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.

I am the P.K. of a P.K. My other parent is the daughter of a Lutheran parochial schoolteacher, thus the closest you can get to P.K.-dom without actually being one. As long as my family had been in the U.S., they’d been Missouri Synod Lutherans. Then my folks went to and met at college in Ft. Wayne in 1973-1974. At the same time some stuff was happening at Concordia Seminary in St. Louis; not good stuff. My dad went to St. Louis but not to Concordia—to that other school instead. I was born at ground zero of American Lutheran schism.

So the first lesson I absorbed about church is that church breaks your heart. Again, and again, and again. I always know now when I’ve met a Seminex pastor. It’s like the mark of Cain.

We moved around a lot when I was little, but the second half of my childhood was spent at a rural parish in upstate New York. It was a nice place to grow up. Pastors’ kids always have a strange relationship to the community around them, and it wasn’t till much, much later that I figured out that I’d lived only on the surface of that community. There were all sorts of deep structures going on there that I couldn’t fathom. That, too, turned out to be a lesson about the church.

At the end of the nice rural years, I graduated a year early from high school to spend what would have been my senior year in Slovakia, where my parents went to do mission work, with my little brother in tow. I spent about half the year as a Division for Global Mission volunteer at the library of the Lýceum, an English-language Lutheran high school in Bratislava. It, like Lutheran Forum, is one of those rare projects where ELCA and LCMS people willingly cooperate. There I also saw Christianity in a different light, in a post-Communist society, where consciences had been compromised as a result of the regime’s slow and steady effort to extinguish the churches, and pietism was a relief from the state-imposed silence on the faith.

Then I went to college in North Carolina at Lenoir-Rhyne, one of the lesser-known Lutheran colleges. A few weeks into my freshman year, after putting up a paltry fight, I declared myself a theology major, though still with every intention of avoiding the pastorate at all costs. Bishop Michael McDaniel gave me a wonderful gift while I was there: the right to be interested in everything. Theology, he insisted, has a wide and generous scope.

As it had been my whole life long, it was easy to be Lutheran at college. Then I went to work at First Things, and it was not so easy to be a Lutheran there. I was not well prepared for the challenge and struggled a great deal to make sense of what I was hearing. Richard John Neuhaus is not one to be shy about his opinions! Whatever one may think of his opinions, though, he is a generous man, and he gave me another wonderful gift: the chance to learn how to write.

In the midst of that year at FT, two unanticipated things happened. The first was that I published my first article, which sometimes I fear will follow me to my grave: “Subversive Virginity.” It completely missed the mark for the FT audience. It was preaching to the choir, in one respect; in another respect, though, the point I was trying to make—that a truly empowering feminism would value chastity over promiscuity—was pretty much ignored. The result was a load of icky love letters from fans every bit as much objectifying my body as if I had advertised myself in an escort service. The episode earned me the nickname “the world’s second-most-famous virgin.” But, as the saying goes, you can’t buy publicity like that. It turns out that chastity is also a good way to launch a freelance writing career.

The other unanticipated thing that happened while I was working at FT—as a contrast to the general onslaught against my Lutheranism—was that I was called to the ministry. I am not really one to place much value on “religious experience” and, if it had stood alone with no other confirmation, I would probably have disregarded it altogether. I confess that, despite the initial rush of emotion, I was pretty annoyed at being sucked into the family business. Church breaks your heart, after all.

I needed somewhere neutral to work out the Lutheran-Roman Catholic rivalry and I knew that, whatever else it might have to offer, the Reformed tradition would never tempt me to convert. So off to Princeton I went. (The money helped too—God bless Presbyterians for being rich and generous.) The chief thing I got out of my M.Div. education was the Bible. Familiarity breeds contempt; the Bible had not been terribly interesting to me before seminary. While I was there, it became my faith’s lifeline again, especially because of the late, sainted Donald Juel.

At the end of three painfully introspective years, the light began to shine again on Maundy Thursday when I walked across the quad and met my husband. He was a Luther Seminary student visiting a mutual friend of ours. We had dinner on Good Friday, a date on Holy Saturday, spent Easter Sunday apart and met up again Easter Monday. Just under a year later we violated the old statute against getting married during Lent, because we took Luther’s insight seriously: Marriage is a school for sinners. Indeed, what better time of year for holy matrimony? (This same gentleman, by the way, does the layout for LF.) That happy event took place during internship at St. Paul’s in Durham, and then it was back to Princeton for the both of us, this time to earn our doctorates. Four years later we have one son, Ezekiel, who was born in Guatemala, and we are looking forward to the birth of our daughter in the same place.

I am now finishing a dissertation on Elisabeth Behr-Sigel, a French Orthodox theologian who was known for her work on Russian spirituality and her advocacy of the ordination of women. My “Doktormutter” is Ellen Charry, a Christian Jew, who has taught me that doctrine is the spiritual care of souls, and that one may not check Christian virtues at the door in the academic study of theology.

I’ve also been the pastor at a very tiny church in Trenton, New Jersey, for a little over a year now. As it turned out, I eventually got a lot less annoyed about the family business. But I still find that church breaks your heart.

Somehow it feels like telling the punchline before the rest of the joke, but in the aforementioned interest of avoiding hidden agendas, here are some things you may as well know about me now.

The Bible: As I mentioned before, it is my lifeline. I don’t find the doctrine of inerrancy (of the literal-six-day-creation-in-fierce-opposition-to-evolution type) illuminating or insightful. But I do believe that the Holy Scriptures are the Word of God and the norm of the church’s faith and life, as I confessed in my ordination vows. I stand under the Scriptures, not above them.

