Editor’s Note: The Rev. Dr. Steven K. Gjerde is a former VP of Lutheran CORE.

“The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.”  So says our Lord Jesus Christ, and who knows spirit and flesh better than He does?   Through Him and for Him all things were made, and in these last days He has become all that He made us to be: flesh, soul, and spirit, and heart and mind, too — even now He lives and rules in our flesh, His Spirit testifying with ours that we are children of God.  So when this Lord and God says, “The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak,” we stop to listen.

 His Special Concern

If the flesh is weak, then our flesh is the object of Christ’s special concern.   “It is not the healthy who seek a doctor,” He reminds us, “it is the sick,” and even so our Good Physician came for the sinful and not the righteous.  Our flesh rests in the perpetual care of Dr. Jesus.   Ages ago He fitted Himself to our embodied life, matching His Word to our speech by means of a mouth and our disease to His health by the touch of His hand.  That same, gracious work continues today as He fits His salvation to our dying flesh, making His grace speakable and edible, hearable and felt.  “Gospel is touch,” a friend of mine likes to say, making even the least gnostic of us a bit uncomfortable and exposing just exactly why quarantines hurt.

But if our flesh rests in the care of Christ, then so do other things that pertain to the flesh, such as the whole tactile life of the church, with all of its dreaded institution, nearly a byword among the diaspora.  Like it or not, you cannot escape it.  Sure, you can have the Holy Supper in the open air, but you’ll still be standing on ground, ground that can be taxed or untaxed, mowed or unmowed, shoveled or drifted, beautiful or ugly; someone will have to agree to buy the stuff (and you know how it works: once people have skin in the game, it gets serious); and finally, you’ll have to arrange it at a time and a place where all of us little hobbits and earthlings can make our way without too much trouble.   You get the point: if you want Christ, then sooner or later you’ll want that dreaded institution, too, in one form or another, because with Christ the Virgin’s son comes all of human flesh, His special concern, the thing He loves to raise from the dead, and with human flesh comes all of the creation made for it. 

With the Church come buildings that shelter and fellowships that organize and papers that say things in ink to make it all clear and bank accounts, because soon you’ll have real people with real bodies and individual minds and arthritis and hormones and a longing for beauty and health, and most of all, backpacks full of sin and history and grief.  Associations and coalitions follow hot upon their (our) heels, and some of those organizations will become big enough or deluded enough to start calling themselves The Church, this Church, or herchurch, and the pious will start wondering if it’s all just the anti-Church, and maybe life as a spirit would be better?  Some say the angels are bodiless spirits, and they don’t seem to complain (at least not the ones who kept their club privileges).  But no, it’s not better.  There’s a reason why the angels envy you, and the devils hate you, and it’s not your spirit —

–and all this I say by way of introduction as to why my congregation and I stayed in the ELCA, and why we have now left it.

On Being Dust, Soil, and Free

“Why are you still ELCA?”  I think I got Christmas cards with those words embossed in gold.  On the one hand, the only possible answer is that I am a sinner, a rotten sinner lousy with sin, who did it all wrong; and on the other hand the answer is that I’m a saint with the courage of King David (the Early Years).  But really, it’s not even about me, it’s about Jesus and His special concern for the flesh. 

He gave me a call, voted, inked, and delivered, and those votes and ink (that earthiness!) make it no less but all the more the call of God.  I served and still serve a real people with a real zip code, different from yours, and therefore with different longings and gifts and histories and griefs.  Diversity isn’t our strength (saith the Lord), but it is a thing, a flesh thing, and if you’re a pastor who is also a believer, then you’re a priest in the best sense of the word, and pretty soon that diversity of your people is part of you like a country’s soil is part of its wine and cheese.  Within the very real diversity of the church, far transcending the fiefdoms of identity politics, the Lord fits His time to different calendars and lengths of patience.  “The Lord is coming soon!” — it’s true.  But just as soon as a man’s ready to fit that clarion call to his own schedule and jump in the car, he remembers he’s married, and there’s a five year old who has to pee, and the man must wait.  Along with the Church in every time and place, he discovers, after all, that he is but dust.

 I’m not getting into specifics, is the point.  The specifics would only bore you and tempt you to sit in the seat of scoffers, which is very bad.  But you get the drift: there were reasons good enough that they don’t need defending anymore, because it’s all done with, anyway.  We simply pursued our Lord’s path of fitting grace to the flesh, with its drooping hands and weak knees.  We looked on our institution as a gift, not a burden—I mean, what else is it, unless you’re a Manichean? — and by pursuing that God-given mission, we pressed ourselves more and more deeply into the local soil and the call of the neighbors and the catholic stink of evangelical ministry, until pretty soon we became something the ELCA simply didn’t want anymore (“inclusive”), and we said, “Ah!  There it is.  Well, okay, then.”

The Transfigured Flesh Part

You’d have done and said it differently if you’re from Georgia or Albuquerque, but you’d have done it somehow — I know you would have, because you’re all brothers and sisters, believers and sinners and courageous saints.  But here’s the last part, and one of the best parts, the transfigured flesh part: when I first stayed ELCA, it was just my single congregation and me.  We spoke our objections loudly, got picky about the pocketbook, and fenced the altar—and still it was just my congregation and me.  But as the Lord squeezed His time into our time and thus turned our time into His time, and as He led us down deeper into the flesh and the soil over the objections of so many, He changed all that. 

He turned this congregation into this congregation plus another one to serve and love, and a third one who wants to know more; and He turned me into me and another pastor, and then an intern who’s now a pastor, and still another pastor, three good brothers in the ministry who joined me at this address and walked its path, the path right into the ELCA and now out of it, even though they weren’t originally on that path, and they’re pure gold; and He turned all of us into us with all of you, Lutheran CORE and the NALC and the LCMC, and Missouri Synod folk, too, you who are a consolation and strength in all of this.  A seed fell to the earth, died a thousand deaths, and bore a thousand-fold harvest.      

So now we’re LCMC, and probably will be other things, too, and that usually makes lots of folks happy except when they feel we didn’t do it fast enough — but land’s sake, people: the kid had to pee, the car needed fuel, she forgot the casserole.  There were reasons.  Cut us some slack, take our coats, and put on the kettle.  You’re Lutherans.  You know how to be gracious with the flesh, and how to be people of skin and bones, with all the history and grief and institution that comes with it, because you know, as so many other Christians do not know, just what it is for the spirit to be willing, and the flesh weak.  It means showing greater honor and more consideration to the weaker member, because that weaker member is Christ, crucified for the sins of the world.

Where Love Is Known

The flesh is where love makes itself known, see, and that’s why the devil hates our flesh: Christ has shown it such great honor by becoming it and redeeming it.  And that’s why everything, absolutely everything that we face these days, is all about the flesh.  Not only church but also the culture wars and politics, with Trump and Biden and all the rage and spite — it’s all about the flesh, in the end, a heavenly conflict stoked by the bitter disappointment of the devil, that angry, ravenous wisp, howling for the flesh that he is not, frantic to devour it all so that it will no longer be, and (he hopes) the hobbits and earthlings won’t even be bones anymore but pure smoke, having cast themselves into the flames, confusing smoke with spirit.    

Against all that, we devour the flesh of Christ, which only increases the more it’s eaten.  Yes, that’s how it goes: wherever the Supper is, there you find the Words of Institution; and where the Words of Institution, other institution follows, all the flesh and land and shelter and ink that a Supper demands, and through this weakened flesh the willing Spirit has His way, and He knits together the growing body.  For who knows our flesh and spirit better than He who became our flesh and breathes the Spirit?  He makes us bold to bear that weakened flesh, that beloved body, the body that He has so lovingly destined for glory, no matter the times it may bring.

The apostle Paul wrote to the Galatians, “Do not be deceived; God is not mocked, for you reap whatever you sow.” (Galatians 6: 7)  From my viewpoint, the ELCA is reaping what it from its inception has been sowing.

Lenny Duncan is an ELCA pastor who describes himself as “the unlikeliest of pastors.”  He is author of the book, Dear Church: A Love Letter from a Black Preacher to the Whitest Denomination in the United States.  We should not be surprised that he quickly became a celebrity within the ELCA – a sought after speaker in congregations and educational institutions.  He sounds exactly like someone to whom the ELCA would give the greatest amount of publicity and visibility. 

There is only one problem.  He has turned on the ELCA and has done so viciously.  Check out his website – https://lennyduncan.substack.com.  There you will find parts one through five of his articles, “Why the ELCA needs to start a reparations process,” which he subtitles, “Why you should defund your denomination.”

What is his plan?  What I really should ask is, What is his demand?  He is demanding that the ELCA set aside $32 million over the next three years to create a reparations fund to right the wrongs of centuries of racial injustice here in the United States.  And if the ELCA does not set aside $32 million over the next three years, then he is challenging people to “defund churchwide” and redirect $32 million in contributions away from the ELCA into his reparations fund.  What is amazing to me is not only the audacity of the way in which he demands that the ELCA make his top priority into their top priority, but also the vicious way in which he speaks of the leadership of the ELCA – a group that gave him support, visibility, and every opportunity to make maximum impact.

