Last month there was a discussion in the ELCA Clergy Facebook group where one person mentioned concerns that had been shared by a member of the congregation regarding last summer’s ELCA Youth Gathering in New Orleans. Specifically this member was disturbed over the promotion of LGBTQ ideology and the presence of drag queens. I responded by stating that a video had been shown at the gathering which argued on the basis of the creation account in Genesis for the possibility of more than two genders. I also reported that one of the summary videos for the event showed a group of young people with some drag queens.

Soon afterwards someone posted the question whether I am the Dennis Nelson who works with the NALC. I responded by saying that I am the Dennis Nelson who is the executive director of Lutheran CORE. That did it. Within a few minutes I found that I could no longer access the Facebook group. Several friends who are members of the group telephoned or sent me an email that confirmed that it had been reported by one of the administrators that – for the safety and well-being of the group – I had been removed. One of these informants sent me a screen shot of the announcement of my removal and the ensuing conversation. Some of it was quite nasty.

Here is the email that I then sent to the administrator who announced that I had been removed from the group.

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Dear –

I was surprised to find out that I had been removed from the ELCA Clergy Facebook group when all I had done was to supply verifiable, publicly available information in response to a discussion regarding last summer’s ELCA youth gathering. I did not initiate the topic. Rather I merely contributed to the discussion by sharing that a video had been shown at the gathering which stated that the creation account in Genesis allows for the possibility of more than two genders and one of the recap videos showed some youth and drag queens.

I am a rostered ELCA pastor (retired) and am a member in good standing of an ELCA congregation where I do not cause disruption but instead contribute to the ministry. I serve as executive director of Lutheran CORE. Contrary to what was said in the conversation thread in the ELCA Clergy Facebook group, Lutheran CORE is not a ministry of the NALC. We are an independent, pan-Lutheran, reform and renewal movement. Our constituency comes from all three Lutheran church bodies – ELCA, LCMC, and NALC. Also contrary to what was said, Lutheran CORE is not the founder of the Lutheran Congregational Support Network. When we learned about that organization the board made it a priority to inform people of their work. We value what they are doing and the tone with which they are doing it.

You stated in the ELCA Clergy Facebook group that Lutheran CORE has “repeatedly demonstrated hostility and abusive behavior towards the ELCA and its clergy.” You said that I have “crossed boundaries targeting and undermining the very clergy this group exists to support.” You accused me of “targeted intolerance.” One member of the group said that it was important that I be identified by name “to prevent additional abusive (sic) from this individual.” Another member accused me of “tearing down ministries and churches.”

I would challenge you to identify any time when I have said anything hostile, abusive, targeting, undermining, intolerant, or tearing down in the ELCA Clergy Facebook group.

I would also challenge you to identify any time when I have been hostile, abusive, targeting, undermining, intolerant, or tearing down in any of my writings for Lutheran CORE. All of my writings are publicly available on Lutheran CORE’s website. Everything I report can be verified through the links I provide to ELCA primary sources. I feel that not I, but the discussion about me in the ELCA Clergy Facebook group has been hostile, abusive, and targeting. The only way that I can interpret the words that were said about me and the action that was taken against me is that you people are so skittish and easily threatened by opinions and information that do not fit with your preferred narrative.

We of Lutheran CORE feel that an important part of our work is alerting pastors, lay leaders, and congregations to what is happening in the ELCA as well as evaluating the significance of those dynamics. Since Lutheran CORE seems to be the only organization that is doing that, we feel that ours is a very valuable ministry. We are very concerned that people know about the possible changes that may be coming because of the work of the Commission for a Renewed Lutheran Church, the DEIA audit which the ELCA had done of its governing documents, and the work of the task force that is reconsidering the human sexuality social statement. What motivates us is love for Jesus, the Gospel, and people, and concern for the ministry of the Church. We are not driven by anger, hatred, and a desire to undermine ELCA clergy and tear down ELCA ministries and churches.

