Sex and Salvation
Part of a 7 week course called "Sense and Sensuality" by Rev. Gary Blobaum
Warnings from the Social Statement In our first session we compared the new ELCA teaching about prostitution with biblical teaching about prostitution. We found that the ELCA sexuality studies address the “personal, economic, and social difficulties” that often give rise to prostitution and result from it. The ELCA documents do not address the spiritual consequences of prostitution. The Bible, on the other hand, perceives the use of prostitutes to be rebellion against God and therefore a threat to salvation. The Bible does not specifically address justice issues as they are related to prostitution although the early church, in providing for widows, eliminated the need for prostitution as an economic option of last resort. In this session we will consider other sexual sins and continue to ask why the ELCA has chosen either to neglect, or to depart from, the biblical teaching that sexual sins endanger faith and are therefore a threat to salvation. It is not that the ELCA does not perceive dangers in sexual sin. For example, the Social Statement says: …sin permeates human sexuality as it does all of life. When expressed immaturely, irresponsibly, or with hurtful intent, then love – or its counter-feit, coercive power – can lead to harm and even death. Too often lust is mistaken for love, which in turn becomes the rationale for selfish behaviors. When infatuation, lust, and self-gratification take the place of the responsibilities of love, cascading consequences result that can be devastating for partners, children, families, and society. (lines 446-455) |
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The biblical narratives…are candid about the harm that can result from human sexuality (2 Samuel 11; 2 Samuel 13; Matthew 5:27-30). (lines 463-466)
This church calls attention to the danger of embracing standards of physical attractiveness that exclude many, including the aged and people with disabilities, and which distort the understanding of what it means to be healthy. (lines 1217-1220)
This is why this church opposes non-monogamous, promiscuous, or casual sexual relationships of any kind. Indulging immediate desires for satisfaction, sexual or otherwise, is to “gratify the desires of the flesh” (Galatians 5:16-19). Such transient encounters do not allow for trust in the relationship to create the context for trust in sexual intimacy.
Such relationships undermine the dignity and integrity of individuals because physical intimacy is not accompanied by the growth of mutual self-knowledge. Absent the presence of physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual trust and commitment, such sexual relationships may easily damage the self and an individual’s future capacity to live out committed and trustworthy relationships. Fleeting relationships misuse the gift of sexual intimacy and are much more likely to be unjust, abusive, and exploitative. (lines 1319-1334)
Only once does the document itself mention spiritual peril:
When [the sixth] commandment is violated, many things are adulterated – relationships are damaged, people are betrayed and harmed. Promiscuity and sexual activity without a spirit of mutuality and commitment are sinful because of their destructive consequences for individuals, relationships, and the community. The Apostle Paul’s list of vices (e.g., fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry) warns believers of the dangers of gratifying “the desires of the flesh,” thereby turning away from belonging to Christ and God’s kingdom (Galatians 5:19-21). The breakdown of trust through the sexual adulteration of the bonds of the committed, intimate, and protected relationship of marriage wreaks havoc for the family and the community, as well as for the people involved. (lines 277-290)
In our first session, when we compared ELCA teaching with biblical teaching, we noted that the teaching of the new ELCA seems grounded in a way of thinking called “consequentialism.” Elizabeth Anscombe, a Christian philosopher, coined the term “consequentialism” to describe a system of ethics that replaces divine judgment with observable consequences as a way of determining right and wrong. Actions are wrong not because they violate the commandments but because they result in undesirable consequences. The above statement: “Promiscuity and sexual activity without a spirit of mutuality and commitment are sinful because of their destructive consequences…” is a particularly clear example of the consequentialist thinking which typifies the ELCA documents. Consequentialism is not content to take the commandments at face value. It is not enough that God declared an action to be wrong; the consequentialist insists on ferreting out the actual harmful effects of the prohibited action. Then the consequentialist refrains from the action not because it is prohibited but because he or she has discerned its effects to be undesirable. The end result of such thinking – whether intended or unintended – is that God is factored out of ethical considerations.