But as I think about, I realize that his words and behavior should not be surprising.  I would like to distinguish between the more moderate, pro-organization revisionists, and the more extreme, burn-and-tear-the-organization-down revisionists.

The more moderate, pro-organization revisionists are the ones currently in power in the ELCA.  They have three top priorities – their relentless agendas, their own power, and the preservation of the churchwide organization.  For them it seems that anything goes – you can believe and advocate for anything you want – even the rejection of basic, Biblical moral values and the foundational tenants of the historic Christian faith – as long as you are loyal to the organization.  For them preservation of the organization is paramount.

The problem is that they are now running into – or maybe I should say that they are being run into by – what they have been enabling and empowering – extreme revisionists who feel no loyalty to and do not value the organization.  Rather these extreme revisionists would be just as happy to burn or tear the organization down.  As it is happening in our nation, so it is happening in the ELCA.

Here is another example.  In 2019 the ELCA Conference of Bishops recommended to the Church Council a document entitled, “Trustworthy Servants of the People of God” as a basic statement of the ELCA’s expectations for rostered leaders.  Extremists, who do not want pastors and other rostered leaders to have to be married (by any definition) in order to be sexually active, objected so strongly that the ELCA Church Council declined to consider the document and instead sent it back to the ELCA’s Domestic Mission Unit to come up with a new document that would not be so hurtful and harmful for people who had been deeply wounded by former ELCA statements that held to traditional Biblical standards for behavior and relationships.  The latest I have heard is that the ELCA’s Domestic Mission Unit has not yet come up with a new document because it wants to give the ELCA a “breathing space.”  Here also the extreme revisionists have been enabled and empowered.  You can be sure that they will not rest until the document that is approved by the ELCA Church Council is one that reflects the most extreme, revisionist view of human sexual relationships and identities.  

And what about the ELCA’s refusal to stand up to the “We Are Naked and Unashamed” movement, which arose out of one of the ELCA seminaries and which rejects marriage by any definition as normative for sexual activity?  Or what about the people who are chosen to be keynote speakers for the ELCA’s triennial youth gatherings?  The last time – in 2018 – one of the keynote speakers – another pastor whom the ELCA has chosen to make into one of its greatest celebrities – led 31,000 young people in rejecting traditional Biblical standards for morality as a lie.  What will the ELCA do as it continues to experience the effects of what it has been enabling and empowering?  How will the ELCA respond as it continues to reap what it has been sowing?   

Sin, Justification, and Salvation: Critical Theory as Christ-less Christianity

Secular Christian Heresy

One of the more perplexing questions I received after writing my last article was, “Why do you call critical theory a secular Christian heresy?”  It was perplexing to me because I thought that was the burden of my whole article; I could see someone disagreeing with me and objecting, but not simply misunderstanding. 

To be clear in this article, let me say what I mean by secularized Christian heresy.  A heresy is simply unbalanced or incorrect teaching.  The word heresy means to pick and choose, so rather than accepting the full, robust teaching of the Holy Scriptures regarding this or that topic, they embrace some aspects of it and neglect others. 

So, to claim that Jesus was an inspired but perfectly human moral teacher is a heresy, not because Jesus is not an inspired, perfectly human moral teacher, but because teaching that alone neglects the other Biblical teaching that He is also the Word of God that “became flesh and dwelt among us,” (John 1:14) the eternal only-begotten Son of the Father, “the only God, who is at the Father’s side, [who] has made [God] known” because “No one has ever seen God.” (John 1:18) Both Jesus’ full humanity and absolute divinity must be proclaimed together for the Church to correctly articulate the Biblical teaching about who Jesus is.  Anything other, less, or partial is heresy.

Christian theology has many subcategories.  In addition to Christology (who Jesus is) just a few are soteriology (how we are saved), pneumatology (who the Holy Spirit is and how He functions), and the most difficult of all, Trinitarian theology (how we articulate who God is in Himself).  In each of these areas it is possible to fall into error by getting the doctrine wrong through omission, addition, or innovation; though some people would reserve the term heresy to errors in Christology and Trinitarian theology alone, the principle of heresy remains the same across all the theological categories, and I will use the term in that sense throughout this article.

Such theological categories are the common inheritance of everyone in the West, even those who forthrightly reject orthodox (correct) Christian teaching — though they may lament it being so, it is the inescapable cultural air a Westerner breathes.  A category of meaning like the fall from primordial human perfection was a controlling idea for philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau, whose ideas are experiencing a resurgence of influence today.  Though he explicitly rejected Christianity — especially its sexual ethics — Rousseau’s thought world was a distorted reflection of the Judeo-Christian story he was rejecting.  First, he gets the story wrong by claiming we can return to primordial perfection (Eden) without the ministrations of a divine Savior, as though an impassible flaming sword does not bar our way.  That makes his story heresy.  Then, he goes on to posit that there is no God at the root of our existence … at least not one of the personal, tendentious, interfering, judgmental sort depicted in the Bible.  That makes his story secular.  Rousseau’s view of the human predicament is a secular Christian heresy.

Critical theory too adopts categories of meaning from the Christian thought world that it sees as its opponent, makes key errors in the doctrines and then secularizes them in the same way Rousseau did, failing to recognize its debt to Christianity.

Sin

In classical Christianity, sin is not a problem for humanity, it is the problem.  “Sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned.” (Romans 5:12)  Sin separates eternally from God and as Genesis 3:7 makes plain, even before humanity becomes aware of the wedge sin drives between us and the divine, we are excruciatingly aware of the wedge it drives between us and the ones we love — Adam and Eve are no longer comfortable naked and vulnerable before one another and so begin to hide aspects of themselves from one another, the deeper and more ominous meaning of their crafting of makeshift loincloths.  Sin thus becomes the common inheritance of all humanity, for as psychologist Eric Berne noted, all people “play games” with one another, seeking to manipulate others for their own benefit; “all sin and fall short of the glory of God.” (Rom 3:23)

In critical theory, sin is not the common inheritance of all humanity, but the special purview of the oppressors.  Indeed, the oppressed is proclaimed to have a moral superiority over the oppressor, especially if the oppressor is unaware of their oppressive status.  Oppression in this case is not simply defined as an immoral, illegitimate exercise of power by one party over another, but rather any exercise of power by such a party, for all structures of authority (what sociologists refer to as dominance hierarchies) are defined as immoral because the goal is absolute equity.  Indeed, preferential attention is paid to language structures that make some people feel oppressed, even if legally and/or culturally they are not.  Thus, the married homosexual continues to be oppressed if people are permitted to express disagreement with their life choices because this may trigger doubt of some sort in them even though legally their marriage enjoys the same protections as a heterosexual one and the majority of people in the United States support gay marriage (at least civilly) and the great majority of all entertainment media lionizes their position. 

Support for and understanding of the political importance of the First Amendment is falling precipitously among Millennials precisely because they see free speech as a tool of oppression, for nobody should have to defend their choices and/or identity.  The political good of liberty, which presupposes that all people will have to live by the consequences of and when necessary defend their choices and sense of identity to people who disagree with them, has been demoted to a good of the second or third order if indeed it is a good; after all, why should anyone have to bear consequences — even natural ones — for their choices?  Aren’t consequences merely another form of limitation and potential chastisement and hence, oppression?

And so, for the critical theorist, just as sin is the problem for a Christian, so oppression is not a problem … it is the problem.  The division between oppressor and oppressed defines the sinner from the saint; in every interaction, it is the purview of the saint to speak, and the privilege of the sinner to listen.  Justice means the oppressed are properly the tutors, and the oppressors only rightly their students — willingly or unwillingly.

Justification

Having just passed Reformation Sunday, it must be acknowledged that from a generically Protestant perspective, the key doctrine of Christianity apart from the Hypostatic Union (Christology) and the Holy Trinity is the doctrine of salvation by grace through faith.  Martin Luther famously referred to it as the teaching whereby “the Church stands or falls.”

In its most simple terms, this doctrine might be summarized as follows; because human beings afford the infinitely high cost of sinning against the infinitely holy God  — “the wages of sin are death” (Rom 6:23) — Jesus picked up humanity’s paycheck when as a true human being He died without sin on the cross.  Because He was also true God, death could not hold Him, so He rose up alive again beyond the reach of death ever again — that is why the Church’s proclamation on Easter is not “Jesus has risen,” but rather “Jesus is risen;” he remains to this day beyond the reach of death.

Because of His unique status as the God-Man, Jesus alone could have accomplished this mission.  Since we cannot pick up the wages of our sin without perishing eternally, God offers us Jesus’ work to take care of our predicament as a gift; we call that grace.  Because we are not yet at the final judgment when God will proclaim us justified (upright in His presence or righteous) on account of Jesus’ saving work for us, we must accept Jesus’ work at this point in time as a pledge or promise in which we trust … a promise in which we have faith.  We are saved by grace through faith.

