What’s New in the ELCA?Part of a 7 week course called "Sense and Sensuality" by Rev. Gary Blobaum
The Thinking Behind the Changes On the Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost our Second Lesson began with these words: “Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers and sisters, for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness” (James 3:1). Talk about dampening the enthusiasm to volunteer! Not exactly the passage we want to read when we are hoping to enlist teachers for Sunday School and CenterPointe! But James has a point to make, and it is the main point I want to emphasize in these remarks: teachers of the church are judged with great strictness because the teaching of the church affects people’s salvation. Maybe not immediately. If the church diverges from the truth of God’s Word, it may take generations for the effect to become fully manifest. For a time, orthodoxy (true teaching) and heterodoxy (false teaching) may commingle. But where false teaching is tolerated, it will likely prevail. This propensity has been called “Neuhaus’ Law”: “Where orthodoxy is optional it will eventually be proscribed.” At its recent churchwide assembly, the ELCA approved unprecedented changes in church teaching and practice. The assembly voted 619 to 402 to allow for blessings of same-sex relationships. The assembly voted 559 to 451 to permit the ordination of people in same-sex relationships. These specific changes will affect most ELCA congregations only gradually, if at all. But the thinking that guided these changes will affect everyone. |
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Acceptance: The Way We Used to Think
In order to understand how it has changed, consider what our Lutheran thinking used to be. About ten years ago, I served as advisory pastor to a congregation in Chicago, a congregation in which a significant percentage of the membership was gay and lesbian. One Sunday morning during Bible study we were discussing homosexuality. A member of the congregation – call him “Rudy” – told us about his loneliness, despair, and desperation when, as a university student in his late teens, he could no longer deny the terrifying fact that he was homosexual. Self-loathing consumed him and he became suicidal. He needed to talk to someone, but whom? This was the early 1960’s; homosexuality was not something one discussed.
Late one afternoon, he returned to the house where he was renting a room. He paused on his way through the kitchen to chat with his landlady, Mrs. Swenson, a woman in her fifties, a Swedish Lutheran. Suddenly he could hold it in no longer; he blurted out: “Mrs. Swenson, I’m a homosexual. I know I am. I hate myself!”
Mrs. Swenson flung open her arms, ran to him, embraced him, and said, “Oh, Rudy, Christ loves you!”
That was the beginning of Rudy’s acceptance of himself as a homosexual. It was also the beginning of his life as a Lutheran. He has been in the church ever since, and Christ has been the rock of his life.
Mrs. Swenson exemplifies the way Lutherans, at our best, used to think. Christ died for all. No one need be outside the embrace of his love. We are all equally sinners in need of God’s grace. But how had Mrs. Swenson arrived at such an understanding, such a spontaneous and warmhearted acceptance? This was before the Stonewall Riot, before diversity training, before queer theory, and before gay pride parades. She had arrived at such an immediate, unhesitating, and confident acceptance by being a Lutheran. She had arrived at it by sitting in church, singing hymns, praying prayers, listening to sermons, remembering her Baptism, eating and drinking the body and blood of her Lord, and reading her Bible. She had arrived at such instantaneous acceptance by believing the Gospel, by believing that she, a sinner, had been unconditionally accepted by Jesus. And she had arrived at such unstinting acceptance by allowing Jesus to conform her life to his. Mrs, Swenson is the way Lutherans, at our best, used to think.
Justice: The Way We Think Now
In 2002, the Metro Chicago Synod held for its pastors a series of workshops called “Gay and Lesbian Persons in the Church.” The workshops had been organized by the Synod Justice Team. Pastors of the synod were required to attend. The workshop I attended featured three speakers – a psychologist, a social worker, and a theologian – all of whom advocated for the blessing of same-sex unions and ordination of persons in such unions. I inquired concerning the absence of speakers from the traditional point of view. “We couldn’t find anyone to represent that view,” came the reply. I suggested several theologians the Justice Team may have overlooked.
During discussion periods that day, two pastors challenged the perspective being offered: myself and the only openly homosexual pastor in the room. This pastor told of his struggle, through prayerful clinging to the cross of Christ, to remain chaste. He warned us that approval of same-sex relationships would make it all the more difficult for him and pastors like him to live in the chastity to which they believed Christ had called them. His warning seemed to fall on deaf ears, as indeed the witness of chaste homosexual pastors appears to have been ignored throughout the church’s recent deliberations.