The above statement – “Promiscuity and sexual activity without a spirit of mutuality and commitment are sinful because of their destructive consequences…” -- shows the consequentialist underpinnings of the ELCA approach to sexuality. This approach pervades the document. For example, problems do not arise not when love oversteps the bounds God established for it, but when “it is expressed immaturely, irresponsibly, or with hurtful intent…” When you put it that way, whole new vistas open up for expressing love because the art of convincing ourselves that we are mature, responsible, and not intending to hurt anyone is an art sinful humans practice every day. The commandment has been replaced by human determinations of right and wrong. Discussion of the will of God and divine judgment has been taken off the table in the ELCA’s deliberations about sexuality.
One of the problems for consequentialist thinking is that our eternal destiny is not an observable consequence, at least not in this life. Therefore the question of salvation does not arise for those whose response to the commandments is guided by this way of thinking. Consequentialism focuses our attention on matters of this world only. But when the Bible speaks of sexual sin, it has in mind a consequence with far more gravity.
Warnings from the Bible
In tone, content, and purpose, the Bible seems a world apart from the approach of the ELCA:
Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. And such were some of you. (I Corinthians 6:9-11)
For you may be sure of this, that everyone who is sexually immoral or impure, or who is covetous (that is, an idolater), has no inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and God. (Ephesians 5:5)
Let marriage be held in honor among all, and let the marriage bed be undefiled, for God will judge the sexually immoral and adulterous. (Hebrews 13:14)
Put to death, therefore, whatever in you is earthly in you: sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness which is idolatry. On account of these the wrath of God is coming. (Colossians 3:5,6)
Blessed are those who wash their robes, so that they may have the right to the tree of life and that they may enter the city by the gates. Outside are the dogs and sorcerers and the sexually immoral and murders and idolaters, and everyone who loves and practices falsehood. (Revelation 22:15)
When the Bible speaks of sexual sin, it is concerned above all for the salvation of believers who are tempted to return to the practices they renounced when they surrendered themselves to Jesus Christ. Concern for the observable consequences of sexual sin has been completely eclipsed by the dreadful specter of loss of one’s salvation. A statement like: “Such transient encounters do not allow for trust in the relationship to create the context for trust in sexual intimacy” (lines 1323-1325) would have been taken for incomprehensible babble to the earliest readers of the New Testament. Why should we “shun fornication” (I Corinthians 6:18)? Well, because “such transient encounters do not allow for trust in the relationship to create the context for trust in sexual intimacy” of course! Rather, the Corinthians are told to resist such temptations not only because sexual immorality is against God’s will, but also because their bodies are meant for a great destiny and an exalted purpose. Through faithful marriage and faithful singleness they are encouraged: “glorify God in your body” (I Corinthians 6:20). By giving themselves to a husband or wife, by giving themselves to the Lord, they make the Lord of the Universe shine even more brightly through all eternity.
So glorious is our embodied destiny and our eternal purpose that the Creator restrains with severe warnings Christians who are tempted to squander their everlasting inheritance by treating sexual sin as a matter of indifference. But apart from that brief mention in lines 282-286 (“The Apostle Paul’s list of vices (e.g., fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry) warns believers of the dangers of gratifying ‘the desires of the flesh,’ thereby turning away from belonging to Christ and God’s kingdom.”) the Social Statement neglects the biblical concern for the salvation of Christians who are sexually tempted. And even that brief warning seems to be superseded in the next sentence by the document’s familiar concern “for the family and the community...”
As the ELCA was poised to vote, as it was about to make its determination that homosexual sex is not sinful, Sarah Hinlicky Wilson was alarmed enough to write: “I have yet to hear any acknowledgment of the potential danger involved in saying something formerly considered to be a sin is no longer a sin. The danger is in misleading persons as to the extreme severity of the Scripture’s warnings against sexual immorality. I don’t know if this is a basic denial of the possibility of real judgment by God, a shallow universalism, a convenient neglect of these awkward texts, or something else entirely. But I have never seen anywhere near the kind of gravity in the face of potential divine judgment that would lead me to take the arguments for same-sex partnerships as serious interpretations of the Scriptures.”