Thus, our uprightness in God’s presence is something of a legal fiction; we are not actually without sin and so deserving of eternal life, God just counts us as sinless because of Jesus, who is truly sinless.  Protestant theologians have classically referred to this as forensic (legal) justification.

Justification — being just — works similarly for the critical theorist.  While the oppressor-sinner can never be truly just (non-oppressive), she, he or zhe (gender neutral) can be declared just by renouncing their identity as oppressor and proclaiming themselves an ally.  If you have heard of undergraduates renouncing a seemingly immutable characteristic (their ethnicity, sex, family of origin, etc.) in order to claim the status of “ally” or their wholesale adoption of a new identity in a group who has garnered the social capital of “oppressed,” you have seen people proclaiming their religious conversion.  They have been “justified” as a gift from the group designated as oppressed, and although they can never be truly other than oppressor, they can accept the gift (grace) of their new “woke” or “ally” status by trusting — having faith in — the social contract that conferred it upon them.  Their persistent pleas for mercy as they seek further wokeness are direct parallels to the Christian life of continual repentance and pursuit of holiness, but they prostrate themselves not before God, but before the capricious, constantly-shifting social categories that new discoveries and definitions of “oppression” dictate.

Salvation

For the Christian, the fullness of salvation is a matter for an undetermined future date and can only be sketched in the loosest outlines, but what they know of it seems promising; Jesus spoke of it as being “like a wedding banquet” and apocalyptic and prophetic texts, beginning with the oldest book of the Bible, Job, refer to it as a time when “after my skin has been destroyed, yet in my flesh I shall see God,” (Job 19:26) and “And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.” (Rev 21:3–4)  When this shall happen is totally in God’s hands — “concerning that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father only” (Matt 24:36) — but that it shall happen is the fundamental hope of Christianity.

Equally so, for the adherent of critical theory, precisely when the hoped-for day of perfect inclusivity, equity, and diversity will arrive is unclear, for since oppression is defined by subjective experience rather than objectively-verifiable metrics, new “inequities” are always being “discovered.”  However, that it shall indeed come and that its coming will be glorious is a truth not to be questioned, for it is the prime motivator for all the efforts Herculean and pedestrian that give their day-to-day life shape and meaning.  Indeed, their participation in the process of ushering in this new age is reflective of not only the classical Christian struggle for sanctification, it is reflective of a peculiarly modern form of Evangelical Christianity which believes that God will not or cannot act until we “do our part” to usher in the longed-for future, such as learning how to harness our spiritual power in the Word of Faith movement or the building of a third temple in Jerusalem for many dispensationalists.

As Patrick Deneen has noted, progress toward a brighter, more glorious future is the great myth — the grand metanarrative — of Western secular Liberalism, a 300+ year project of which both modern conservatism and liberalism are a part.  When President Obama quoted Dr. Martin Luther King, saying, “the arc of history bends toward justice,” he was not expressing Dr. King’s Christ-based hope in the eschaton, but rather the conviction of secular Progressivism, which is the intellectual superstructure of Christianity wrenched from its historic and metaphysical foundations; it is Christ-less Christianity, and heretical Christ-less Christianity at that.

The Heretical Moves

How is it heretical?  First of all, it is so in its understanding of sin.  Just as some misguided forms of Evangelical Protestantism confuse sanctification with the claim that a relatively or completely sin-free life is possible following one’s conversion to Christ, so critical theory believes that through strenuous efforts at “wokeness” and externally-measurable equity that people can become relatively free of the sins of exclusivity and inequity as denominated in the more familiar constellation of sins like sexism, racism, ableism, homophobia, white supremacy, etc.

Or perhaps such sinfulness may be conquered completely in a world where the education of the masses from womb to tomb is rigorously controlled by politicians, teachers, and CEO’s of multi-national communication and commerce companies who effectively operate beyond the regulatory bounds of sovereign nation states … if such leaders are catechized properly — and exclusively — by critical theorists, who have in true Enlightenment fashion, defined an intellectual space wherein they can operate free of the “sin” that haunts the great wash of humanity.

Orthodox Christian doctrine allows no such bifurcation of humanity into the (perhaps relatively) sin-free and the sinful.  There is a bifurcation inherent in Christianity, but it is between the redeemed and the unredeemed — those who trust in Christ’s work of salvation and those who do not.  Such trust includes both salvation and whatever holiness of life proceeds from faith, which are ultimately the work of the Triune God who creates, redeems, and makes us holy. 

People, believer and unbeliever alike, not only fail to, but are incapable of becoming sin-free by their own efforts.  “We confess that we are in bondage to sin and cannot free ourselves,” go the familiar words of the Lutheran Book of Worship’s Brief Order of Confession and Forgiveness.  All human beings are both oppressed because they live under the yoke of sin and oppressor because they regularly and willingly collaborate with sin in the oppression of others around them for personal gain. 

The Orthodox Christian Alternative

There is literally no option for human beings to be radically free in Christian theology, something that the atheist existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre understood far better than many self-identified Christian theologies, which are heretical on this point.  Redemption through faith in the gracious gift of God in Christ Jesus means moving from unwilling servility to sin (oppression) to willing servanthood to the Lord.  The self-aware and active disciple of Jesus is to be a “slave to righteousness:”

¹⁵ What then? Are we to sin because we are not under law but under grace? By no means! ¹⁶ Do you not know that if you present yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves,^[a] you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness? ¹⁷ But thanks be to God, that you who were once slaves of sin have become obedient from the heart to the standard of teaching to which you were committed, ¹⁸ and, having been set free from sin, have become slaves of righteousness. ¹⁹ I am speaking in human terms, because of your natural limitations. For just as you once presented your members as slaves to impurity and to lawlessness leading to more lawlessness, so now present your members as slaves to righteousness leading to sanctification.

²⁰ For when you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness. ²¹ But what fruit were you getting at that time from the things of which you are now ashamed? For the end of those things is death. ²² But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the fruit you get leads to sanctification and its end, eternal life. ²³ For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.  (Romans 6:15-23)

Because this is reality, the actors who seek for themselves radical libertarian freedom will find themselves in the end to be merely a slave to sin, receiving as the reward for their quixotic quest unbeneficial fruits whose culmination (end) is death. 

Conversely, the Christian who willingly lays down his erstwhile “freedom,” which is really bondage to sin, chiefly taking the form of futilely trying to fulfill his disordered desires, finds in the end that every desire is in fact fulfilled as he learns to love the things that God loves, pursues the things God would have him pursue, and in the end receive for it “the unfading crown of glory.”(1 Peter 5:4) 

All this proceeds from the justification we have in Christ Jesus; it is “not a result of works, so that no one may boast. For [Christians] are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.” (Eph 2:9–10)  Christians continue to be servants, but no longer of a cruel taskmaster who will in the end take everything from them, but rather for a gracious Lord who will in the end bestow everything upon them.

You see, sin is not just a problem — the problem — for human beings in the Christian telling of history, it is also a problem for God, for God’s great desire is for restored communion with His fallen creatures. (cf. John 3:16, Ezekiel 18:23, Mark 5:15, etc.)  In Jesus of Nazareth, “Christ crucified,” we are not to see a God so demanding and bloodthirsty that He required the death of His Son before He would allow errant sinners into the kingdom of heaven.  Rather, with a full and robust Christology, in the cross of Jesus Christ, we are to know God as the One who is so loving that He was willing to sacrifice Himself — experience the annihilation of death, which is utterly foreign to Him as the One whose deep and first revealed name is “I AM” — that we might have eternal life and restored communion with Him.

Evangelical Hope

In every critical respect — its understandings of sin, justification, and salvation — critical theory is a secularized form of Christian heresy.  While this means we must be on our guard not to drift into false teaching when dialoguing with its proponents as the Church of Jesus Christ, it is also a cause for hope.  Since our thought worlds are not so far apart, we may be able to give a winsome and persuasive witness to the gospel by doing what orthodox Christians do; we can confess the sins of which we are guilty, including our own slides into heresy.  We can help them understand the fatuousness of their account of sin and justification and point out that the categories of meaning they employ are quickly resulting in the opposite of paradise wherever they are or have been employed, that “the end of those things is death.”  Most importantly, we can tell them a far better story of sin, justification in Christ, and redemption, a story whose end is eternal life for those who will, in the immortal words of the Lutheran Reformers, through faith “grasp on to it.”

Recently I was talking with an ELCA seminarian who was saying how much he wished that there was a list of Biblically and confessionally faithful books and other resources.  I was very pleased to be able to tell him about the List of Confessional Resources, which can be found on the Seminarians page on our website, www.lutherancore.org.  You can also find the Seminarians page by clicking on the hamburger symbol in the upper righthand corner of the website home page.  Seeing that list, he said, “That is exactly what I have been looking for.”  There you will find a list of and information about such resources as books, commentaries, videos, ministries, and movements that have been recommended by friends of Lutheran CORE.