This homosexual pastor accepted the fact of his homosexuality and embraced Christ’s acceptance of him. But in the view of the workshop presenters, acceptance was not the point. Justice was the point. The viewpoint of the new ELCA is that justice will not be served until the church recognizes homosexuality as equal to heterosexuality. According to the new teaching, justice will not be served until the joy with which the church celebrates same-sex marriages equals the joy with which the church celebrates heterosexual marriages. Furthermore, until the church understands that God intends both heterosexual and homosexual relationships for the human beings he created, until the church understands that both heterosexual and homosexual relationships were envisioned when God pronounced his creation of the male and female as “very good” – justice will be lacking in the church.
The question of justice permeates the thinking of the new ELCA and determines the way decisions are made. Nothing trumps justice. A friend of mine, a former ELCA missionary to Bangladesh, tells how several Muslims converted to Christianity through his ministry. When he was home on furlough he mentioned this to his supervisors at the ELCA Division for Global Mission. They informed him he had not been sent to Bangladesh to convert Muslims. It was appropriate to dialogue with Muslims, they said, but not to proclaim the Gospel to them. Treating Christianity and Islam as equal is “justice;” encouraging Muslims to accept the Gospel is “monoculturalism”.
In 2002 and 2003, when partial-birth abortion was being debated in Congress, the Lutheran Office of Governmental Affairs, the advocacy arm of the ELCA, lobbied for this gruesome abortion practice. The offerings of faithful Lutherans were used to advocate for the right to insert a scissors into the brains of nearly-born children. The determinative principle behind this decision was “justice.”
Robert Benne, director of the Roanoke College Center for Religion and Society, sums up the thinking of the new ELCA: “But the ELCA has accepted the Social Gospel as its working theology even though its constitution has a marvelous statement of the classic Gospel. The liberating movements fueled by militant feminism, multiculturalism, anti-racism, anti-heterosexism, anti-imperialism, and now ecologism have been moved to the center while the classic Gospel and its mission imperatives have been pushed to the periphery. The policies issuing from these liberationist themes are non-negotiable in the ELCA, which is compelling evidence that they are at the center. No one can dislodge the ELCA’s commitment to purge all masculine language about God from its speech and worship, to demur on the biblically normative status of the nuclear family, to refuse to put limits on abortion in its internal policies or to advocate publicly for pro-life policies, to press for left-wing public domestic and foreign policy, to replace evangelism with dialog, [and] to commit to ‘full inclusion’ of gays and lesbians at the expense of church unity…”
Benne says these justice issues have become non-negotiable in the ELCA while the core Christian beliefs such as the Trinity, Christ as the one Mediator between humans and God, the authority of the Word, salvation by grace through faith, and the character of the Church as one, holy, catholic, and apostolic – have become negotiable. Descriptions of God like “the fountain of living water, the rock who gave us birth, our light and our salvation” are increasingly substituted for God’s Trinitarian name – “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.” The masculine associations of the Trinitarian name make this a justice issue. When my daughter graduated from the ELCA’s Luther College we prayed to Allah at the baccalaureate service, an invocation which left in doubt whether Jesus was the Mediator of that prayer. But such multiculturalism is a matter of justice. The authority of the Word? Prior to the current decade, social statements on sexuality were guided by the authority of scripture and tradition. Since 2003, they have been guided by scripture, tradition, and experience, and it is clear that the authority of one’s own experience can take precedence over the other two. Salvation by grace through faith? A year ago the Lutheran covered the story of an ELCA pastor’s daughter who had converted to Judaism and become a rabbi; in the glowing report on this inter-religious family, neither the churchwide magazine nor the ELCA pastor himself seemed concerned for his daughter’s salvation. The one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church? Our recent decisions at the churchwide assembly disregarded the admonitions of our partner churches and ignored the obstacles to Christian unity those decisions will create. The central teachings of the faith have moved to the periphery in the new ELCA; at the highest levels of leadership social justice issues are at the center. Social justice issues are important. But at the highest levels of the ELCA they have eclipsed what is most important: the death and resurrection of Christ for the world’s salvation.
The ELCA continues to have good theologians, good teachers, good pastors, and good congregations. The Gospel will be proclaimed and lived out. But one may reasonably ask: for how long?