Defying Gravity
The ELCA contradicted a two thousand year teaching of the Church without acknowledging the gravity of what it was doing. Nothing so shows the spiritual weightlessness with which the ELCA made this unprecedented decision than the nonchalance of the Social Statement itself on the question of whether or not salvation might be at stake. The statement repeatedly assures us, without a syllable of evidence, that we are discussing “matters around which salvation is not at stake, including human sexuality” (footnote 26, page 30). The statement assures us that we “are able to be realistic and merciful with respect to our physical and emotional realities, not striving…as if our salvation were at stake” (lines 344-347). Instead of acknowledging the gravity of the question, the Statement minimizes its seriousness, for “we recognize that this church’s deliberations related to human sexuality require our best moral discernment and practical wisdom in the worldly realm, even though these matters are not central to determining our salvation” (lines 378-381). True, they would have been hard pressed to find a Lutheran arguing that sexuality is “central” to determining our salvation. But that was never the question. The biblical question is: Can sexual immorality have an effect on whether or not we will be saved? The Bible answers that question with an unequivocal “yes.” Sexual sin affects us so deeply, so near the core of our being, that it can lead us into unreachable guilt or unreachable complacency. We can come to believe we have done something so seriously wrong that God will never forgive us; or, if our lives appear to go on as before, we can come to believe that God has not spoken seriously in the Bible and that neither God’s threats nor God’s promises are true.
It is not the case that sexual immorality in itself bars us from eternal life. As with every other sin, sexual immorality has been forgiven by the suffering and death of Jesus. Sexual immorality endangers salvation only through the opening it creates for Satan’s assault on saving faith. Throughout our lives we struggle against sin and often fail, needing forgiveness each day. Every sin has been forgiven; every sexual sin has been borne by Jesus in his own body and suffered away. We have only to receive the forgiveness Christ has already won for us. But this realism about our recurrent failure to resist temptation and our daily need for forgiveness is a world apart from a teaching of the church which beckons us to bless and celebrate what the Word of God calls sin.
The Social Statement attempts “to establish a sexual ethic on Christian freedom” (Stephen Hultgren reflecting on lines 1521-1534 of the statement). But it may be that Scripture warns against such an attempt:
For they speak bombastic nonsense, and with licentious desires of the flesh they entice people who have just escaped from those who live in error. They promise them freedom, but they themselves are slaves of corruption; for people are slaves to whatever masters them. For if, after they have escaped the defilements of the world through the knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, they are again entangled in them and overpowered, the last state has become worse than the first (2 Peter 2: 18-20).
The question of how a person will stand before the throne of God on Judgment Day does not seem to occur to the authors of the Social Statement. As a hospice chaplain, I sat beside persons in same-sex relationships as they were dying. I heard their confessions. I absolved them and gave them Holy Communion. But my church has now invited such people to stand before God without repenting for sexual acts which the Bible calls sin. It seems to me it now offers to such people a hope that is different from the cross of Christ.
Rodney Juell, a chaplain in the Northern Illinois Synod, tells the following story: “We had a woman in the medical center a while back, around forty years old, with a long history of drug and alcohol abuse and some behavioral health issues. In the course of our conversations she identified herself as a lesbian. At one point she asked me what I thought about homosexuality. I asked her if she was sure she wanted to know, because she might not like what I had to say. She said she did. So I told her that I didn’t believe that God had created her to be a lesbian, that it was not God’s will for her. But I also told her that I did not believe that her lesbianism was something she had chosen (I think that might be changing for some people today, but that is a story for another time), that she was not somehow individually culpable, and that in fact she was ‘in bondage to sin and cannot free herself.’ I also told her that I believe Jesus was sent to die for her brokenness, and that she, like all of us, could live confidently in the mercy of God, even while living with and maybe even acting out the ambiguity of her sexuality, not unlike (without intending to be flip about it) the fact that I’m gonna worsen global warming next weekend by taking my wife on a car trip. In short, her sexuality, and even her sexual behaviors, are part of the ‘nothing else in all creation’ that can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. Now her response to me was interesting. She cried. She told me I was the first clergy who had not told her either that 1) she was a condemned sinner on her way to hell, or that 2) gay is good and God made her that way so she should rejoice in it. This wise or at least very intuitive woman recognized that those were false alternatives.” (Lutheran Forum, Winter 2008, pp.61f.)