That resource is now being taken to the next level.  We have begun the process of providing video reviews of some of these books on YouTube.  Our first book review can be found here. Our YouTube channel can be found here.

Many thanks to Pastor Chris Johnson for making the first review, Pastor Brett Jenkins for making the intro and outro, and Joel Awes for setting up the YouTube channel.

Our plan is to publish a new video book review during the first week of every month.

When you look at a video review for the first time, please click on the Subscribe button.  As enough people do that, it will eventually help us get a channel name that will include our organization’s name. 

The Great Commission Society of the North American Lutheran Church is to be commended for the three-day, online missions conference which they held in early November under the theme, “Unveiled: Shining Light in the Darkness.”   The comment was made at the beginning of the event that the only person that the conference organizers wanted to lift up is Jesus – not the structures of the church, not our own resourcefulness or efforts, but Jesus.  I need a faith that focuses on Jesus.  That is the kind of faith that I found nourished and sustained at the Unveiled Conference from the NALC’s Great Commission Society.  I also give thanks for the gift of today’s technology, which made it possible for us to be blessed by such an event, even during the time of a pandemic. 

Later in the day of the third session of the “Unveiled” conference I watched a webinar with Dr Thom Rainer of Church Answers.  You can learn more about his ministry at https://churchanswers.com.  His webinar was entitled, “Preparing for Revitalization in a Post-COVID World.”  One of the points that he made that I thought was most insightful was his comment about how much COVID has accelerated change.  Whatever dynamics and trends a congregation was experiencing prior to COVID have been accelerated by about four years.  If a congregation was in decline, its decline has been accelerated by four years.  But he also gave hope.  He gave strategies for revitalization, and he is working to train coaches who will work with congregations in the process of revitalization.

Both of those webinars were life and hope giving.  But what do I receive from the ELCA?  A word that tells me that I need to repent of systemic racism and white supremacy. 

The law is not life and hope giving.  The law rightly applied shows me my sins and drives me to Christ.  But the law wrongly applied only crushes, demoralizes, and discourages.  If the main message the ELCA has to give is all of the ways in which I need to repent because I have acted contrary to all of their chosen priorities, then how can I ever expect that the ELCA knows how to renew congregations and help them recover from COVID? 

Editor’s Note: The first half of an article by Pr. Brett Jenkins was published as a single post in Lutheran CORE’s September 2020 newsletter. It can be viewed here. The new post below completes his full article, Part 1. However, stay tuned since Pr. Jenkins intends to write a series of articles on this vitally important topic.

One of my children’s favorite stories about St. Nicholas doesn’t involve reindeer, elves who want to be dentists, or even the notes “he” left them as children (in my wife’s handwriting since mine is illegible), but rather the story of his slapping the heretic Arius at the Council of Nicaea.  What could inspire this iconically irenic and generous personality to an act of personal violence that would get him thrown into the Emperor’s jail?

The answer: Arius’ loquacious, persistent, and falsely evangelical heresy.  Arius spilled much ink and preached many influential sermons to promote his false Christology.  He persistently lobbied other clerics to align with his innovative views and used all the ploys of “marketing” current in his day—including snappy jingles—to promote popular support for them.  His ideas were falsely evangelical precisely because far from being good news for fallen humanity—the news that in Christ God had truly become a human being and taken up humanity’s burden of restoring the communion with God lost in the fall—it was the proclamation that if human beings were really good like Jesus, God might deem to adopt them like He did Jesus.  Arius offered yet another moralistic prescription for an already hopelessly over-burdened humanity.  Nicholas slapped Arius not only because he loved Jesus, but precisely because he loved the world for which Christ died and more specifically the people to whom he preached and he would not see them bereft of the hope—and quite possibly the eternal life—that only the true gospel of Jesus Christ can confer.

The eschatological arc of Critical Theory (CT) is from oppression to liberation, but in CT liberation is defined very specifically as measurable equity between identifiable social groups.  (In its current iteration, the complete identification of the individual with their various identity groups is married uncomfortably and illogically to an atomistic view of the sovereign individual, but this is foreign to CT proper.)  According to CT, the equity that defines the “promised land” is always out of reach, because existence is defined by the struggle of oppressed against their oppressors; this is the fundamental social binary in Critical Theory.  According to CT, each new generation needs to battle afresh through the oppressive structures as they encounter them, and each identity group is locked into a Hobbesian war of all-against-all as they seek to define themselves as oppressed rather than oppressor, victim rather than villain.

Why define yourself as the oppressed victim?  Because, in the moral landscape of CT, the oppressed victim has more moral authority than the oppressor by virtue of their oppressed condition.  Because this is conferred by group membership apart from one’s personal volition, the only way for someone in a group identified as the oppressor to be “redeemed” is to self-consciously and publicly embrace the identification as oppressor and persistently reject the perceived values of that group.  This stance is called “wokeness,” because the postulant is “awake” enough to be aware of how they oppress others simply by their existence as a member of the oppressive group, whose values are only properly interpreted as nothing more than a veiled attempt to keep or grab power.

This is a false eschatology and it produces a false anthropology, the anthropology of the human being as nothing more than members of tribes locked in a never-ending battle—rhetorical and often physical—for an equity made unattainable by human nature and the very nature of life, which, as author Jared Diamond demonstrated years ago in his history Guns, Germs, and Steel, is always promoting new groups into the dominant “oppressor” role.

The True Social Binary

According to orthodox Biblical Christianity, there is a social binary to be found in humanity, but it is not fundamentally oppressor versus oppressed, though that may be found in human relations, and when it is, it is to be rectified, to which the Old Testament prophets persistently witnessed.  According to the New Testament, the human condition is defined by servitude.  All human beings are douloi—servants or slaves, depending on how you translate the word.  They are either slaves of sin, which is the natural condition into which human beings are born, or they are slaves of righteousness, which is a condition only brought about by God’s grace given in Jesus Christ.

The burden of Paul’s teaching in Romans 6 is that servitude is not an escapable condition through any amount of personal or political struggle.  Building upon the Sacramental union with Christ wrought for us in Holy Baptism and the attendant death of our necessary slavery to sin, St. Paul continues:

¹⁵ What then? Are we to sin because we are not under law but under grace? By no means! ¹⁶ Do you not know that if you present yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness? ¹⁷ But thanks be to God, that you who were once slaves of sin have become obedient from the heart to the standard of teaching to which you were committed, ¹⁸ and, having been set free from sin, have become slaves of righteousness. ¹⁹ I am speaking in human terms, because of your natural limitations. For just as you once presented your members as slaves to impurity and to lawlessness leading to more lawlessness, so now present your members as slaves to righteousness leading to sanctification.

²⁰ For when you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness. ²¹ But what fruit were you getting at that time from the things of which you are now ashamed? For the end of those things is death. ²² But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the fruit you get leads to sanctification and its end, eternal life. ²³ For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 6:15–23, ESV)

Verse 6:15 makes it clear that there is a continuing possibility that we can fail to live as though our Master is God, even though He has redeemed us (quite literally bought us back) from sin and is now the proper Master for us to serve.  Accordingly, we who have received the light of the gospel (the recently baptized were referred to as “the newly illumined” in the early Church) are in a position to know that we are ineluctably servants, “either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience [to God], which leads to righteousness.” (6:16)

Therefore, every human effort—the exercise of our best strength, power, and insight—will do nothing more than reveal to which power we are in thrall, establishing new injustices for ourselves and our descendants to deal with.  This insight is the source of the Lutheran Book of Worship’s beautiful prayer, “We confess that are in bondage to sin and cannot free ourselves.”  Our persistent sin, which the prayer is meant to unveil to us, is itself the evidence that while we have been claimed by God’s grace in Jesus Christ so that we might “present our members as slaves to righteousness” (6:19), we prefer our old master sin, and keep returning to his service, despite the fact that we know the wages of doing so are death. (6:23)

According to the Biblical account, human effort not self-consciously springing from obedience “from the heart to the standard of teaching to which you were committed” (Romans 6:17)—the standard of Jesus’ teaching in the Gospels and exposited further in the canonical New Testament—can hope to do nothing more than redistribute sinful inequity and injustice, not eliminate it.  For any ideas, communication, or deeds that do not spring directly from our slavery to God necessarily come from our slavery to sin, “which leads to death.” (6:16)

Slave to God and His righteousness or slave to sin and its attendant, death?  That is the only true social binary recognized in Scripture.

Syncretism Breeds Heresy

Nicholas hated heresy because it immediately threatened the world and his flock with hopelessness and in time threatened them with damnation.  But where did such heresy come from?  Largely, the heresies that wracked the early Church came from trying to use philosophical and metaphysical constructs endemic to the Mediterranean basin to understand Who Christ was or apply Christ’s teachings in that cultural context—constructs whose unexamined assumptions were in whole or in part incompatible with those of the gospel.  It took the work of great theologians like Irenaeus and the Cappadocian Fathers Gregory, Basil, and Gregory of Nazianzus as well as the campaigning of churchmen like Athanasius to uncover and help others understand the violence these foreign ideologies did to the gospel of God.