Lutheran CORE’s website shows that we are not a hate group that cares nothing about ministry. Our goal is not to disrupt congregations. Rather we provide many valuable resources for pastors, lay leaders, and congregations, including worship aides, daily devotionals, and weekly lectionary-based Bible studies and children’s messages. We have a support group for seminarians and are one of the sponsors of a program that challenges high schoolers to consider God’s call on their lives. We offer webinars on various topics related to church leadership and provide guidance for congregations in the call process as well as for congregations that are coming to the realization that very likely there will not be an ordained pastor available for them to call. We support cross-country mission trips to help people who have suffered a disaster, as well as local mission trips in the Baltimore area. We have held annual Encuentro events in the Chicago area for congregations that are already involved in as well as congregations considering becoming involved in Spanish language and/or bilingual ministry. The majority of those attending as well as presenting at those events are ELCA. All of the above show that Lutheran CORE provides valuable resources to pastors, lay leaders, and congregations.

I believe that as the administrators and members of the ELCA Clergy Facebook group you need to ask yourselves why you are so threatened by opinions and verifiable, factual information that does not fit with your preferred narrative. Through the things that you have said about me you have shown that you are the ones whose words are hostile and abusive.

In Christ,

Dennis D. Nelson
Retired ELCA Pastor
Executive Director of Lutheran CORE

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Later that day I received a reply from the pastor/administrator. There are several things I would say about his response. I did not reply to him because I did not see the purpose or point of continuing the conversation. But I did want to let you know how he responded and I wanted to show you how fragile, inconsistent, hypocritical, and intolerant they are.

First, he said, “Your work with Lutheran CORE has long been a source of division and pain within the ELCA.”

It is not Lutheran CORE that has caused division and pain within the ELCA. Instead it is the LGBTQIA+ agenda. The election of the ELCA’s first gay bishop in the synod in which I was rostered before I retired caused total conflict and turmoil within the congregation where I had served as pastor for thirty-nine years, and that conflict continued throughout and beyond my final year there. The LGBTQIA+ agenda has caused pain in my life in a way in which I never have caused pain in their lives. Also, before the ELCA changed its policies in 2009 regarding the blessing of same sex relations and the ordination of persons in same sex relations, people who wanted those policies to change disrupted a Churchwide Assembly, defied ELCA standards, and were very blatant and brazen about doing so.

Second, he said, “The organization’s efforts, both direct and indirect, to encourage congregations to leave the ELCA, often under the guise of reform, have left deep wounds.”

Reform is not a “guise” that we hide behind. Instead it is central to our work. Our purpose and mission is not to get congregations to leave the ELCA. Rather it includes alerting persons and congregations that are still in the ELCA to what is happening in and to changes that could be soon coming to the ELCA. We fully realize that for many congregations, leaving the ELCA would not be possible and/or would not be the right or best decision.

Third, he said, “The shaming and mischaracterization of LGBTQIA+ individuals, who are beloved children of God, are especially harmful and stand in opposition to the inclusive love of Christ.”

We do not engage in shaming or mischaracterizing LGBTQIA+ individuals. We agree that they are beloved children of God. We love them and are concerned for them because we believe that they are living a life that is not pleasing to God. We are also deeply concerned as we see that it is only non-binary and LGBTQIA+ ideology that is being promoted at the ELCA youth gatherings. The young people there never hear anything that supports and encourages a traditional view of human sexuality, even though the ELCA still says – in its 2009 human sexuality social statement – that traditional views still have a place of dignity and respect within the ELCA.

Fourth, he said, “When individuals or organizations repeatedly engage in actions that cause division, foster animosity, or promote intolerance – especially towards marginalized communities – it becomes clear that their participation is not aligned with the group’s purpose.”

During the years leading up to the 2009 decisions, during the time when traditional views still prevailed – though always by an ever-decreasing percentage amount – those with traditional views always bent over backwards to make sure that all views – including revisionist views – were treated respectfully and were heard. After revisionist views prevailed in 2009, those with traditional views were not afforded the same kind of courtesy that they had extended for years. It felt like we were being pushed over the cliff. It is not the LGBTQIA+ community that is marginalized. Instead they are a preferred and empowered community. It is those with traditional views that are marginalized. Evidence for this is in the fact that ReconcilingWorks has a voice but no vote position on the ELCA Church Council while the same courtesy is not extended to any group with traditional views.

Fifth, he said, “This decision is not about being ‘threatened’ by different opinions, as you suggest. It is about setting boundaries that foster a supportive, respectful environment for ELCA clergy. Intentionally divisive contributions, no matter how they are framed, detract from that goal.”

Nothing that we say or do is ever “intentionally divisive.” Rather it is motivated by the deepest of love for and commitment to Christ, people, and the mission of the church. For these people any dissent from the “preferred view” is considered disloyal, divisive, and disruptive.