Reflecting on the outcome of the churchwide assembly, Robert Benne writes: “The fallout of these historic moves by the ELCA is hard to predict, mainly because the Lutheran orthodox have no group of dissenting bishops around whom to rally. There will be a profusion of different responses by congregations and individuals. Many congregations and individuals will leave the ELCA. Others will bide their time to see what CORE (Coalition for Renewal) will become as it strives to articulate and then embody the best of Lutheranism. Many will withdraw from involvement in the ELCA and its synods and live at the local level. Many others will try to live on as if nothing happened. Others will approve of the new direction. But a tectonic shift has taken place, and it wasn’t primarily about sex. The ELCA has formally left the Great Tradition for liberal Protestantism.”
The New Thinking: Prostitution as a Case Study
The discussion of prostitution in the new sexuality documents is an example of the shift to “justice” as the principle by which Lutherans are to make decisions regarding sexuality. In “A Message on Sexuality: Some Common Convictions,” (2002) the ELCA said the following about prostitution: “Prostitution is sinful because it involves the casual buying and selling of ‘sex,’ often in demeaning and exploitative ways. Prostitutes and their patrons endanger their own health and that of others. Prostitution usually arises from and contributes to a cycle of personal, economic, and social difficulties.”
Consider what is being said. The document sets out to tell us why prostitution is sinful, in other words, why it is rebellion against God. But the document never does what it sets out to do. Instead of explaining why prostitution is sinful, it explains why it is unhealthy and unjust. It asks one question and answers another. It does not explain what a churchly document should explain, namely, why prostitution is harmful to our relationship with God. Instead it explains what a textbook in Community Health should explain, namely, why prostitution is harmful for the health of individuals and society. In the ELCA’s new outlook on sexuality, the over-riding concerns are health and justice.
In contrast to the ELCA, consider what the Bible says about prostitution: “Do you not know that wrongdoers will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived! Fornicators, idolaters, adulterers, male prostitutes, sodomites, thieves, the greedy, drunkards, revilers, robbers – none of these will inherit the kingdom of God. And this is what some of you used to be. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God.
“’All things are lawful for me,’ but not all things are beneficial. ‘All things are lawful for me,’ but I will not be dominated by anything. ‘Food is meant for the stomach and the stomach for food,’ and God will destroy both one and the other. The body is meant not for fornication but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body. And God raised the Lord and will also raise us by his power. Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? Should I therefore take the members of Christ and make them members of a prostitute? Never! Do you not know that whoever is united to a prostitute becomes one body with her? For it is said, ‘The two shall become one flesh.’ But anyone united to the Lord becomes one spirit with him. Shun fornication! Every sin that a person commits is outside the body; but the fornicator sins against the body itself. Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God, and that you are not your own? For you were bought with a price; therefore glorify God in your body” (1 Corinthians 6:9-20).
When the Apostle Paul addresses sexual matters generally, and prostitution specifically, his over-riding concern is salvation. He is concerned that people inherit the kingdom of God. He fears Christians may be deceived into thinking that their sexual relationships have no relevance to their salvation, as if they were matters of indifference. A textbook on Community Health would be quite correct in identifying the harm prostitution brings upon individuals and society. But only the Word of God can identify the harm it does to human souls.
Paul is aware how easily we deceive ourselves in sexual matters (v.9). If we decide how we will behave sexually based on reason and experience, if we approve forms of sexual expression according to prevailing cultural opinions, if we are bereft of the counsel of God’s Word – we will easily be deceived. Paul shows how the Corinthians deceived themselves through uncritical assimilation of ideas dominant in their culture. Paul quotes a popular slogan derived from Stoicism: “All things are lawful for me” (v.12). Paul does not contest the freedom implicit in this slogan. Christians are free with regard to the law. But the law, though it no longer has power to condemn us, still stands. It points out those ruinous paths through which believers can rebel against God and become enslaved again to forces that would separate them from God.
Paul then confronts a second Corinthian slogan which was being used by some in the church to justify prostitution: “Food is meant for the stomach and the stomach for food.” The libertine Corinthians argued that sex should be thought of on analogy with eating. Just as we are not bound by Old Testament dietary laws, these Christians argued, so also we should not be bound by Old Testament laws about sexuality. Another Stoic principle held that actions affecting the body are a matter of indifference. But Paul challenges the appropriateness of the analogy. The act of eating involves the stomach but does not involve the whole body. But the act of sexual intimacy involves the whole body, the whole person. What foods we eat may be a matter of indifference; whom we unite with sexually is not. Our salvation is not endangered if we turn to pork chops to satisfy our appetite for food; our salvation may be endangered if we turn to prostitutes to satisfy our appetite for sexual union. For Paul, acts of the body have eternal significance. Unlike a person’s body, a person’s stomach is not who he or she is. Our body is meant for the Lord (v.13). So significant is the human body that it is a temple in which the Holy Spirit desires to dwell (v.19). To surrender one’s body to a prostitute is to initiate all over again the contest between Christ and the demonic powers over ownership of one’s body.