The rough worldview provided by Critical Theory is as follows: our origin is that we are the product of millions of years of merciless “survival of the fittest” wherein our participation in “nature red in tooth and claw” left our ancestors standing as the bloodstained victors with the dead piled around their feet.  Some groups were more bloodstained than others, however, and they can be distinguished by the fact they are privileged by the power structures of contemporary society; like it or not, their heels are upon the necks of those whom their ancestors didn’t outright kill.  The greater guilt of the dominant group means that those of less privilege and power are by definition possessed of more moral authority.  It is the destiny of humanity to fight an endless battle between oppressed and oppressor until equity is achieved, and consequently it is the moral obligation of all people to either rise against their oppressors or renounce their power until equity—the only morally acceptable condition for human society—is achieved.  This is the meaning of human life.

By contrast, Christianity says that the origin of humanity is the creative activity of the good and sovereign God, who makes humanity in His own image.  Because of sin, humanity finds itself in a condition fundamentally different from that for which they were created.  Now all of humanity live as slaves under the foreign master of sin rather than under the dominion of their good Creator.  To relieve this intolerable situation, God married divinity to humanity in the person of Jesus Christ so that Jesus could collect the wages of our sin (death) and so buy us back to be servants in His own kingdom once again.  The destiny of humanity is hence to live eternally under the dominion of sin or the dominion of God.  This means that what is moral is defined as living as an obedient servant of our proper, legal master God rather than returning to our slavery under sin, which brings us and those around us death.  The meaning of human life hence is becoming fully alive by truly leaving the service of the sin whose fruit is death and being restored to the life of willing obedience to God for which we were created; in the memorable phraseology of the Westminster Catechism, “to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.”

It is unlikely that a single high-profile legal trial will bring our culture to focus on the differences between secular and Christian accounts of human destiny in the same way that the Scopes’ Monkey Trial made us do so for human origins, however, lots of smaller trials are already doing so.  The Supreme Court decisions that have wrought such rapid, monumental, and, for orthodox Christians, challenging cultural changes in our society around the issues of human sexuality have had everything to do with the loss of this sense of human destiny.  They point to the eclipse or deliberate abandonment of a sense that there is an inherent point to the human creature.  That a culture possessed of more (and more widespread) wealth and leisure than any other in history should come to construe marriage as primarily one more means to personal self-fulfillment is perhaps not surprising.  That a great number of people cannot even perceive what generations of both religious and non-religious people took as obvious—the obvious physical complementarity of the sexes as a clue to the meaning of marriage—means we are terrifyingly untethered from reality.  Recent SCOTUS rulings even declare that objectively verifiable biological sex is less “real” in a legal sense than one’s self-ascribed “gender.”  This is the instantiation in law of the idea that nothing should define humanity but human will—that there is biologically and metaphysically no essentially human destiny—theologically speaking, no eschatology.

The origin, destiny, meaning, and morality of humanity proposed by Critical Theory—its anthropology—is wholly at variance with that of orthodox, Biblical Christianity.  Any attempt to syncretize CT with the gospel of Jesus Christ within the Church will necessarily result in the corruption of one or more of the non-negotiables of the Biblical story, producing heresy that will endanger the very souls it purports to serve, breeding the lawlessness that sin always does, and obscuring, if not obliterating completely, the gospel of the only Son of God, whose is the only name under heaven whereby we must be saved.  In the final analysis, Critical Theory and its daughter Critical Race Theory must be rejected by Christians as a possible path to justice because they hopelessly compromise the mission of the Church of Jesus Christ and the world She is called to be for though She can never be of it.

To view the first post in Pr. Jenkin’s two-post article, click on the button below.

Editor’s Note: The conclusion of this article will be published in a second post on or about September 18, 2020.

Critical Theory—in particular, Critical Race Theory—has recently captured the Church’s attention, and in some corners of the Lord’s vineyard it seems, more significantly, Her imagination.  (For those unfamiliar with Critical Theory, this article will serve as a necessarily incomplete introduction.)  Springing from the same philosophers and theorists (Foucault, Derrida, etc.) who brought us postmodernism, Critical Theory seems to be suddenly taking the whole Western world by storm.

This is an illusion.  Though all but Liberal Arts majors would likely be unfamiliar with the Frankfurt School or even the phrase “Critical Theory,” everyone who has received an undergraduate education in the last thirty years has been familiarized with (and in many cases, indoctrinated into) its basic terminology and the categories of meaning by which it makes sense of the world.  For instance, for every one of my acquaintance at my own undergraduate alma mater of Penn State, the obligatory “professional writing” requirement for non-English majors was used by the professors as an opportunity to force-feed undergraduates Critical Theory.  As an example, a business writing class for music majors taught participants to write personal reflections on books like Stone Butch Blues, a lesbian coming of age story, instead of memos, letters to parents, and departmental requisitions.  Even if you think the exposure salutary, it demonstrates the tactics of Critical Theory, which, as its exponents readily affirm, “contains an activist dimension. It tries to not only understand our social situation but to change it, setting out not only to ascertain how society organizes itself along racial lines and hierarchies but to transform it for the better.”[1]

Solid introductions to Critical Theory by both its proponents and opponents are now widely available, and I encourage the reader to consult at least one of each to familiarize themselves with its outlines; otherwise, as commentator Phil Blair demonstrated in his response to a recent Christianity Today article, we may find ourselves employing it unbeknownst to ourselves.

Heresy

Though articles abound that are critical of Critical Theory (hereafter referred to as CT) from a Christian perspective, as mine is, I hope to explore the topic from an at least slightly different perspective; I propose that while CT may properly diagnose some elements of our cultural ills, it necessarily misaddresses these maladies because it is in fact a secularized Christian heresy.

The Critic Is Often Right About What Is Wrong, But He Is Nearly Always Wrong About What Would Be Right.

I want to start by acknowledging what CT—and progressive ideologies more generally—often get right.  One of the functions of the people in a society that are typically deemed “liberal,” “left,” or “progressive” is to point out injustices when they accumulate.  Any meritocracy (where achievement or talent is rewarded with social and/or economic upward mobility) periodically and predictably accumulates inequity and unfairness at its margins.  At a biological level, talent and giftedness are inborn traits that often run in families.  Sociologically, families pass on habits and knowledge that maximize (or minimize) inherent capacities for greater achievement and reward.  The greatest patrimony that a family passes on in a meritocracy is not their wealth—though that certainly has undeniable advantages—but rather their knowledge and skills in accessing or leveraging the power structures of the meritocracy.

This does not mean that a meritocracy is inherently immoral. (What would we want, a system where lack of talent, industry, and skill is rewarded?) But it does mean that for all the good it may produce, it is a system that can put real people at a real disadvantage in accessing the social and economic rewards deemed legitimate by the value system at its foundation; it is a system that needs a watchdog that calls for course corrections when the process whereby “the rising tide that lifts all boats” creates eddies and riptides that prevent people from weighing anchor and setting sail.

In his book The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt contends that in the same way all the complex flavors of the world’s cuisines are composed of the tongue’s four basic tasting capacities—sweet, sour, salty, and bitter—the great diversity of moralities to which people ascribe are woven from the five basic “cognitive modules” with which we define and evaluate morality and justice.  Defined in terms of their antipodes, these modules are care/harm, fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and sanctity/degradation.  Haidt names this Moral Foundations Theory.

One need not agree with Haidt’s thesis about the origins of these cognitive modules to see their utility as an interpretive grid.  In analyzing the political application of the theory, Haidt, who identifies himself as a liberal, discovered that those who measured as the most “liberal” registered highly in the care/harm and fairness/cheating categories but little to not at all in the other three.  Though caring and fairness were also the dominant categories for those who registered as the most “conservative,” people with these political leanings showed a near convergence with the other three concerns of loyalty, authority, and sanctity:

What this means is that if it seems that the proponents of Critical Theory are “tone deaf” to some of the moral concerns expressed by other, more “conservative” people, it is because they are.  For the “liberal” adherent of CT, the mere presence of inequity is all the proof needed that injustice is occurring.  Questions of whether people have demonstrated the social virtues of developing skills (that is, demonstrating loyalty to the system’s values) are largely not considered, or if they are, the need to do so is defined as part of the oppression inherent in “the system.”  Likewise, the need to “pay one’s dues,” which recognizes the system’s authority, is construed as more evidence of injustice rather than a period of necessary apprenticeship during which there is predicted inequity between those who have acquired the sought-after skills and resources and those currently acquiring them.  Finally, the need to exhibit sustained effort with or without immediate reward—the most sanctified value in a meritocracy—is despised most of all as the mechanism of systemic injustice because, although such effort generally yields overall improvement in the socio-economic position of a given class of people, there is no guarantee in any particular instance that the effort so exerted will result necessarily in equity.  The moral concerns of three of the five moral cognitive modules are not only temporarily bracketed to focus analysis on the issue of fairness, for the “liberal,” they quite literally do not register as things worthy of assessment and for the critical theorist, they are merely attempts to obfuscate the real issue, which is measurable equity.