Some hot-button issues: I do think (obviously enough) that the ordination of women is in keeping with the gospel, but at the same time I am not at all interested in non-theological reasons for ordaining them. I have tried very hard to conclude that homosexual behavior is in keeping with the gospel too, and I have failed; and I imagine that neither the effort nor the failure will win me any friends. I think the much bigger problems are divorce, abortion, and sexual abuse. I find it hard to take seriously invocations of statis confessionis where homosexuality is concerned when it has not been invoked over divorced bishops and non-celibate heterosexual pastors.

Ecumenically: I have no desire to become a Roman Catholic and I do not find the reasons that others have offered for doing so compelling. As you might deduce from my dissertation topic, the eastern church is more appealing to me. All the same, it’s a nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there. I think Lutheran indifference towards (other) Protestants is a shame and a failure.

Closer to home: I have examined the Lutheran confession of the Christian faith at length and have not found it wanting. In fact, in it I have found life, grace, truth, and my Lord Jesus Christ. I have examined the Lutheran church bodies that confess the Christian faith and have found them profoundly wanting. But I expected that all along because, after all, church breaks your heart.

Well. This is a dire beginning!

I should be asked now, with some justice, why I have prolonged this apparently masochistic relationship with the church; why I have stuck around, gotten ordained, pursued a Ph.D. in theology, and accepted an editorship for a church journal, if the only payoff is heartbreak.

There is, happily, more than one reason for sticking around.

The first is the simplest. If I am to find my crucified and risen Lord, I have to go where he will be found: in the body of Christ, which is the church. Even our own messed-up Lutheran churches in America qualify. Luther once wrote to fellow Augustinian friar George Spenlein these wonderful words: “Beware of aspiring to such purity that you will not wish to be looked upon as a sinner, or to be one. For Christ dwells only in sinners.” And so in my despairing moments, I say to myself—and to you—do not aspire to a church so pure that it is purified of all sinners. The church is both empty and dangerous when it aspires to such purity. Our own church bodies today are at their most offensively self-righteous when they trumpet their purity and good works on the street corner for all to hear. Christ is found in the sinful church—in the church that confesses its sins. If the church is the body of Christ, it should come as no surprise that the body is broken and dying.

However—reason number two—the crucified body of Christ did die, but it did not stay dead. The theology of the cross doesn’t end with the cross, because the cross has to give way, finally, to the resurrection. The death that our church dies—congregationally or institutionally or in any other way—is a divine death, one that kills to make alive. It may seem that a strong, faithful, and healthy Lutheran church in America is as probable as dry bones coming to life again. But that is precisely why we may hope. Our God excels in resurrections.

This is certainly no empty optimism. We have one Lutheran church body in this country that looks quite a lot like Galatia, tending towards the legalistic and unforgiving, at the expense of the gospel. And we have another Lutheran church body that looks quite a lot like Corinth, tending towards the antinomian and unrepentant, at the expense of the law. The cold but real comfort for us is that these maladies have such a fine pedigree. They are the very things that the church on earth is always tempted by—has always been tempted by, even under the guidance of no less a preacher than the apostle Paul himself.

The past few decades have seen swift and extraordinary changes. It should come as no great wonder that our churches have been confused, mistaken, even faithless in their response. The greater wonder is that such faithless bodies are still the church of God. The greater wonder is that God has always trafficked with the faithless. He created a world in which sin was possible, in which sin actually happened; He preserved sinful people, fed and clothed and sheltered them, even while they remained hardened in their sin; He called for Himself a stiff-necked folk to bear His word, even while they chased after other gods. Those who take offense at the church finally take offense at the mercy of God, who from the beginning has put Himself in the lowly and undignified position of advocate for sinners. It was while we were still sinners that Christ died for us. And while we remain sinners He calls us to be His church.

But I can go you still one better than that, which is also my third reason for sticking around. Simul justus et peccator is a doctrine for surviving the brutal parts of life. But, astonishingly, the Holy Spirit is God too! And the same Holy Spirit can do remarkable things with that peccator. Not all of Paul’s churches were like Corinth and Galatia. There was also Philippi: a church that provoked Paul to joyful, not tearful, prayers; a church in which good works were brought to completion, love flourished, knowledge increased; a church that produced a harvest of righteousness to the glory of God. A church where people competed to proclaim the good news about Christ, even from mixed motives, yet either way the gospel was proclaimed—and in that Paul rejoiced. A church, ultimately, which had the same mind that was in Christ. Philippi is not an allegory or a type—any more than Galatia and Corinth—but an actual, historical church, the real thing. Churches can be, and sometimes even are, joyful, faithful places.

So, sisters and brothers, we live in a time and place beyond our comprehension, as old systems and patterns break down and new ones develop, where great good is possible just as much as great evil. We have been called to persevere in the thick of it, dead to sin and alive to God through our baptism, always repenting and always rejoicing. Let us shed our Galatian and Corinthian heresies; let us become Philippians. The pages of Lutheran Forum are intended to map out, in some small way, the path to Philippi, to a church that is on balance more faithful than faithless. In groping our way forwards, we confess that by our own human strength this is impossible, but with God, crucified and risen, all things are possible.

Therefore it is to the church in Philippi that this editorship is affectionately dedicated.

Sarah Hinlicky Wilson is the editor of Lutheran Forum.