The central tenet of the Social Statement is the command to “love the neighbor as yourself.” But can it be an act of love toward homosexuals to refuse to address Scripture’s most pressing question, the most important question in the entire debate: Will the decision to bless same-sex activity affect the salvation of the people involved? To not even discuss that question, to not engage the Word of God where it lists the practice of homosexual sex alongside other behaviors that threaten salvation, to simply offer the unsupported declaration that “salvation is not at stake” – can this be love?
Go to Global Sisters and Brothers
This church calls attention to the danger of embracing standards of physical attractiveness that exclude many, including the aged and people with disabilities, and which distort the understanding of what it means to be healthy. (lines 1217-1220)
This is why this church opposes non-monogamous, promiscuous, or casual sexual relationships of any kind. Indulging immediate desires for satisfaction, sexual or otherwise, is to “gratify the desires of the flesh” (Galatians 5:16-19). Such transient encounters do not allow for trust in the relationship to create the context for trust in sexual intimacy.
Such relationships undermine the dignity and integrity of individuals because physical intimacy is not accompanied by the growth of mutual self-knowledge. Absent the presence of physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual trust and commitment, such sexual relationships may easily damage the self and an individual’s future capacity to live out committed and trustworthy relationships. Fleeting relationships misuse the gift of sexual intimacy and are much more likely to be unjust, abusive, and exploitative. (lines 1319-1334)
Only once does the document itself mention spiritual peril:
When [the sixth] commandment is violated, many things are adulterated – relationships are damaged, people are betrayed and harmed. Promiscuity and sexual activity without a spirit of mutuality and commitment are sinful because of their destructive consequences for individuals, relationships, and the community. The Apostle Paul’s list of vices (e.g., fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry) warns believers of the dangers of gratifying “the desires of the flesh,” thereby turning away from belonging to Christ and God’s kingdom (Galatians 5:19-21). The breakdown of trust through the sexual adulteration of the bonds of the committed, intimate, and protected relationship of marriage wreaks havoc for the family and the community, as well as for the people involved. (lines 277-290)
In our first session, when we compared ELCA teaching with biblical teaching, we noted that the teaching of the new ELCA seems grounded in a way of thinking called “consequentialism.” Elizabeth Anscombe, a Christian philosopher, coined the term “consequentialism” to describe a system of ethics that replaces divine judgment with observable consequences as a way of determining right and wrong. Actions are wrong not because they violate the commandments but because they result in undesirable consequences. The above statement: “Promiscuity and sexual activity without a spirit of mutuality and commitment are sinful because of their destructive consequences…” is a particularly clear example of the consequentialist thinking which typifies the ELCA documents. Consequentialism is not content to take the commandments at face value. It is not enough that God declared an action to be wrong; the consequentialist insists on ferreting out the actual harmful effects of the prohibited action. Then the consequentialist refrains from the action not because it is prohibited but because he or she has discerned its effects to be undesirable. The end result of such thinking – whether intended or unintended – is that God is factored out of ethical considerations.
The above statement – “Promiscuity and sexual activity without a spirit of mutuality and commitment are sinful because of their destructive consequences…” -- shows the consequentialist underpinnings of the ELCA approach to sexuality. This approach pervades the document. For example, problems do not arise not when love oversteps the bounds God established for it, but when “it is expressed immaturely, irresponsibly, or with hurtful intent…” When you put it that way, whole new vistas open up for expressing love because the art of convincing ourselves that we are mature, responsible, and not intending to hurt anyone is an art sinful humans practice every day. The commandment has been replaced by human determinations of right and wrong. Discussion of the will of God and divine judgment has been taken off the table in the ELCA’s deliberations about sexuality.