Does the Lord have sole claim on the body of an individual believer? Surprisingly, Paul answers “no.” In the chapter following the one we are considering, Paul will tell us a wife has authority over her husband’s body and a husband has authority over his wife’s body (7:4). In the chapter under consideration, Paul evokes God’s original gift of marriage (“the two shall become one flesh,” 6:16). There is another to whom (in addition to the Lord) the married Christian is to surrender his or her body: the spouse. Sexual union with a prostitute is sinful not only because it is a rebellion against the Lord’s claim on the body, but also because it is a substitution for the only one God created to also have a claim on that body: the spouse. Sexual union with a prostitute treats someone with whom we are not married as if we were married to them. It overturns God’s good order for creation.
Note that Paul does not enter into a discussion of the injustices involved in prostitution. The concerns of the new ELCA (“demeaning,” “exploitative,” “economic,” “social difficulties”) are not his immediate concern. But Paul was not lacking in compassion for prostitutes. Nor was the early Church oblivious to the social and economic conditions which impelled women toward prostitution; the Church’s provision for widows exemplified that very justice which made it unnecessary for women to turn to prostitution as the economic option of last resort. Paul’s discussion of prostitution did not avoid the justice issues; it went deeper. Paul went to the root of the problem. Paul disclosed the use of a prostitute as fundamentally sin, as rebellion against God. His over-riding concern was reconciliation between human beings and God and thus our salvation.
The ELCA document “A Message on Sexuality: Some Common Convictions” intends to explain why prostitution is sinful (prostitution “is sinful because…”), but it never gets around to that. Instead of giving us the reason prostitution is sinful, it enumerates some effects of that sinfulness. This way of thinking has been called “consequentialism” because in this thinking the morality of an act is not determined by the nature of the act itself but by the nature of the consequences that follow it. Prostitution, for example, is not viewed as being in itself sinful, but it is determined to be sinful in light of its harmful effects. This is different from the Biblical view. According to the Bible, the Creator judges an act to be sinful when it rebels against the order of creation provided for all living things. Sexual intercourse with a prostitute is sinful because it disrupts and distorts the Creator’s good and holy gift of marriage. Sexual intercourse is an act in which a man and a woman give themselves to each other and with their bodies promise themselves to each other. Prostitution is a way in which two people conspire to say one thing to each other with their bodies while saying the opposite with their economic transaction. Furthermore when “A Message” enumerates the harmful effects of prostitution, it does not even mention those effects which are most harmful, namely, the potential for separating a believer from God and for destroying marriages and families. “A Message” skips over those effects in order to dwell on secondary and tertiary effects, namely, matters of health and justice.
When it discusses prostitution, “A Message” sets aside the Word of God and concentrates on effects of sexual sinfulness that can be discerned apart from God’s Word. And it treats other sexual sins similarly. It says “adultery is sinful because…promiscuity…is sinful because…pornography is sinful because…” but it follows each because with effects which are already fully discernible to purely secular perception. Instead of relying on the Word to show what is sinful and what is not, “A Message” invites us to make those determinations ourselves based on whether the consequences of a sexual practice seem to our perceptions to be just or unjust. But when we are cut loose from God’s Word and left to our own perceptions, we not only deceive ourselves about the seriousness of sin (as a threat to our salvation), but we finally deceive ourselves about whether or not certain sexual practices are sinful at all.
Prostitution offers an example of the way purely secular perceptions go awry in determining whether or not a sexual practice is moral. Prostitution has divided feminist thinking since the 1970’s. Is it moral or immoral, just or unjust, a form of employment to be encouraged or an intrinsic evil to be discouraged? One feminist organization in particular, COYOTE (“Cut Out Your Old Tired Ethics”), advocates the legalization of prostitution and the elevation of “sex-workers” and their profession. According to Kari Kesler in the journal, Sexualities, this organization believes negative attitudes about prostitution come from “outdated notions of sexuality.” On purely secular grounds it is possible to argue that one has a right to “use one’s body” as one chooses and that prostitution provides some women with a level of economic well-being which otherwise might not be available to them. It is possible to argue that, at least for some women, prostitution offers a measure of justice.
