar one involved Rev. Moon). Several prominent politicians have publicly proposed that churches which refuse to conduct same-sex marriages should be denied tax exemptions.

A second brilliant move by the sexual revisionists is even more frightening: They have basically declared that anybody who opposes their viewpoints on sexuality is mentally ill.

Think of what that term “homophobia” means: “homo” means “same” and “phobia” is fear. It is a pseudo-scientific term coined to cut off any debate about the rightness or wrongness of same-sex sexual activities. If you disapprove of same-sex sexual relationships, you are obviously homophobic, and shame on you! End of discussion.

In my state, our Secretary of Health started life as Richard but is now Rachel. And the media is trumpeting how those who make unkind statements about her are “transphobic.”

I’m not sure about you, but I don’t lie awake nights in fear that a group of transgender people are going to attack me. Nor do I wake up screaming because of a nightmare that some crazy doctor is attacking me with a knife. I guess there might be such a thing as homophobia, in the sense that a person may be insecure in their masculinity or femininity. But most of us do not go through life obsessed with fear of gay or lesbian people or inclinations. I have friends and family members who are gay or lesbian, and they are generally nice people. I just don’t agree with this aspect of their lifestyle. But then there are reasons to disapprove of a lot of things I do too (file that under the topic of original sin, even though most of my sinning isn’t all that original).

Not only does turning traditional sexual ethics into mental illness cut off any constructive conversation, but it puts us in a very vulnerable position, which is exactly the intention. Call me paranoid, but I can see that in a certain cultural climate, folks like me might be compassionately “treated” in a kind and gracious attempt to release us from our bondage to our phobias.

Let’s be clear: All gay and lesbian people, all transgender people, are precious children of God for whom Jesus died, as he died for all us sinners. They are our neighbors whom we are commanded to love as we love ourselves. All of us (including me) need to avoid unkind comments or actions toward these people.

And it is true that there is such a thing as gender dysphoria, where the brain and body fail to communicate accurately in fetal development, so that the brain thinks it is one gender while the body develops as the other. This is tragic, and Christians can and will disagree on how a person deals with this aspect of the brokenness of our fallen world. Similarly, there seem to be very complex factors in a person being attracted to a member of the same sex. I accept that persons normally don’t choose to be gay or lesbian (although today there seem to be some exceptions like Katy Perry “I kissed a girl,” who try it for kicks and to prove their open-mindedness).

What does this mean for us? For starters, I believe we need to repent of any nastiness or unkindness we practice or feel toward what are called “sexual minorities” (I won’t try to name them all). We are not called to hate anybody, and when we come across that way, we simply confirm the opinion of those who believe we have a serious prejudice or mental illness.

And on a societal basis, we need to treat all people with justice and fairness. The time is probably long past when pastors should be agents of the state in officiating at marriages. We should let the government do its thing, and if people want God’s blessing pronounced on their relationship, that would be our role where we believe we can do it with integrity.

But we need to keep reminding ourselves and others that our concern is not with orientations or inclinations but with actions. We can’t always change what we feel, but we can have some control over what we do. I am not saying that this is easy: I think of Mark Twain who said that it was easy to quit smoking; he must have done it a thousand times. And most of us can relate regarding our struggles with our particular temptations.

I am not optimistic that we can change the framework in which sexual ethics is being argued today, but we need to be aware of it and be prepared to challenge it. Once behaviors outside the boundaries of heterosexual marriage are turned into civil rights, and especially when opposition to them is defined as mental illness, we have our work cut out for us. It will require a lot of wisdom and patience to counter those assumptions (for they are assumptions, not proven facts).

And if we fail to love other sinners, we don’t deserve to win an argument either. So let us keep our focus directed toward love for all our neighbors, even as we look for opportunities to account for the hope that is in us, but always with gentleness and reverence (see 1 Peter 3:15-16).

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]

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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