One of the problems for consequentialist thinking is that our eternal destiny is not an observable consequence, at least not in this life. Therefore the question of salvation does not arise for those whose response to the commandments is guided by this way of thinking. Consequentialism focuses our attention on matters of this world only. But when the Bible speaks of sexual sin, it has in mind a consequence with far more gravity.
Warnings from the Bible
In tone, content, and purpose, the Bible seems a world apart from the approach of the ELCA:
Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. And such were some of you. (I Corinthians 6:9-11)
For you may be sure of this, that everyone who is sexually immoral or impure, or who is covetous (that is, an idolater), has no inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and God. (Ephesians 5:5)
Let marriage be held in honor among all, and let the marriage bed be undefiled, for God will judge the sexually immoral and adulterous. (Hebrews 13:14)
Put to death, therefore, whatever in you is earthly in you: sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness which is idolatry. On account of these the wrath of God is coming. (Colossians 3:5,6)
Blessed are those who wash their robes, so that they may have the right to the tree of life and that they may enter the city by the gates. Outside are the dogs and sorcerers and the sexually immoral and murders and idolaters, and everyone who loves and practices falsehood. (Revelation 22:15)
When the Bible speaks of sexual sin, it is concerned above all for the salvation of believers who are tempted to return to the practices they renounced when they surrendered themselves to Jesus Christ. Concern for the observable consequences of sexual sin has been completely eclipsed by the dreadful specter of loss of one’s salvation. A statement like: “Such transient encounters do not allow for trust in the relationship to create the context for trust in sexual intimacy” (lines 1323-1325) would have been taken for incomprehensible babble to the earliest readers of the New Testament. Why should we “shun fornication” (I Corinthians 6:18)? Well, because “such transient encounters do not allow for trust in the relationship to create the context for trust in sexual intimacy” of course! Rather, the Corinthians are told to resist such temptations not only because sexual immorality is against God’s will, but also because their bodies are meant for a great destiny and an exalted purpose. Through faithful marriage and faithful singleness they are encouraged: “glorify God in your body” (I Corinthians 6:20). By giving themselves to a husband or wife, by giving themselves to the Lord, they make the Lord of the Universe shine even more brightly through all eternity.
So glorious is our embodied destiny and our eternal purpose that the Creator restrains with severe warnings Christians who are tempted to squander their everlasting inheritance by treating sexual sin as a matter of indifference. But apart from that brief mention in lines 282-286 (“The Apostle Paul’s list of vices (e.g., fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry) warns believers of the dangers of gratifying ‘the desires of the flesh,’ thereby turning away from belonging to Christ and God’s kingdom.”) the Social Statement neglects the biblical concern for the salvation of Christians who are sexually tempted. And even that brief warning seems to be superseded in the next sentence by the document’s familiar concern “for the family and the community...”
As the ELCA was poised to vote, as it was about to make its determination that homosexual sex is not sinful, Sarah Hinlicky Wilson was alarmed enough to write: “I have yet to hear any acknowledgment of the potential danger involved in saying something formerly considered to be a sin is no longer a sin. The danger is in misleading persons as to the extreme severity of the Scripture’s warnings against sexual immorality. I don’t know if this is a basic denial of the possibility of real judgment by God, a shallow universalism, a convenient neglect of these awkward texts, or something else entirely. But I have never seen anywhere near the kind of gravity in the face of potential divine judgment that would lead me to take the arguments for same-sex partnerships as serious interpretations of the Scriptures.”
Defying Gravity
The ELCA contradicted a two thousand year teaching of the Church without acknowledging the gravity of what it was doing. Nothing so shows the spiritual weightlessness with which the ELCA made this unprecedented decision than the nonchalance of the Social Statement itself on the question of whether or not salvation might be at stake. The statement repeatedly assures us, without a syllable of evidence, that we are discussing “matters around which salvation is not at stake, including human sexuality” (footnote 26, page 30). The statement assures us that we “are able to be realistic and merciful with respect to our physical and emotional realities, not striving…as if our salvation were at stake” (lines 344-347). Instead of acknowledging the gravity of the question, the Statement minimizes its seriousness, for “we recognize that this church’s deliberations related to human sexuality require our best moral discernment and practical wisdom in the worldly realm, even though these matters are not central to determining our salvation” (lines 378-381). True, they would have been hard pressed to find a Lutheran arguing that sexuality is “central” to determining our salvation. But that was never the question. The biblical question is: Can sexual immorality have an effect on whether or not we will be saved? The Bible answers that question with an unequivocal “yes.” Sexual sin affects us so deeply, so near the core of our being, that it can lead us into unreachable guilt or unreachable complacency. We can come to believe we have done something so seriously wrong that God will never forgive us; or, if our lives appear to go on as before, we can come to believe that God has not spoken seriously in the Bible and that neither God’s threats nor God’s promises are true.