If we lose the Biblical insight that the body is for the Lord and for the spouse, if we imagine instead that the body is for us and for our choices, we may begin to call “blessed” what God calls “sin.” Sexual intercourse, in the good ordering of creation, is the honor of being united with another human being in God’s own union with that person. Such a “one flesh” union happens only in marriage.
The way the new ELCA teaches concerning prostitution can serve as a case study of its new thinking. The concept of “justice” is vitally important in the Lutheran understanding of God’s Word as Law and Gospel. But in the new ELCA, “justice” has become a norm apart from and over-against the Word of God. Apart from the Word of God, “justice” has become a blank check for supporting causes and ideologies antithetical to the Gospel.
Go to the What is Marriage?
In order to understand how it has changed, consider what our Lutheran thinking used to be. About ten years ago, I served as advisory pastor to a congregation in Chicago, a congregation in which a significant percentage of the membership was gay and lesbian. One Sunday morning during Bible study we were discussing homosexuality. A member of the congregation – call him “Rudy” – told us about his loneliness, despair, and desperation when, as a university student in his late teens, he could no longer deny the terrifying fact that he was homosexual. Self-loathing consumed him and he became suicidal. He needed to talk to someone, but whom? This was the early 1960’s; homosexuality was not something one discussed.
Late one afternoon, he returned to the house where he was renting a room. He paused on his way through the kitchen to chat with his landlady, Mrs. Swenson, a woman in her fifties, a Swedish Lutheran. Suddenly he could hold it in no longer; he blurted out: “Mrs. Swenson, I’m a homosexual. I know I am. I hate myself!”
Mrs. Swenson flung open her arms, ran to him, embraced him, and said, “Oh, Rudy, Christ loves you!”
That was the beginning of Rudy’s acceptance of himself as a homosexual. It was also the beginning of his life as a Lutheran. He has been in the church ever since, and Christ has been the rock of his life.
Mrs. Swenson exemplifies the way Lutherans, at our best, used to think. Christ died for all. No one need be outside the embrace of his love. We are all equally sinners in need of God’s grace. But how had Mrs. Swenson arrived at such an understanding, such a spontaneous and warmhearted acceptance? This was before the Stonewall Riot, before diversity training, before queer theory, and before gay pride parades. She had arrived at such an immediate, unhesitating, and confident acceptance by being a Lutheran. She had arrived at it by sitting in church, singing hymns, praying prayers, listening to sermons, remembering her Baptism, eating and drinking the body and blood of her Lord, and reading her Bible. She had arrived at such instantaneous acceptance by believing the Gospel, by believing that she, a sinner, had been unconditionally accepted by Jesus. And she had arrived at such unstinting acceptance by allowing Jesus to conform her life to his. Mrs, Swenson is the way Lutherans, at our best, used to think.
Justice: The Way We Think Now
In 2002, the Metro Chicago Synod held for its pastors a series of workshops called “Gay and Lesbian Persons in the Church.” The workshops had been organized by the Synod Justice Team. Pastors of the synod were required to attend. The workshop I attended featured three speakers – a psychologist, a social worker, and a theologian – all of whom advocated for the blessing of same-sex unions and ordination of persons in such unions. I inquired concerning the absence of speakers from the traditional point of view. “We couldn’t find anyone to represent that view,” came the reply. I suggested several theologians the Justice Team may have overlooked.
During discussion periods that day, two pastors challenged the perspective being offered: myself and the only openly homosexual pastor in the room. This pastor told of his struggle, through prayerful clinging to the cross of Christ, to remain chaste. He warned us that approval of same-sex relationships would make it all the more difficult for him and pastors like him to live in the chastity to which they believed Christ had called them. His warning seemed to fall on deaf ears, as indeed the witness of chaste homosexual pastors appears to have been ignored throughout the church’s recent deliberations.
This homosexual pastor accepted the fact of his homosexuality and embraced Christ’s acceptance of him. But in the view of the workshop presenters, acceptance was not the point. Justice was the point. The viewpoint of the new ELCA is that justice will not be served until the church recognizes homosexuality as equal to heterosexuality. According to the new teaching, justice will not be served until the joy with which the church celebrates same-sex marriages equals the joy with which the church celebrates heterosexual marriages. Furthermore, until the church understands that God intends both heterosexual and homosexual relationships for the human beings he created, until the church understands that both heterosexual and homosexual relationships were envisioned when God pronounced his creation of the male and female as “very good” – justice will be lacking in the church.