Moreover, the proponent of Critical Theory does not need to provide measurable criteria whereby to evaluate the claims of their analysis.  The existence of the inequity natural to and predicted by a system that rewards merit is the prima facie evidence that revolution is needed.  Whether the proposed system could actually create the desired equity and whether that equity would be balanced with other moral concerns  (everyone living in social and/or economic squalor is, after all, a type of equality) need not be seriously contemplated, because the only value in view is equity, which is defined as fairness that provides the necessary care for everybody.

This is how these critics can be right about what is wrong (that is, in Critical Race Theory, the form of CT most affecting the life of the Church at present, racial inequities), but so wrong about what would put these wrongs right; their theories are not based upon a morality with a complex enough palate, capable of fine enough distinctions.

Eschatology and Anthropology

This is also in part why Critical Theory is a comprehensive worldview; in merely noting inequity, it believes that it has accounted for all the most significant moral variables—the only ones that count.  It must then flatten all human experience into the narrow interpretive grid it deems the only valid one.

Four Fundamental Questions

The late Ravi Zacharias helpfully delineated at least four fundamental questions of human life to which any worldview must propose an answer: human origin, meaning, morality, and destiny.  Because of the 1925 “Scopes Monkey Trial,” the issue of origins has dominated the intellectual landscape of the Western Church for the last 100 or so years.  First, it dominated the popular imagination as “yet another case” of backward religionists resisting reason’s inevitable march of progress in accord with the Enlightenment’s self-narration.  (Yes, this was first. Scopes deliberately implicated himself so that a trial would need to be held and Darrow deliberately had the trial played out by a sympathetic urbane media in the court of public opinion as part of his legal strategy.)  The attempts to condemn Intelligent Design as veiled religious dogma are the intellectual descendants of that controversy.  Secondly, it precipitated a growing crisis within the Church between Fundamentalists and Modernists, who believed a dating of the age of the earth to greater than 7,000 years was congruent with orthodox Biblical interpretation.  The inheritors of that dispute are the Young Earth versus Old Earth Creationist debates of today.[2] 

“Your theology can never be better than your anthropology,” was one of the favorite axioms my Prophets professor in seminary passed on to us from his mentor.  Of course, being self-consciously orthodox, I thought that axiom got it exactly backward; our theology—specifically our Christology and soteriology—necessarily defines our understanding of human nature, so our anthropology can never be better than our theology.

Unfortunately, the Western Church’s obsession with origins has led to a relative neglect of the way our understanding of who Jesus is and what salvation fully entails informs our understanding of what human beings are (our meaning), how we should live (our morality), and our purpose or telos (our destiny).  The preaching of Jesus predominantly as life coach, social activist, friend of sinners, prophetic preacher, social reformer or even atoning sacrifice for sinners, has led to the neglect of the consistent preaching of Jesus as the God-Man or Theanthropos, a new species in God’s economy of salvation.[3]  “God became man that man might become [like] God,” exulted Irenaeus of Lyons in his second century classic Against Heresies, going on to declare as the soteriological significance of that teaching that “the glory of God is a [hu]man fully alive.”

Great Tradition Christianity proclaims that the ultimate destiny of redeemed humanity is not merely to avoid hell (Jesus as the cosmic get-out-of-jail-free card) or to emulate Jesus as the finest example of a fully self-realized or perfectly moral human person, but rather to become “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4).  Through our Sacramental union with Jesus, who was fully God and fully human, by faith in His promises, we are drawn into the perichoretic inner life of the Godhead, the most Holy Trinity.  As the Theanthropos, Jesus is the “firstborn among many brothers” (Romans 8:29), not the only-born to be admired and worshipped, but whose life remains fundamentally distant from our own.

This teaching about the implications of salvation through Christ for our destiny as human beings thoroughly conditions and shapes all other elements of our theology.  In other words, remembering the fullness of our destiny as human beings in Christ has far more impact on our understanding of what is the meaning of human life and the morality by which it is to be lived than our understanding of our origins.

---

[1] Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic. Critical Race Theory: An Introduction. (New York: New York University Press, 2017), page 8.

[2] If you speak the first article of the Nicene or Apostles’ Creed without crossing your fingers, you are a creationist of one stripe or the other; it is important that non-fundamentalist Christians be absolutely clear on this point and think through the consequences of that position as distinct from a functional Deism.

[3] Justification by grace through faith—forensic justification—may indeed be the doctrine upon which the Church stands or falls as Martin Luther declared, but it was never meant to be preached denuded of the very Christology that makes it so powerful and poignant.

You might say we are beginning to witness the proverbial straw that is about to break the camel’s back.  The camel, in this case, is the Protestant ordained ministry.  (Including, of course, Lutheran pastors.)  The straw is the current pandemic, and all the ways it is contributing to the work-related stress of pastors in this already infamous year of our Lord, 2020.

And yet the “straw” metaphor doesn’t do Covid-19 justice.  This pandemic and its consequences would have been hard to even imagine just ten months ago.  Yet here we are.

 I retired from parish ministry less than two years ago.  Apparently just in time.  And while I am currently coaching numerous not-yet-retired Lutheran pastors, I have been personally insulated from the “new normal” full-time pastors are dealing with in this pandemic era.  So I was surprised to come across Pastor Thom Rainer’s latest article just posted on August 31^st.  The title alone gained my complete attention: “Six Reasons Your Pastor Is About to Quit”.

Who is Thom Rainer?  He is the former CEO of Lifeway Christian Resources, and currently leads the coaching ministry Church Answers.  And while Thom is Southern Baptist background, I’m convinced his insights apply to mainline Protestant pastors in general—including Lutheran clergy.

 Early in his article Thom writes this: “The vast majority of pastors with whom our (coaching) team communicates are saying they are considering quitting their churches.  It’s a trend I have not seen in my lifetime.”  (Keep in mind Pastor Rainer has been in ministry for almost forty years.)  Here are the six reasons, as described by Thom Rainer, why many pastors are “about to quit.”

1. “Pastors are weary from the pandemic just like everyone else.”  No surprise here.
2. “Pastors are greatly discouraged about the fighting taking place among church members about the post-quarantine church.  Gather in person or wait?  Masks or no masks?  Social distancing or not?”  Rainer also mentions the added stress when these conflicts have been politicized.
3. “Pastors are discouraged about losing members and attendance.”  Pastors I have been coaching are, this summer, seeing in-person attendance that is only 30 to 50% of pre-Covid levels.  And Rainer adds this: “Pastors have already heard directly or indirectly from around one-fourth of the members that they do not plan to return at all.”
4. “Pastors don’t know if their churches will be able to financially support congregational ministries in the future.”  And while giving might be healthy up to this point there is apparently mounting anxiety about whether this will continue to be the case in 2021.
5. “Criticisms against pastors have increased significantly.”
6. “The workload for pastors has increased greatly. … They are trying to serve the congregation the way they have in the past, but now they have the added responsibilities that have come with the digital world.  And as expected, pastoral care needs among members have increased during the pandemic as well.”

This pandemic has, in my view, created something of a “perfect storm” when it comes to the matter of clergy supply.  Even pre-Covid we were seeing the reality of many more pastors retiring than new pastors being ordained.  Now that trend will undoubtedly be accelerating, due in part to many pastors retiring sooner rather than later.

 Lutheran CORE’s Congregations in Transition (CiT) ministry coaches are available to help confessing Lutheran congregations who are or soon will be dealing with a pastoral vacancy in these uncertain and unnerving times.  If you are a congregational lay leader at a church that already has—or soon will have—a vacancy, or you are a pastor who will be retiring in the next one to two years, we can help.  Our coaching assistance, while at a distance, is comprehensive, and is customized to address your congregation’s unique ministry challenges.  If you want to know more, contact me, Don Brandt, either by email (pastordonbrandt@gmail.com) or phone (503-559-2034).

 And for every lay person reading this, do what you can to thank and encourage your pastor!

Dr. Don Brandt

Director, Congregations in Transition

Editor’s Note: In this article, author David Charlton thoughtfully critiques Reconciling Scripture for Lutherans, a commentary on Scripture. It was written by Reconciling Works which advocates “for the full welcome, inclusion, and equity of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex and asexual/aromantic (LGBTQIA+) Lutherans in all aspects of the life of their Church, congregations, and community.” While independent, Reconciling Works is closely affiliated with the ELCA. 

Reconciling Scripture for Lutherans begins by listing four “common metrics for scriptural interpretation” taken from the writings of Martin Luther.  The list includes:  a) the Law/Gospel Dialectic, b) the Plain Reading of Scripture, c) Scripture Interprets Scripture, and d) Scripture as the Manger that Holds Christ.[1] These are indeed common Lutheran principles for interpreting Scripture.  One principle that I would expect to find, but did not, is was Christum treibt, or “whatever teaches Christ.”   However, I have no objection to the four mentioned.

