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ELCA Sexuality Statement
Up one levelLutheran Seminarians Do Not Support Task Force Recommendations
In response to the ELCA News Service's coverage of a statement signed by a group of Lutheran seminarians in favor of the Task Force Recommendations, a second group of Lutheran seminarians has drafted a letter of protest, indicating that in fact not all Lutheran seminarians are of one mind, as the News Service title might have led one to believe...
A Bishop's Proposal
Bishop James Mauney issued this public letter last week to members of the Virginia Synod, ELCA, and also sent it on to the ELCA Conference of Bishops. The letter represents a theologically serious attempt to uphold and make use of the Lutheran doctrinal standards to engage what many feel to be a burning question of pastoral care for homosexual persons in the church. It offers an alternative to both to ignoring the question altogether and to accepting the divisive proposal to deal with it offered by the task force...
An Open Letter to the Voting Members of the 2009 ELCA Churchwide Assembly
We are grateful that the church has called you to serve as a voting member for the 2009 Churchwide Assembly. Your role at the assembly will be a difficult one. We are writing this open letter as Lutheran theologians and church leaders concerned about the fidelity and future of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. The proposals to be considered by the Churchwide Assembly this summer from the Task Force for ELCA Studies on Sexuality are perceived by some as compromises that will permit the ELCA to live faithfully with internal diversity on controversial ethical questions. The proposals are in fact no compromise...
Dear Bishops
The role and office of the bishop is a subtle though ever-present part of the current debate regarding the Sexuality Statement and Recommendation--further proof that what is at stake for the ELCA this summer is not just moral teaching but ecclesiology. It began when, at the last assembly, our bishops were asked to "exercise restraint" in their dealings with sexually active homosexual clergy...
Time for a Free Conference
The free conference is a venerable old American Lutheran tradition, the medium of discussion and mutual support in times of controversy. It's time to renew the tradition...
Against the 130 "Teaching Theologians"
A statement signed by, so far, more than 130 ELCA “teaching theologians” (as the ELCA Press Release has seen fit to dub them) has come out in support of all four recommendations by the ELCA Task Force on Sexuality. I will show how misleading and self-contradictory their statement is. But I have to begin here on a personal note. I belonged to the students who first attended Seminex. I was consequently ordained in the miniscule AELC, which body went on, however, to play a disproportionately important role in subsequent American Lutheran history...
Delight, Design and Destiny: Toward a Doxological Ethics of Sexuality
The cosmetic separation of ethics from doxology is a frequent problem when Christians take human response and action as the starting point in determining how they are to live. The proposed ELCA Social Statement on “Human Sexuality: Gift and Trust” is not unusual in this approach, but such a move determines the misguided course of the nature of the “Report and Recommendations on Ministry Policies” that will follow. The Social Statement asks what can be considered a sort of third-use-of-the-law type of question, “How do we understand human sexuality within the context of Jesus’ invitation to love God and love our neighbor?” The how of this question applies to what sort of actions we, as Christians, will take once we understand what Jesus “invites” us to do. The framing of the question is a thin veneer for its theological underpinnings, for within its introductory statement command is turned to invitation, and obedience into pretense...
The Imposition of Obedience in Dissenting Position #2
Unlike previous sexuality statements produced by the ELCA, this one made a point of not telling you who adhered to which position—to the official recommendation or to either of the dissenting positions. Apparently it was considered in very poor taste for the three pastors behind Dissenting Position #1 to declare themselves publicly, as Bp. Peter Strommen indicated in an ELCA News Release. Apparently it was in even worse taste to “make formal public statements or initiate what may be perceived as their own news release.” It’s acceptable to depart from the consensus of the church across time and space—but initiate your own press release! My heavens!...
It's Not About Homosexuality--Not Really
It is not only, or perhaps even primarily, about homosexuality. My whimsical lament “I Think I Want a Divorce” got quite an echo in “this church”; apparently, the bone-deep disenchantment articulated in the piece has been building up among theologically serious Christians in the ELCA for many reasons for a long time. Slowly we are waking up to reality. The truth is that Luther is being overshadowed by Zwingli, so to say; plainly put, homosexuality is being used as a wedge issue by the religious Left. This wedge works for several reasons...
Hiatus for Holy Week
It wasn’t until a few years ago that I fully appreciated the great liturgical irony of Palm Sunday processions. We gather together with our leafy fronds (usually too embarrassed to do anything but grip them under the hymnal) and distribute them to far more enthusiastic children, and then with great pomp and ceremony circle around the church or the block, singing hymns of triumph and joy, enacting a hospitable welcome to our Lord just as the cityfolk of Jerusalem did. Of course, less than a week later, the cityfolk of Jerusalem spit upon this same Lord, derided and taunted him, doubted his claim to be the Son of God, and abandoned him to a miserable death. And so do we, in our own present-day, culturally appropriate ways. Palm Sunday is the liturgical exposure of our vast pharisaical hypocrisy; and as we are consummate hypocrites, we rarely even notice what we’re doing...