The question of justice permeates the thinking of the new ELCA and determines the way decisions are made. Nothing trumps justice. A friend of mine, a former ELCA missionary to Bangladesh, tells how several Muslims converted to Christianity through his ministry. When he was home on furlough he mentioned this to his supervisors at the ELCA Division for Global Mission. They informed him he had not been sent to Bangladesh to convert Muslims. It was appropriate to dialogue with Muslims, they said, but not to proclaim the Gospel to them. Treating Christianity and Islam as equal is “justice;” encouraging Muslims to accept the Gospel is “monoculturalism”.
In 2002 and 2003, when partial-birth abortion was being debated in Congress, the Lutheran Office of Governmental Affairs, the advocacy arm of the ELCA, lobbied for this gruesome abortion practice. The offerings of faithful Lutherans were used to advocate for the right to insert a scissors into the brains of nearly-born children. The determinative principle behind this decision was “justice.”
Robert Benne, director of the Roanoke College Center for Religion and Society, sums up the thinking of the new ELCA: “But the ELCA has accepted the Social Gospel as its working theology even though its constitution has a marvelous statement of the classic Gospel. The liberating movements fueled by militant feminism, multiculturalism, anti-racism, anti-heterosexism, anti-imperialism, and now ecologism have been moved to the center while the classic Gospel and its mission imperatives have been pushed to the periphery. The policies issuing from these liberationist themes are non-negotiable in the ELCA, which is compelling evidence that they are at the center. No one can dislodge the ELCA’s commitment to purge all masculine language about God from its speech and worship, to demur on the biblically normative status of the nuclear family, to refuse to put limits on abortion in its internal policies or to advocate publicly for pro-life policies, to press for left-wing public domestic and foreign policy, to replace evangelism with dialog, [and] to commit to ‘full inclusion’ of gays and lesbians at the expense of church unity…”
Benne says these justice issues have become non-negotiable in the ELCA while the core Christian beliefs such as the Trinity, Christ as the one Mediator between humans and God, the authority of the Word, salvation by grace through faith, and the character of the Church as one, holy, catholic, and apostolic – have become negotiable. Descriptions of God like “the fountain of living water, the rock who gave us birth, our light and our salvation” are increasingly substituted for God’s Trinitarian name – “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.” The masculine associations of the Trinitarian name make this a justice issue. When my daughter graduated from the ELCA’s Luther College we prayed to Allah at the baccalaureate service, an invocation which left in doubt whether Jesus was the Mediator of that prayer. But such multiculturalism is a matter of justice. The authority of the Word? Prior to the current decade, social statements on sexuality were guided by the authority of scripture and tradition. Since 2003, they have been guided by scripture, tradition, and experience, and it is clear that the authority of one’s own experience can take precedence over the other two. Salvation by grace through faith? A year ago the Lutheran covered the story of an ELCA pastor’s daughter who had converted to Judaism and become a rabbi; in the glowing report on this inter-religious family, neither the churchwide magazine nor the ELCA pastor himself seemed concerned for his daughter’s salvation. The one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church? Our recent decisions at the churchwide assembly disregarded the admonitions of our partner churches and ignored the obstacles to Christian unity those decisions will create. The central teachings of the faith have moved to the periphery in the new ELCA; at the highest levels of leadership social justice issues are at the center. Social justice issues are important. But at the highest levels of the ELCA they have eclipsed what is most important: the death and resurrection of Christ for the world’s salvation.
The ELCA continues to have good theologians, good teachers, good pastors, and good congregations. The Gospel will be proclaimed and lived out. But one may reasonably ask: for how long?
Reflecting on the outcome of the churchwide assembly, Robert Benne writes: “The fallout of these historic moves by the ELCA is hard to predict, mainly because the Lutheran orthodox have no group of dissenting bishops around whom to rally. There will be a profusion of different responses by congregations and individuals. Many congregations and individuals will leave the ELCA. Others will bide their time to see what CORE (Coalition for Renewal) will become as it strives to articulate and then embody the best of Lutheranism. Many will withdraw from involvement in the ELCA and its synods and live at the local level. Many others will try to live on as if nothing happened. Others will approve of the new direction. But a tectonic shift has taken place, and it wasn’t primarily about sex. The ELCA has formally left the Great Tradition for liberal Protestantism.”
