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Editorials
Up one levelMissouri's Clergy Crisis
The discussion surrounding the ELCA sexuality task force’s recommendation to consider ordaining non-celibate homosexuals to the public ministry raises a number of questions, not the least of which is: “Who gets to decide who is ordained to the public ministry of the church?” The ELCA is not alone; this question has lurked in the background of the LCMS for much of the past decades, surfacing as districts shun candidates for first call placement from one seminary or the other, and as certain men seek ordained ministry via non-residential seminary routes. The question recognizes that a tension exists between the rights of an individual congregation and the responsibility of that congregation to both the wider denominational community and the church catholic...
Ecumenical Liturgy, Its Possibilities and Problems
Already, among the ecumenically-minded, preparations are underway to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh in 1910, which is regarded as the birthday of the ecumenical movement. What seems to be quite a bit less well-known is that this year, 2009, is also a 100th anniversary celebration, and for a movement that has impacted the Christian world every bit as much as the ecumenical: the liturgical movement...
Why Stay?
So it happened. The churchwide assembly made a bad choice, defying the consensus of the church catholic, breaching ecclesial unity at every possible level within and without. Immediately laypersons, clergy, and congregations started to leave. I am staying. Here’s why...
The Best of Times, the Worst of Times for the LCMS Seminaries
For as much as people claim to dislike history, our present is routinely beholden to our own personal intersections with history. The church is no exception. Often our present decisions (or indecisions) are shaped by our institutional history. The great challenge to the church occurs when the history with which we live fails to meet our present realities. Nowhere is this seen more clearly than in the ongoing decline of our Lutheran schools...
Speak the Truth in Love
What are we to do? We who are committed, by our confirmation and the love of our hearts, or further by our ordination vows, to the church and its teaching as understood by the Lutheran Confessions? If we desire our church to live according to the word of God, then we must do so ourselves. So our task is to follow the charge of Ephesians 4:15 and speak the truth in love...
Saints for Sinners
In many and various ways Christians have tried to prove the existence of God. Many of these proofs are known to Lutherans and have been employed by us on occasion: the cosmological argument about a first cause or prime mover; the teleological argument pointing to the order and complexity of the universe; the ontological argument that God is greater than the greatest thing conceivable. Each has its virtue as well as its weaknesses, but one thing they all have in common: they are remarkably lonely. Whether they mean to or not, they signify a God detached, objectified, a thing to be proven or disproven rather than a person to be known, loved, or quarreled with. Likely this is why, even if they prove, these proofs never persuade...
Mystical Marriage Renewal
"Next to the Bible and Saint Augustine no other book has come to my attention from which I have learned—and desired to learn—more concerning God, Christ, man, and what all things are" (Martin Luther). With such an endorsement, you’d think that the Theologia Germanica would have found a more widespread audience within the churches that embraced Luther’s reforms. And yet, down to today, North American Lutherans largely remain ignorant of the role that the Theologia Germanica played in the development of Luther’s theology...
The Face of Jesus, Part II
At this point, some concrete examples will help make clearer this Philippians 2–II Corinthians 5 christology of the arts. How, artistically, have we made Christ into our sin, and how might we reform our profane imaginations? A classic example is the imposition of white images of Jesus upon Africans enslaved in America and upon their heirs for years after the end of slavery. In a system of such profound unjustice, when there were lords using human lives for their own ends, to name Jesus as “Lord,” and then to show this Lord in a white skin, was nothing short of blasphemous. It was also not scripturally or historically accurate (recall here Luther’s concern for historical accuracy), for Jesus Christ was not white at all, but born a Jew. It is easy to see how forgetting the fact of Jesus’ Jewishness lent Jesus’ authority to an ideological evil—the implicit claim that the Lord is white. In the white face of Jesus we see our sin laid upon him...
Adoption after Altruism
Vietnam, Marshall Islands, Russia, Nepal, Guatemala, Vietnam again. For those who follow the world of international adoption, they have seen history repeat itself in country after country and sometimes even within the same country. A country opens to international adoption, the number of international adoptions soars, leading to an increase in unethical practices, in turn leading to a shutdown in international adoptions...
The Face of Jesus, Part I
This is an exercise in adiaphora. Images, including images of Jesus, are neither mandatory nor prohibited in the Lutheran way of thinking. But if we are to have them, and more to the point since we do actually have them, we are required to make sure that they promote the gospel and not falsehood. Art is capable of witnessing faithfully to Christ, but it is also capable of having a non-canonical, deceptive relationship to Christ. For Jesus himself is not the active agent in art...