In general, the description of each is sound.  However, I do have a question regarding the Plain Reading metric.  It seems anachronistic to include the modern historical critical method as part of that principle.  That method would not be developed and standardized for several centuries after Luther’s time.  It is more likely that Luther had in mind what some call the historical grammatical method.  Luther used the best in contemporary textual criticism, Greek and Hebrew lexicons, and knowledge of history.  What would Luther know about source, form, redaction, or narrative criticism?  What would he know of the several quests for the historical Jesus?

The real difficulty with these “common metrics” are how they are applied in interpreting two kinds of texts, labeled “Passages Used to Exclude” and “Passages Used to Welcome.”  I will address each section separately, giving examples of how all four metrics are applied to both kinds of passages.

Passages Used to Exclude

There are eight Biblical texts described as “passages used to exclude.”  The intent is to demonstrate how the four Lutheran metrics clear up confusion about the meaning of these texts.  The question for us is whether the Lutheran metrics are applied correctly, and whether they succeed in the purpose for which they are used.

The Law/Gospel principle is used to address Genesis 1:26-29 and Romans 1:22-27.  In the three pages dedicated to Genesis 1:26-29, there is only one reference to Law, and one to Gospel.  The authors make the dubious claim that the phrase “male and female he created them” cannot be taken as Law because it is not grammatically in the form of a command.[2]  They certainly know better than that.  Lutherans have never limited Law to grammatical commands.  The Law is understood more broadly than that.  While including grammatical commands, it also includes anything that is taken as normative, makes demands, accuses or condemns.  The authors undermine this argument three paragraphs later when they refer to “the Gospel in this passage.”[3]  They do not cite a grammatical promise that serves as Gospel.  Instead, they infer a Gospel promise from the descriptive passage in verse 27, which says that humankind was created in the image of God.  If Gospel can be inferred, then so can Law.  On the other hand, if absent a grammatical command, no Law can be inferred, then absent a grammatical promise, no Gospel can be inferred. 

The discussion of Romans 1:22-27 also fails to apply the Law/Gospel principle correctly.  However, it does so in a different way.  It misconstrues Paul’s use of Law and Gospel in a serious way.  Romans 1:22-27 is part of a longer argument extending from Chapter 1 to Chapter 3.  It culminates in the conclusion that “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”  (3.23)  And yet the authors assert that Paul is not describing the Romans themselves, in 1:22-27, but instead describing a sinful and “unnamed people who are set up as a foil.”[4]  He is doing this, it is alleged, to set up his main argument, that “salvation is based entirely on Christ, and not on our own ability to do good works and follow the Law.”[5]  This is a non-sequitur.  That Paul’s ultimate goal is to show the impossibility of salvation by the works of the Law, does not mean that he doesn’t consider the activities he describes to be sinful.  It would make no sense to use things that are not sinful to convict people of sin.  Nor does it mean that Paul doesn’t consider some in Rome to be guilty of those sins at one time or another.  He seems to assume that as Christians, they no longer engage in those activities.  This does not imply that they never engaged in those activities before they came to faith in Christ. 

The Metaphor of the Manger, is used in interpreting Genesis 2:22-24, Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13.  Its application to these texts is puzzling.  My understanding of that metaphor is that it teaches us to ask, “Where is Christ in this passage?”  It calls for a Christological interpretation of the Old Testament. The problem is that in the discussion of Genesis 2:22-24, this principle is never mentioned.  No attempt is made to show how a Christological interpretation helps us interpret those texts.  Instead the argument relies entirely on a discussion of the meaning of “one flesh.”[6] 

In addressing the texts from Leviticus, only one mention is made of the Metaphor of the Manger.  We are asked to compare these texts with what we know of Christ, to see whether they correspond to him, or whether they are straw.[7]  Is this really what the Metaphor of the Manger teaches us to do?  In fact, in his Preface to the Old Testament, Luther tells us not to despise or be offended by the Old Testament.  It is as precious as the manger that held the infant Christ.[8]  Nowhere in that writing does Luther refer to the Old Testament as straw.  The authors seem to be conflating Luther’s view on the Book of James, found in his Preface to the New Testament[9], with his words about the Old Testament. 

The principle of Scripture Interpreting Scripture is used to interpret Genesis 19 and Deuteronomy 23:1.  They make a good use of this principle in discussing Genesis 19, using multiple references to Sodom in the Old and New Testament to show that homosexuality was not the primary focus when the sin of Sodom was discussed.  In a similar manner, they show that the attitude toward eunuchs changes as we move through Scripture, so that Deuteronomy’s exclusion must be balanced with the inclusion found in other places.  I agree that neither of these texts can be used by themselves to exclude homosexuals or eunuchs.

As for the Plain Reading of Scripture principle, I have the objection that I mentioned earlier.  I think it tends to be anachronistic, as if Luther had the historical critical method in mind.  On the other hand, lexical objections to traditional interpretations seem to be more in line with the tools that Luther had in mind.  In discussing Deuteronomy 22:5, 1 Corinthians 6:9 and 1 Timothy 1:10, the authors raise appropriate questions about the proper translation of key words.  We should not assume that modern notions of homosexuality or transgenderism are what the original reader would have had in mind. 

Passages Used to Include

The authors use the Metaphor of the Manger to interpret the story of Ruth (1:16-17) and Psalm 139:13-14.  In both cases they interpret the text Christologically.  In Ruth they find a foreshadowing of Jesus’ welcoming of outsiders.  They also imply a connection between Ruth’s loyalty and God’s faithfulness in Christ.  In interpreting Psalm 139 Christologically, they lift up the Incarnation itself, reminding us that God embraces our humanity fully, not just in part.  They rightly highlight the importance of recognizing the many ways that loyalty can be expressed in human relationships, the importance of welcoming and including the marginalized, and of embracing people as they are, following the example of Jesus.

The Plain Reading principle is used to interpret Isaiah 56:3-5 and Acts 10 and 11.  They use the plain meaning of each text to illustrate the way that God breaks down walls of ritual purity that exclude those who were considered unclean because of sexual or gender status, diet, or nationality.  They rightly conclude that such categories no longer apply in the Church.  One is justified and therefore included in God’s family by faith in Christ, not by any outward status or action.  Whether one is circumcised or not, follows dietary laws or not, is male or female, Jew or Gentile, eunuch or not, is not relevant. One is acceptable to God by faith alone.

The sections on Scripture Interpreting Scripture focus on Galatians 3:26-29 and Matthew 22: 34-40.  In both cases, the principle is able to raise questions, but not able to provide answers.  Does the dual commandment of love of God and neighbor help us interpret passages like those in Leviticus 18 and 20?  To some degree. Does Galatian 3:26-29 help us determine which Old Testament laws are no longer relevant in the eschatological community of the Church?  In part.  What complicates things is the fact that the Lutheran confessions put the laws of the Old Testament in three categories, 1) religious or ceremonial law, 2) the civil law of the nation of Israel, and 3) the moral law that applies at all times and places.  Many laws that applied in ancient Israel no longer apply to us today, but some of them do.

This leads us to the final category, Law and Gospel.  This is where things tend to get complicated.  In their discussion of Acts 8 and 1 Corinthians 12, the authors are not careful to distinguish the many ways that Lutherans speak of the Law.  As I mentioned above, Lutherans have distinguished between different kinds of Old Testament laws.  The proper distinction between Law and Gospel does render Old Testament religious or ceremonial laws obsolete.  The laws that once distinguished between clean and unclean, Jew and Gentile, are no longer in effect in the Church.  The same is true for civil laws that applied to the nation of Israel in the era of Moses, the judges, the kings, or the Second Temple. 

However, the moral law, as described in Romans 1:19-20, still applies today.  It has a twofold function, the so called civil use and theological use of the Law.  In its civil use, the Law defines the boundaries that are necessary for any healthy community.  The Law in its civil use finds many forms of expression, but some things remain the same.  Murder, adultery, theft, lying and envy are universally detrimental to community. 

The theological use of the Law is to expose sin and reveal the wrath of God.  In doing this, the Law reveals that all fall short of the glory of God.  It undercuts all attempts to justify oneself through works.  In doing so it drives a person to Christ, who through the Gospel grants forgiveness to all who have faith. 

Clearly, the Law that declared the Ethiopian unclean because he was a Gentile and a eunuch no longer applies today.  He was justified and made part of the Church by baptism and faith, as all Christians are.  In a similar manner, Paul makes it clear in 1 Corinthians 12 that membership in the Body of Christ is not based on which gifts a person has been given, but on the confession that Christ is Lord, i.e. faith.   This faith, in turn, is a gift of one and the same Spirit.  Anyone who confesses Christ as Lord is already part of the Body of Christ, through the power of the Spirit. 