And then he concluded by saying that he has “a deep pastoral responsibility to protect this group as a safe space for clergy who seek encouragement and support rather than conflict.”

In my contribution to the most recent discussion which got me kicked out of the group – as well as in all my other contributions in this Facebook group – I have never said or done anything disruptive, divisive, or conflict producing. Rather I merely pointed out information that would be available to anyone who went to the primary sources.

 

As a friendly commenter noted, my last article needed some serious editing. It is never good for me to find myself writing too close to a deadline; the result is always technically correct but dense, jargon-heavy prose that obscures what it seeks to clarify.  My apologies to all.

To restate succinctly what I was driving at in my last installment, in contrast to what any group might claim, we can tell what that group truly holds sacred on the one hand by what things, actions, and speech they extol and prescribe, and on the other, those at which they take offense.  Sacredness is defined for a group by what they revere and what they revile.  That which is prescribed constitutes the group’s dogmas or orthodoxy.  That which is proscribed or treated as blasphemous is like a photographic negative of the same thing, defining the sacred by contrasting it to its inverse, the profane.  This is a sociological and functional, not theological, definition of the sacred.

I ended my last article by saying, “Progressive Christianity quickly ceases to be formally Christian precisely because it holds different things to be sacred than does the Biblical, Apostolic faith … it represents a different religion, not a different way to be Christian.”

Though I differ with his work on many points, one thing that the enormously popular psychologist Jordan Peterson has helped me understand is that human thought is intrinsically and inescapably hierarchical.  Believing that we can actually think in a truly egalitarian manner is not merely logically, but neurologically incorrect; our brains could literally not handle the amount of incoming sensory data presented to it by the rest of our nervous system if it did not prioritize some information over others.  Thinking hierarchically is identical to thinking at all.

In a hierarchy, whatever occupies a higher position determines the relative value of everything beneath it.  Why in CPR training do they use the acronym “ABC”—airway, breathing, circulation—to anchor the care provider in the moment of crisis?  Because while the heart is needed to pump oxygen to the rest of the body, the lungs must be filled with oxygen before it can get to the heart, and the lungs can only be filled by artificial respiration if the airway is in turn clear.  The operation of that which is lower in the hierarchy is contingent upon the proper function of that which is higher.

What is true in an operational hierarchy is equally true in a conceptual hierarchy.  In fact, you can determine an idea’s place in a conceptual hierarchy precisely by identifying whether another idea is dependent upon or foundational to it.  Within a religious schema, this translates to what is holy, holier, or holiest.

While in seminary, one of my professors quoted one of his own graduate school mentors, lauding to us the sage wisdom that “your theology can never be any better than your anthropology.”  I made a phone call that afternoon to a mentor of my own, a double Ph.D. whose own generous but well-defined orthodoxy had catapulted him to a position of great responsibility in his own Christian tradition as an ecumenical theologian, to check whether my response was too reactionary.  “That,” he said, confirming my intuition in the carefully measured tone of voice I had come to associate with him at his scholarly best, “seems to me to be precisely backward.”

The sentiment commended by my professor placed humanity (or humanity’s assertions about God) above God’s revelatory self-disclosure.  In fact, its effect was to negate any possibility of the latter by placing humanity above God epistemologically.  This professor’s spouse, when presiding at the Eucharist during the final worship service I attended at that school, began the Lord’s Prayer with the unbiblical and self-congratulatory phrase, “Our father and mother in heaven.”  I refused to receive Communion that day not because her ego was out of control (the sins of the presider do not invalidate the grace of God) but because I was no longer sure it actually was the Eucharist, and that was because I was no longer sure the Christian God, the God that commanded His people to “have no other gods before Him,” was in fact being worshiped in that space.

If Christ is not “the image of the invisible God” (Col. 1:15), if it is not true that “if we have seen [Jesus], we have seen the Father” (John 14:9), and the Bible is not in fact a revelatory portrait of that Christ to us, something—in this case humanity—must replace the Triune God in the highest position within the religious hierarchy, whether historically Christian vocabulary is used to describe it or not.

By definition, that is some other religion than Christianity.