The Enthusiasm Clause
One of the more fascinating aspects of the two recent sexuality documents is their struggle to be Lutheran. In many and various ways, they succeed. There was a genuine attempt to live in and out of our theological heritage and give it expression in a world very much changed from the one where our confessional documents were formulated. The problem seems to be that our Lutheran heritage demands things that are no longer popular or desirable. Then the documents can’t help but part ways with Lutheranism. A plum of an example is what I deem the “Enthusiasm Clause”...
Repentance is Part of the Gospel
The Recommendation on Ministry Policies tells us: “Our perspectives on social realities, in particular human sexuality, are not the basis of our unity or disunity. Our Lutheran unity is centered on the promises of God, our common baptism, and our fellowship in the sacrament of Holy Communion, expressed in our love for the Lutheran church, theology, and tradition” (424-428). On what, I admit, is a distrustful reading, I take the subtext to be that we can disagree about matters of sexual morality because we share common beliefs about grace, baptism, and communion; a statement which plays off the right Lutheran belief that it is not morality that justifies us before God, but Christ alone. As usual with these statements, so close and yet so far!...
The Dissenters Speak
We begin with a word of thanks and gratitude for the opportunity to serve on the ELCA Task Force for Human Sexuality. Even though the three of us often disagreed with the other 27 members and advisors of the task force on traditional biblical interpretation and theological principles, we were treated as the minority voice with great kindness, dignity and respect. Because we firmly believe the current polices of the ELCA, when enforced, are consistent with the biblical witness, Christian moral tradition, and the view of the vast majority of Christians in the world, we refused to sign off on both the social statement and the recommendations and are submitting our dissent...
The Elephant in the Room: Divorce
The other night I forced myself to sit down and re-read the Recommendation on Ministry Policies. It had been a couple of weeks, and I thought it time to look at the thing with fresh eyes. This time through I was stunned at the red thread running through the whole document, unmentioned and unacknowledged by the text itself, and largely missed even by our various critiques of it so far. The deep issue is not homosexuality. The deep issue is divorce...
The Flaws in the Celibacy Argument
Our sexuality documents can’t quite make up their minds about celibacy. On the one hand, “The desire for sexual love, therefore, does not by itself constitute a moral justification for sexual behavior” (Statement 369-370), so celibacy must be the norm until a proper justification other than desire itself comes along. On the other hand, “[T]he ELCA currently allows people who are homosexual in their self-understanding to serve as rostered leaders in the church if they remain celibate. However, Luther himself considered celibacy to be a special gift of the Spirit granted to few people” (Recommendations 796-798), apparently implying that the reformer himself would never condone our blanket requirement of celibacy for homosexuals who likely don’t have this gift of celibacy. One does hear generally Luther’s objection to priestly vows of celibacy to be a possible basis for allowing sexually active gay clergy...
How This is Not like the Ordination of Women
A background issue to the ELCA Task Force Recommendations, not mentioned in the document itself but still in the minds and mouths of many, is how this whole situation does or does not compare to the ordination of women. People on opposite extremes tend to link the two...
The "Church Problem" of the Sexuality Statement
In a history of American Lutheranism class, which I have taught in both ELCA and LCMS deacon training programs, one of the standard texts I use is John Tietjen’s Which Way to Lutheran Unity published by the Missouri-Synod’s Concordia Publishing house in 1966. It is illustrative to read through his closing chapter “Prospects for Future Lutheran Union.” There is much optimism, perhaps rightfully so. Missouri had joined the Lutheran Council-USA and Tietjen, himself a Missouri-Synod Lutheran was serving as its executive secretary. The American Lutheran Church (ALC) and The Missouri-Synod were well on their way to a fellowship agreement realized in 1969. It was a high-point heretofore unseen in American Lutheran unity. With the release of the ELCA Sexuality Study, it is difficult to read the optimistic words of Tietjen now 40-plus years later, as the unity of our respective Lutheran jurisdictions appear to be on the brink of a heretofore new low point in American Lutheran history. What happened to get us to this point?...
Spiritual Gifts and Hard Choices
Part of the argument for ordaining sexually active homosexuals, the ELCA Task Force Recommendations tell us, is to make use of the genuine gifts of the Spirit given to these persons. Once again, as one good point is made, the correlating point is lost...
Human Sexuality and Report on Ministry: A Response
“Human Sexuality: Gift and Trust,” the newly proposed social statement on human sexuality, along with the Task Force’s “Report and Recommendations on Ministry Policies,” present for consideration in the ELCA a wide-ranging document on sexuality and suggest changes to the denomination’s current practices. In partial response, the pastors of this congregation offer the following teaching on specific points from the documents and recommendations. Since we submit to the authority of Scripture in all matters of life and faith, we are deeply troubled by the document and the threat it poses to the unity we hold in the Word of God. We ask therefore that everyone join us in prayer for the church and in careful study of the issues raised...
The Law, the Neighbor, and the Self
In general, I agree with the neighbor-centered-ness of the new ELCA Sexuality Statement, and of ethics generally, away from pious self-centeredness. The introspective conscience of Lutherans can indeed be deadly. But the baby seems to have gone out with the bathwater. There seems to be almost no recognition that a society is in fact made up of individuals living together—and thus that individual, personal, private behavior has social consequences. The statement deliberately puts its attention on social structures, but to the point of depriving individuals (created in the image of God, called to a holy life, an honor no “society” as such has!) of all agency in their situations...