The New Thinking: Prostitution as a Case Study
The discussion of prostitution in the new sexuality documents is an example of the shift to “justice” as the principle by which Lutherans are to make decisions regarding sexuality. In “A Message on Sexuality: Some Common Convictions,” (2002) the ELCA said the following about prostitution: “Prostitution is sinful because it involves the casual buying and selling of ‘sex,’ often in demeaning and exploitative ways. Prostitutes and their patrons endanger their own health and that of others. Prostitution usually arises from and contributes to a cycle of personal, economic, and social difficulties.”
Consider what is being said. The document sets out to tell us why prostitution is sinful, in other words, why it is rebellion against God. But the document never does what it sets out to do. Instead of explaining why prostitution is sinful, it explains why it is unhealthy and unjust. It asks one question and answers another. It does not explain what a churchly document should explain, namely, why prostitution is harmful to our relationship with God. Instead it explains what a textbook in Community Health should explain, namely, why prostitution is harmful for the health of individuals and society. In the ELCA’s new outlook on sexuality, the over-riding concerns are health and justice.
In contrast to the ELCA, consider what the Bible says about prostitution: “Do you not know that wrongdoers will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived! Fornicators, idolaters, adulterers, male prostitutes, sodomites, thieves, the greedy, drunkards, revilers, robbers – none of these will inherit the kingdom of God. And this is what some of you used to be. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God.
“’All things are lawful for me,’ but not all things are beneficial. ‘All things are lawful for me,’ but I will not be dominated by anything. ‘Food is meant for the stomach and the stomach for food,’ and God will destroy both one and the other. The body is meant not for fornication but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body. And God raised the Lord and will also raise us by his power. Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? Should I therefore take the members of Christ and make them members of a prostitute? Never! Do you not know that whoever is united to a prostitute becomes one body with her? For it is said, ‘The two shall become one flesh.’ But anyone united to the Lord becomes one spirit with him. Shun fornication! Every sin that a person commits is outside the body; but the fornicator sins against the body itself. Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God, and that you are not your own? For you were bought with a price; therefore glorify God in your body” (1 Corinthians 6:9-20).
When the Apostle Paul addresses sexual matters generally, and prostitution specifically, his over-riding concern is salvation. He is concerned that people inherit the kingdom of God. He fears Christians may be deceived into thinking that their sexual relationships have no relevance to their salvation, as if they were matters of indifference. A textbook on Community Health would be quite correct in identifying the harm prostitution brings upon individuals and society. But only the Word of God can identify the harm it does to human souls.
Paul is aware how easily we deceive ourselves in sexual matters (v.9). If we decide how we will behave sexually based on reason and experience, if we approve forms of sexual expression according to prevailing cultural opinions, if we are bereft of the counsel of God’s Word – we will easily be deceived. Paul shows how the Corinthians deceived themselves through uncritical assimilation of ideas dominant in their culture. Paul quotes a popular slogan derived from Stoicism: “All things are lawful for me” (v.12). Paul does not contest the freedom implicit in this slogan. Christians are free with regard to the law. But the law, though it no longer has power to condemn us, still stands. It points out those ruinous paths through which believers can rebel against God and become enslaved again to forces that would separate them from God.
Paul then confronts a second Corinthian slogan which was being used by some in the church to justify prostitution: “Food is meant for the stomach and the stomach for food.” The libertine Corinthians argued that sex should be thought of on analogy with eating. Just as we are not bound by Old Testament dietary laws, these Christians argued, so also we should not be bound by Old Testament laws about sexuality. Another Stoic principle held that actions affecting the body are a matter of indifference. But Paul challenges the appropriateness of the analogy. The act of eating involves the stomach but does not involve the whole body. But the act of sexual intimacy involves the whole body, the whole person. What foods we eat may be a matter of indifference; whom we unite with sexually is not. Our salvation is not endangered if we turn to pork chops to satisfy our appetite for food; our salvation may be endangered if we turn to prostitutes to satisfy our appetite for sexual union. For Paul, acts of the body have eternal significance. Unlike a person’s body, a person’s stomach is not who he or she is. Our body is meant for the Lord (v.13). So significant is the human body that it is a temple in which the Holy Spirit desires to dwell (v.19). To surrender one’s body to a prostitute is to initiate all over again the contest between Christ and the demonic powers over ownership of one’s body.