It is not the case that sexual immorality in itself bars us from eternal life. As with every other sin, sexual immorality has been forgiven by the suffering and death of Jesus. Sexual immorality endangers salvation only through the opening it creates for Satan’s assault on saving faith. Throughout our lives we struggle against sin and often fail, needing forgiveness each day. Every sin has been forgiven; every sexual sin has been borne by Jesus in his own body and suffered away. We have only to receive the forgiveness Christ has already won for us. But this realism about our recurrent failure to resist temptation and our daily need for forgiveness is a world apart from a teaching of the church which beckons us to bless and celebrate what the Word of God calls sin.
The Social Statement attempts “to establish a sexual ethic on Christian freedom” (Stephen Hultgren reflecting on lines 1521-1534 of the statement). But it may be that Scripture warns against such an attempt:
For they speak bombastic nonsense, and with licentious desires of the flesh they entice people who have just escaped from those who live in error. They promise them freedom, but they themselves are slaves of corruption; for people are slaves to whatever masters them. For if, after they have escaped the defilements of the world through the knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, they are again entangled in them and overpowered, the last state has become worse than the first (2 Peter 2: 18-20).
The question of how a person will stand before the throne of God on Judgment Day does not seem to occur to the authors of the Social Statement. As a hospice chaplain, I sat beside persons in same-sex relationships as they were dying. I heard their confessions. I absolved them and gave them Holy Communion. But my church has now invited such people to stand before God without repenting for sexual acts which the Bible calls sin. It seems to me it now offers to such people a hope that is different from the cross of Christ.
Rodney Juell, a chaplain in the Northern Illinois Synod, tells the following story: “We had a woman in the medical center a while back, around forty years old, with a long history of drug and alcohol abuse and some behavioral health issues. In the course of our conversations she identified herself as a lesbian. At one point she asked me what I thought about homosexuality. I asked her if she was sure she wanted to know, because she might not like what I had to say. She said she did. So I told her that I didn’t believe that God had created her to be a lesbian, that it was not God’s will for her. But I also told her that I did not believe that her lesbianism was something she had chosen (I think that might be changing for some people today, but that is a story for another time), that she was not somehow individually culpable, and that in fact she was ‘in bondage to sin and cannot free herself.’ I also told her that I believe Jesus was sent to die for her brokenness, and that she, like all of us, could live confidently in the mercy of God, even while living with and maybe even acting out the ambiguity of her sexuality, not unlike (without intending to be flip about it) the fact that I’m gonna worsen global warming next weekend by taking my wife on a car trip. In short, her sexuality, and even her sexual behaviors, are part of the ‘nothing else in all creation’ that can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. Now her response to me was interesting. She cried. She told me I was the first clergy who had not told her either that 1) she was a condemned sinner on her way to hell, or that 2) gay is good and God made her that way so she should rejoice in it. This wise or at least very intuitive woman recognized that those were false alternatives.” (Lutheran Forum, Winter 2008, pp.61f.)
The central tenet of the Social Statement is the command to “love the neighbor as yourself.” But can it be an act of love toward homosexuals to refuse to address Scripture’s most pressing question, the most important question in the entire debate: Will the decision to bless same-sex activity affect the salvation of the people involved? To not even discuss that question, to not engage the Word of God where it lists the practice of homosexual sex alongside other behaviors that threaten salvation, to simply offer the unsupported declaration that “salvation is not at stake” – can this be love?
Go to Global Sisters and Brothers