But If Salt Has Lost Its Saltness...
I believe the Bible to be inspired and free from error. In holding this view, I stand in a long line of Christians spanning back to Christianity’s birth. Of course, as readers we often bring our own experiences to the texts we read. That is why, after spending a couple of months in the riverless and lakeless Marshall Islands, this verse from James caught my attention as I led my parish Bible study. For, on the tiny island of Ebeye, salt water does yield fresh, and if it weren’t for the roaring hum of the diesel powered desalinization plant, water use would be even more restricted than the couple of hours a day that we got when things were going well. Does the Bible err? At least here, in one very real sense, it can be argued that it does...
A Field Guide to the Missouri Synod
At the 2007 LCMS convention a resolution entitled “To Keep Unity of Spirit in Bond of Peace” passed with nearly 90% in favor. It rather innocuously directed circuits of the synod to share in a common Bible and study of the Lutheran Confessions called “Faithful and Afire” prepared by various leaders within synod. Not terribly newsworthy. In the course of the debate over the resolution, however, an amendment was proposed to “acknowledge theological differences.” That amendment failed with 49% of the vote. All of which led one commentator to observe that, since the vote to show our unity was split nearly 50/50, the disunity at the very least is a divide between those who think we are unified and those who do not...
The Epistle of Eutyche
It is with greatest pleasure that LF presents the world premiere publication of the recently discovered Epistle of Eutyche, dug from the ruins of the Abbey of Three Marys (mosaic fragments on the site suggest Jesus’ mother, Mary Magdalene, and Mary of Bethany) in southern Croatia. Internal evidence suggests that Theophila was the abbess of the house and received the letter from a fellow abbess by the name of Eutyche in response to an earlier letter from Theophila. Theophila’s original letter so far has not been discovered, though its contents is summarized at some length in the present epistle...
Mary and the Incarnation of Hope
We have a Mary tree in our neighborhood. More accurately, we have a tree on which the image of the Virgin Mary has appeared. A little over two years ago, a car crashed into the tree, causing significant damage to both car and tree. A few months later the elderly owner of the tree was on his roof doing some work when he slipped and fell off. His neighbor across the street heard the scream and looked out the window. There standing next to the fallen man was the tree with the image of the Virgin Mary revealed in the accident-damaged trunk. The elderly man made a miraculous (after a thirty-day hospital stay) recovery, and the tree has been a place of local pilgrimage for the devout and the curious alike ever since...
Peace, Peace, When There Is No Peace
I’ve been noticing lately how all around us in the mainline churches military imagery is being carefully and quietly plucked out of our worship language. Partly it is (cowardly) discomfort with the violence and apocalypticism of the Scriptures. Partly it is (sensible) worry that the imagery will be co-opted to support a vicious political ideology. Curious as to its treatment in the ELCA, I took a look at the new and much-disputed Evangelical Lutheran Worship. I had three hymns in mind as test cases for the imagery of war...
One Little Word Subdues Him
Those of you in the ELCA who have been doing your denominational duty by working through the third installment of the sexuality study may have noticed that one of the members of task force was your new LF editor. I am a member no more; upon taking up this editorship I opted to withdraw. Given the already fragile nature of trust in such a venture, it seemed that a media rat like myself wouldn’t do anybody any good. Someone else was found to replace my demographic (“young, conservative, female, clergy” appear to be the four major requirements) and she will probably do a much better job than I did...
Abundant Death, Abundant Life
Search through any pastor’s library and you are likely to find a whole manner of books covering the various disciplines of pastoral ministry—biblical commentaries, church history, preaching, counseling, doctrine. But it is often the other books you find on the pastor’s shelf that gives insight you into the soul of the pastor...
The Certain Ambiguity of Catholicity
I am a member of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod because, like most Missouri-Synod Lutherans, it is the church body into which I was born. It is not all that surprising, even in this age of consumer-driven Christianity, that many folks still cling to the church of their birth. Inertia is a powerful thing. But why I continue to remain a part of this synod is more complex than simple inertia...
Church Breaks Your Heart
It has been said that the one great contribution of postmodernism to scholarship will be the autobiographical clause in the introduction. This is it. My associate Paul Sauer and I don’t believe in hidden agendas: our agendas are going to be in plain sight...