The question remains whether the prohibition of sex outside of heterosexual monogamous marriage is part of the obsolete ceremonial and civil law of ancient Israel, or whether it is part of the moral law, which remains valid today.  If it is part of the ceremonial law, it is no longer mandatory for Christians.  If it is part of the civil law of ancient Israel only, then it need not apply to us today.  However, if it is part of the moral law inscribed in the human heart, then it still applies in both its civil and theological uses. 

If so, then there are two implications.  First, the prohibition of sex outside of heterosexual monogamous marriage remains the standard for leaders in the Christian community. (civil use)  Secondly, it still accuses those who violate that prohibition. In that case, the proper response of the Church is not to abolish the Law, but to preach the forgiveness of sin for Jesus’ sake to those who sin.

Where Are We?

I do believe that Reconciling Scripture for Lutherans makes a convincing case that Old Testament rules of exclusion and punishment need not apply today.  They made a good case that distinctions between clean and unclean no longer apply.  Their Christological interpretation of Scripture is convincing in its argument that all people should be welcomed, and that all people should be treated as whole persons created in God’s image.  No person should be unwelcome in the Church or excluded as recipients of its ministry.

What the authors failed to do was to show that the four Lutheran metrics for interpreting Scripture were able to solve the key question.  Is the prohibition of sex outside of monogamous heterosexual marriage a part of the obsolete ceremonial or civil law of ancient Israel, or a continuing part of the Law which even today continues in its civil and theological uses?   In the end, we are right where we began.  The ELCA decided in 2009 that it could not decide which was the case.  Instead, it identified four possible conclusions and chose to allow congregations to choose the answer that suited them.  Meanwhile, it called on people to respect the “bound consciences” of others.   

The authors were not able, on the basis of the four Lutheran metrics for interpreting Scripture, to resolve this dispute.  More importantly, they have failed to show why pastors, seminarians and congregations should be required to abandon the traditional position of the catholic Church. 

Final Thoughts

One further Lutheran metric that I believe applies to the question is what I would call the metric or principle of Scriptural Authority.  The principle here is twofold and is related to the understanding of God’s Word as Law and Gospel   The Church may only command what God commands in the Word.  It may only bless that which God blesses in the Word. 

In the Large Catechism, Luther makes the case for clerical marriage based on the fact that throughout Scripture God both gives commands that protect marriage and promises blessings to those who enter into marriage.  Meanwhile, God never commands men and women to take vows of celibacy, to become monks or nuns, or enter monasteries.  Neither does God promise to bless those who do.  The Church does not have the authority to prohibit marriage, nor to require people to keep monastic vows.  

The same is true today.  The Church has no power to require people to enter same sex marriage, or to perform same sex marriages.  It has no authority to bless such unions, nor the authority to require its pastors to bless such unions.  The Church has no authority to exalt a man-made institution, whether celibacy or same sex marriage, to the level of an institution that has both God’s command and blessing.

Pastors, congregations and seminarians who adhere to the traditional understanding of marriage have not violated Lutheran metrics for Scriptural interpretation.  They have not violated their ordination vows or the Confession of Faith of the ELCA.  They should be under no pressure to adopt the position of Reconciling Works on same sex marriage or be under the threat of retribution for failing to do so.

---

[1] See Reconciling Scripture for Lutherans, pp. 9-11.

[2] Reconciling Scripture. p. 16.

[3] Ibid, p. 17.

[4] Ibid. p. 23.

[5] Ibid, p. 23.

[6] Ibid, p. 19-20.

[7] Ibid, p. 24.

[8] Lull, Timothy F. Martin Luther’s Basic Theological Writings (p. 98). Fortress Press. Kindle Edition.

[9] Ibid, p. 96.

Background Notes: One of the dangers and difficulties of discussing almost any issue these days is how easily any discussion can become highly divisively politicized.  It is not the intent of Lutheran CORE to speak either for or against any political party or candidate.  The political views of the friends of Lutheran CORE cover a very wide spectrum.  In this discussion of Contemporary Critical Theory we are neither endorsing nor speaking against any political candidate or party.  We are discussing an issue which we feel is critically important for Christians to be aware of and be prepared to deal with.

The First Reading for September 6 was from Ezekiel 33, where God compares the role of the prophet to the role of a military sentinel.  Verse 6 says, “If the sentinel sees the sword coming and does not blow the trumpet, so that the people are not warned, and the sword comes and takes any of them,” God will require the blood of the people at the hand of the sentinel.  In the same way, verse 8 says that if the prophet does not warn the people, God will require the blood of the people at the hand of the prophet.

Lutheran CORE defines its mission as being a Voice for Biblical Truth and a Network for Confessing Lutherans.  As a Voice for Biblical Truth we feel called by God to serve as a sentinel to warn people of forces and movements in our world today – even in the church – that are incompatible with if not actually hostile to the historic, orthodox Christian faith.  This is in addition to our role of alerting people to ways in which orthodoxy is being challenged and compromised within the church today.

One of the mindsets and movements that are growing and prevailing today – within our culture and, unfortunately, even within some segments of the Church – is Contemporary Critical Theory.  There are two articles within this issue of CORE Voice which deal with this very powerful and I believe very dangerous force within our world today.  This first article is intended to give you an overview and introduction to Contemporary Critical Theory.  If you are not already familiar with this way of thinking, I am certain you will recognize it as the mindset behind much of what is happening in our nation and our world today.  The second article is a longer and more detailed evaluation and critique of Contemporary Critical Theory.  The intent of this second article is to show how this mindset is incompatible with and even a threat to the historic, orthodox Christian faith.  Many thanks to Brett Jenkins, NALC pastor and former member of our board, for writing the second article.

There is a major difference between the claim that “there is no truth” and the claim that “there is truth, but we have a hard time seeing it on our own.”  While those who are more orthodox-minded may be inclined to assert the latter, those who are not so orthodox-minded may be inclined to assert the former. The former has its roots in the claims of Contemporary Critical Theory.

Contemporary Critical Theory asserts that all knowledge is “socially constructed.”  Therefore, there is no single, objective body of knowledge which all must accept.  All of knowledge is rooted in experience, and we all have different experiences.  My experience will be different from yours; therefore, the knowledge that is “socially constructed” by me may be different from the knowledge that is “socially constructed” by you.  There is no body of knowledge which is wholly objective, as every area of knowledge is tainted with subjectivity.  “Even the field of science is subjective.” (Robin DiAngelo & Öslem Sensoy). 

Because we all have different experiences, we all have different levels of access to truth. The degree to which we have access to truth depends upon positionality: that is, I may have greater access to truth than you do, or vice versa, based on our respective positions in life.  Greater value is given to the perspectives of those with positions in life that give us lived experiences that may provide us with greater insight on the topic(s) discussed.

The idea that there is such a thing as objective reality is looked upon with great suspicion, or even rejected entirely.  Some say that, historically, those in positions of power and privilege have falsely claimed that things which are subjective are actually objective and have used these false claims in order to marginalize and oppress those without power and privilege. Some also say that the privileged misuse these false claims in order to normalize forms of injustice that we should not be accepting as normal. When this is done, “Those in power sleep well at night; their conduct does not seem to them like oppression.” (Richard Delgado).

Contemporary Critical Theory pays great attention to the particular demographic status of the person, and, based on that status, to whether the person might, in context, be considered privileged or marginalized (i.e., rich or poor, white or black, male or female, straight or gay, cisgender or transgender, etc.). The marginalized have the benefit of lived experiences which the privileged simply cannot experience first-hand.  Because the marginalized have greater access to truth than the privileged, the voices of the marginalized are considered to be of greater value than the voices of the privileged. That is especially, but not exclusively, true of matters in which the lived experience of the marginalized provides particular insight into the matter being discussed.  For example, a powerless person who has experienced discrimination at the hands of a person in power will be better equipped to explain such discrimination than a person in power who has never experienced such discrimination first-hand.

Contemporary Critical Theory warns that those with power and privilege do not easily give up their power and privilege.  Rather, they establish institutions, rules, norms, and claims of objective truth in order to establish and protect their dominance in society.  Those in power use all those institutions, rules, norms, and claims in order to subject the powerless to marginalization and oppression.  When the dominance, power, and privilege of the privileged are challenged, they cast doubt on the validity of the claims of those who challenge them.  Consequently, the act of questioning those who are marginalized, especially when done by those who are privileged, is frowned upon, looked upon with suspicion, or even forbidden entirely.

These are not just the opinions of a small number of peculiar individuals.  Rather they are ideas that have spread far and wide in our society, even within the church.  These ideas are driving forces, though not the only driving forces, behind several contemporary movements in the political and social arenas.  These ideas are widely, but not universally, accepted.  They have their critics, on the left as well as on the right.  And there are those with more nuanced positions who will partially but not wholly accept these ideas.  Nevertheless, the influence of these ideas is strong, with variants on the left and on the right.  It is critically important for us to be aware of them, in order that we might be able to respond effectively.