Does the Lord have sole claim on the body of an individual believer? Surprisingly, Paul answers “no.” In the chapter following the one we are considering, Paul will tell us a wife has authority over her husband’s body and a husband has authority over his wife’s body (7:4). In the chapter under consideration, Paul evokes God’s original gift of marriage (“the two shall become one flesh,” 6:16). There is another to whom (in addition to the Lord) the married Christian is to surrender his or her body: the spouse. Sexual union with a prostitute is sinful not only because it is a rebellion against the Lord’s claim on the body, but also because it is a substitution for the only one God created to also have a claim on that body: the spouse. Sexual union with a prostitute treats someone with whom we are not married as if we were married to them. It overturns God’s good order for creation.
Note that Paul does not enter into a discussion of the injustices involved in prostitution. The concerns of the new ELCA (“demeaning,” “exploitative,” “economic,” “social difficulties”) are not his immediate concern. But Paul was not lacking in compassion for prostitutes. Nor was the early Church oblivious to the social and economic conditions which impelled women toward prostitution; the Church’s provision for widows exemplified that very justice which made it unnecessary for women to turn to prostitution as the economic option of last resort. Paul’s discussion of prostitution did not avoid the justice issues; it went deeper. Paul went to the root of the problem. Paul disclosed the use of a prostitute as fundamentally sin, as rebellion against God. His over-riding concern was reconciliation between human beings and God and thus our salvation.
The ELCA document “A Message on Sexuality: Some Common Convictions” intends to explain why prostitution is sinful (prostitution “is sinful because…”), but it never gets around to that. Instead of giving us the reason prostitution is sinful, it enumerates some effects of that sinfulness. This way of thinking has been called “consequentialism” because in this thinking the morality of an act is not determined by the nature of the act itself but by the nature of the consequences that follow it. Prostitution, for example, is not viewed as being in itself sinful, but it is determined to be sinful in light of its harmful effects. This is different from the Biblical view. According to the Bible, the Creator judges an act to be sinful when it rebels against the order of creation provided for all living things. Sexual intercourse with a prostitute is sinful because it disrupts and distorts the Creator’s good and holy gift of marriage. Sexual intercourse is an act in which a man and a woman give themselves to each other and with their bodies promise themselves to each other. Prostitution is a way in which two people conspire to say one thing to each other with their bodies while saying the opposite with their economic transaction. Furthermore when “A Message” enumerates the harmful effects of prostitution, it does not even mention those effects which are most harmful, namely, the potential for separating a believer from God and for destroying marriages and families. “A Message” skips over those effects in order to dwell on secondary and tertiary effects, namely, matters of health and justice.
When it discusses prostitution, “A Message” sets aside the Word of God and concentrates on effects of sexual sinfulness that can be discerned apart from God’s Word. And it treats other sexual sins similarly. It says “adultery is sinful because…promiscuity…is sinful because…pornography is sinful because…” but it follows each because with effects which are already fully discernible to purely secular perception. Instead of relying on the Word to show what is sinful and what is not, “A Message” invites us to make those determinations ourselves based on whether the consequences of a sexual practice seem to our perceptions to be just or unjust. But when we are cut loose from God’s Word and left to our own perceptions, we not only deceive ourselves about the seriousness of sin (as a threat to our salvation), but we finally deceive ourselves about whether or not certain sexual practices are sinful at all.
Prostitution offers an example of the way purely secular perceptions go awry in determining whether or not a sexual practice is moral. Prostitution has divided feminist thinking since the 1970’s. Is it moral or immoral, just or unjust, a form of employment to be encouraged or an intrinsic evil to be discouraged? One feminist organization in particular, COYOTE (“Cut Out Your Old Tired Ethics”), advocates the legalization of prostitution and the elevation of “sex-workers” and their profession. According to Kari Kesler in the journal, Sexualities, this organization believes negative attitudes about prostitution come from “outdated notions of sexuality.” On purely secular grounds it is possible to argue that one has a right to “use one’s body” as one chooses and that prostitution provides some women with a level of economic well-being which otherwise might not be available to them. It is possible to argue that, at least for some women, prostitution offers a measure of justice.
If we lose the Biblical insight that the body is for the Lord and for the spouse, if we imagine instead that the body is for us and for our choices, we may begin to call “blessed” what God calls “sin.” Sexual intercourse, in the good ordering of creation, is the honor of being united with another human being in God’s own union with that person. Such a “one flesh” union happens only in marriage.
The way the new ELCA teaches concerning prostitution can serve as a case study of its new thinking. The concept of “justice” is vitally important in the Lutheran understanding of God’s Word as Law and Gospel. But in the new ELCA, “justice” has become a norm apart from and over-against the Word of God. Apart from the Word of God, “justice” has become a blank check for supporting causes and ideologies antithetical to the Gospel.
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