 

Although the appellation “woke”—used by Ricky Gervais to the Hollywood establishment at the Oscars as “insider” language just a few years ago—is eschewed by progressives now that cultural conservatives have fastened onto it and redeployed it as a demeaning epithet, its inception in progressive circles originally indicated a true stance of religious conversion that Christians should recognize.  As the Church year winds to its eschatologically focused close and begins the new year in Advent, both Jesus and John the Baptist exhort us to “wake” up to the reality of our spiritual situation. Such an awakening is at once a combination of intellectual recognition and a posture of preparation for incipient action. “Woke” originally meant to the true believer in progressive ideals much the same thing that “newly illumined” meant to the just baptized in the early Church; it signaled the passing of a liminal threshold and the adoption of such a substantially new interpretation of age-old data points and orientation to the challenges of life as to be only capturable in the proclamation of a new identity.

It is by now not particularly provocative or insightful to interpret the constellation of ideological commitments that goes variously by the names woke, postmodern, poststructuralism, or social justice as a religion, but it is helpful to explore why this is formally rather than merely experientially the case. If religion is defined sociologically as a set of communal behaviors rather than as a set of metaphysical beliefs or commitments (a hopelessly Western definition in any case), this progressive set of beliefs above-labeled clearly functions as a religion for its adherents.

Channeling the work of Émile Durkheim, Jonathan Haidt helpfully identifies the sociological characteristics of a religion. By designating something as “sacred” a group of disparate people can have a sense of unified identity. You know you are in the presence of a thing (or value system) that has been designated by a group as “sacred” when that thing must be defended at all costs from even ridiculous or accidental insults. “Jokes, insults, and utilitarian trade-offs” cannot be tolerated if they impugn the honor of the thing held sacred because they threaten the fundamental social cohesion of the group’s acolytes. When what is at stake is the sacred, blasphemy codes dictate the range of acceptable expression, and such cannot be challenged by rational objections.

In a lecture at Duke University,[1] Haidt identified six groups that are now identified as sacred in the social justice milieu: the “big three” of blacks, women, and LGBTQIA+ along with a secondary group deemed slightly less sacred consisting of Latinos, Native Americans, people with disabilities, and more recently, Muslims.  Comments or ideas that are deemed less than laudatory of people in these groups or their behavior are met not only with outrage but disgust, an emotional response whose purpose is to get us to avoid things that are potentially poisonous to us—contagions and pathogens.

I spoke in last issue’s article of not permitting the pain of a student in my care—very real pain for which I had genuine empathy and wanted to see healed—to colonize my theology, coming to exercise a controlling influence over it. Viruses colonize their host by hijacking the cell’s DNA reproduction system, turning its very system of replication and renewal to its own purposes. The reason why progressive Christianity quickly ceases to be Christianity at all is that the Church’s ministries of renewal and replication—catechesis and evangelism—are necessarily reemployed in service of the new objects that are, in fact, now deemed sacred.

In the case of progressive Christianity, the aforementioned victim groups replace the orthodox objects of worship (the Triune God, revealed by the life, teaching, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ) as the center around which the group’s identity revolves.  In the same way, the holy tasks of pursuing an amorphously defined and ever-mutating sense of justice for these sacred victims replaces the orthodox tasks of preaching the stories of Scripture and celebrating the Sacraments commanded by God’s Sacred Victim, as well as the repentance, conversion, and amendment of life according to the revealed will of God to which these lead. Progressive Christianity quickly ceases to be formally Christian precisely because it holds different things to be sacred than does the Biblical, Apostolic faith. I will have more to say on this in the next issue, but for now it is enough to note that it represents a different religion, not a different way to be Christian.

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[1] https://youtu.be/Gatn5ameRr8?si=5elvFmZJAPTJyapK

 

“What’s all this ‘Father’ stuff about in the Lord’s Prayer?  Why should we call God ‘Father,’ anyway?” she intoned petulantly, fixing me with a stare that clearly thought no reasonable answer was possible.  It was my first year in ministry.  I had converted to Christ but a year before and now found myself teaching Luther’s Small Catechism as part of my youth minister duties at a largish program-style Lutheran church.  From my undergraduate background in the arts and my wife’s current graduate school studies, I was utterly familiar with the post-structuralism that informed her question, but despite the self-consciously progressive, university-dominated atmosphere of the town I served, I was still shocked to hear the sentiment from the mouth of a seventh grader.

I would not be shocked today… not anywhere in the United States, let alone a college town.  “How do we know God is ‘Father?’” challenged the former PASTOR of one of my parishioners in an adult Sunday School forum.  Such pugnacious personalities litter the Christian landscape of the modern West, pseudo-intellectuals who, because they came across the concept of apophatic theology in seminary, now feel they can use it to undermine Scriptural authority and thence refashion the Christian faith in a manner more congenial to their modern WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) presuppositions and biases. 

In my last article I made the case that a specific, seemingly innocuous use of inclusive language for human beings had unexpected but potentially devastating side effects in the realm of pastoral care and Christian self-understanding.  Tinkering with Christ’s chosen address of God may have similar side effects.  Progressives like Rosemary Radford Reuther and Sally McFague purport to give us reasons we need not address God as Father.  Conservatives like Dennis Prager give us reasons we must. Still, it may well be that the question “Why should we call God ‘Father?’” may be like Job addressing God on the question of suffering, to which God responds in a way that lets Job know that he has no possible idea of full import of what he is asking—that Job lacks the capacity for God to respond in a meaningful way to such a question.  “Stop clucking in such a self-important way. You cannot possibly understand what is at play here.  Consider yourself blessed to know Me at all,” might be an apt summary of God’s speech in Job 38-41.  To address God in any other way than that revealed by God may have ripples that redound to the harm or even damnation of others and should so be avoided.

Which is why I believe that the answer that I gave the young lady mentioned above in my theological naivete is still the correct one; we call God “Father” because we are disciples—followers—of Christ, not His instructors.  If we think of Jesus as someone who merely cracked open a door on God that we can now wedge open a little wider by our own enlightened efforts, we misunderstand Him utterly as “the Word become flesh” who “dwelt” (in the Greek, skenoō or “tabernacled”) among us, who in my favorite modern translation “is in the bosom of the Father” and hence alone has the capacity to “make Him known.”

As time went on, I discovered that this young woman had good reason for negative associations with the word “father;” her own dad was an addict who had been emotionally and often physically absent until two years before when he had cleaned up and was endeavoring to “make good” in his role in her life, an effort she perceived as “pushy” and presumptuous.  What a privilege it was to teach her—as I hope I have taught my own daughter—that she has a Father in heaven who we earthly fathers can only hope to palely imitate as providers, nurturers, and self-sacrificing protectors. (Ephesians 3:14)

Had I let her indubitably real pain colonize—exercise a controlling influence—over my theology, she could never have found what I would later hear theologian Marva Dawn refer to as “the true liberation of being a woman who can without reservation call God ‘Father.’”

Grappling with Scripture as the revealed Word of God and the Apostolic faith that has informed that encounter has preserved such liberation—true liberation—for us all.

In my office hangs my ordination certificate.  Across it is emblazoned the name of the ordaining body, the body whose confessional commitments I pledged to uphold on the day I knelt and made my vows.  An adult convert to the Christian faith who settled in Lutheranism as the place where I would live out my “mere Christianity” after reading a church library copy of the Augsburg Confession, in the spring of 2016 I had served that denomination in various roles for twenty years.

This spring marks the eighth year since I called my bishop and informed him that I would be serving in a new church body.  Even as an adult convert, I know how painful the process is of leaving a church body you have called home; to cause further fracture to the Body of Christ, to disappoint My Lord by ensuring that His prayer that all His disciples might be one as I will become yet one more piece of living evidence of how little the truth of the gospel seems to change the lives of those who believe it, to serve at least in part as another stumbling block for people who—as did I at one point—hold the Christian faith in contempt, was an exquisite pain… I can only imagine how hard it is for a cradle member of a communion to make a similar choice.

In his classic study of what causes massive shifts in a mindset, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn details how it takes a superabundance of contrary evidence to get people to rethink their fundamental commitments, coining the terms paradigm and paradigm shift.  A paradigm shift, when it occurs, is more than a reordering of the furniture in one’s mental office or even changing offices due to corporate restructuring; it amounts to moving out of the building, watching that edifice be razed, and having a new foundation poured upon which you must tentatively build a new place from which to conduct your business.

It is for this reason that I am uncertain whether my decision to leave the ELCA represents a true paradigm shift or not.  In the words of a Roman Catholic mentor whose specialty was ecumenical theology, with whom I shared the pain of my process, “You aren’t leaving your church; your church is leaving you.”  Though hopefully my thinking has become more refined and nuanced, my fundamental commitments in some ways have not changed since I first knew myself to be a Christian in 1995 and a conscientious son of the Lutheran reformation by early 1996.

Yet once such a choice is made—the choice to leave the home that has nurtured you during your most formative years—once the evidence piles up so high that you cannot ignore it, you begin to rethink many things.  Aspects of your identity you thought unassailable become things you question.  Commitments you thought unshakable bedrock you begin to recognize as issues of secondary and sometimes tertiary importance… sometimes you come to know them as even detrimental to keeping the most fundamental commitments of all.

Such for me has been the issue of inclusive language in ministry, whether for God or people.  The sine qua non of both my undergraduate and graduate education, I have come to question not just its utility, but its very ability to communicate the Word of God, which in turn means its very ability to foster human flourishing… especially for women.

By the time I was being formed in seminary, the use of inclusive language for human beings was a matter of basic politeness and the use of such language for God became mandated as a “justice issue” while I was away from campus on internship.  My early training conditioned me to be okay with the former; indeed I had chosen to pursue ordination in the ELCA over the LCMS because of a precommitment to women’s ordination, a commitment I still hold but should not have then, before I could possibly know the Biblical or theological issues at stake.

My conviction in Christianity as a revealed religion prevented me from embracing inclusive language for God.  Because of an encounter with a cult in my early twenties, I have a sensitivity to when I am only being told one side of an argument, so the aggressive insistence on the agenda second-cum-third wave feminism and the lack of critical presentation of any other perspective set off a voice in my head: “Danger, Will Robinson… Danger!”  The special prominence of this in my liturgics class, where we failed to learn the rudiments of using The Minister’s Desk Edition, made me begin researching the best arguments on the other side.

I was surprised to often find these arguments to be robust rather than reactionary.  An honest reader could disagree with these arguments, but not accuse the writer of bad faith or barely disguised animus against women.  Particularly compelling was an article by Jesuit Paul Mankowski (who often wrote under the pen name Diogenes) entitled Jesus, Son of Humankind? The Necessary Failure of Inclusive-Language Translations, which I found in a now out-of-print journal.  (It is still available on the Touchstone magazine website for subscribers.[1])

There is one issue central to our salvation that inclusive language translations of the Bible obscure—even those translations that only use inclusive language for human beings, like the NRSV—that I have never seen referenced in any scholarly work, so I would like to address it briefly here.

“No one comes to the Father but by me,” says Jesus in one of our most beloved funeral readings (John 14:6), but how exactly does Jesus get us to the Father?  “For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ,” joyously declares St. Paul. (Galatians 3:27)  Elsewhere he adds, “For if we have been united with [Christ] in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his.” (Romans 6:5)  We have been united with Jesus.

A robust Sacramental theology teaches us that as regards our eternal inheritance, this means that when the Father regards us, He sees Christ, with whom we have been united, and whom we have donned like a mantle.  In other words, He sees not Joe or Sally, merely created in the image of God however pious or penitent, but Jesus, His Son, God Himself, for Whom the entire realm of created reality and uncreated glory is the rightful inheritance.

What this means in contradiction to the polite niceties of post-Christian American cultural religion, each of us is, properly speaking, a child of God only when we share in the sonship of Jesus Christ through Baptism.  It is for this reason—not the misogynistic cultural baggage assumed by feminists of whatever wave—that St. Paul in his letters addresses both the male and female objects of his correspondence as “brothers.”  We are all brothers because we all through Holy Baptism share in the sonship of Jesus Christ.

Inclusive language translations that render St. Paul’s address as “brothers and sisters” obscure this important salvific truth, esteeming the demands of feminist-defined justice as greater than the actual Biblically depicted mechanism of salvation.  Further, it propagates its own fundamentally irreconcilable war between the sexes into the very “beloved community” that is to be the home of “the ministry of reconciliation” (2 Cor 5:18), fomenting disunity in the Body of Christ. Under such conditions, the uniqueness of Christ as the way to God is necessarily veiled and universalism will proliferate to the loss of the evangelistic impulse.

I count this as a very serious way that the very inclusive language that is purported to be a justice issue for women actually does worse than underserve them; it may fail to call them to Christ and so be positively opposed to their ultimate interests.

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[1] https://touchstonemag.com/archives//article.php?id=14-08-033-f