Director’s Note: Many thanks to Bob Benne, esteemed NALC theologian and friend of Lutheran CORE, for his review of the history of the whole issue of “Bound Conscience.”

The 2022 ELCA Churchwide Assembly passed two resolutions that called for reconsideration of
the 2009 social statement, “Human Sexuality: Gift and Trust.”

• Reconsideration #1 called for a review of specific text references in light of the 2015
  Supreme Court ruling regarding same sex marriage and “public acceptance of marriage of
  same-gender and gender-non-conforming couples.”
  
• Reconsideration #2 called for a reconsideration of the “church’s current concept of the
  four positions of bound conscience” found on pages 19-21 of “Human Sexuality: Gift and
  Trust.”

The task force that was appointed to work on these reconsiderations had recommendations for
the 2025 Churchwide Assembly regarding Reconsideration # 1. They described these
recommendations as “simply editorial,” even though they amounted to no less than a complete
embrace of every form of sexual orientation and gender identity.

The task force is now working on its recommendations for Reconsideration # 2, which will be
voted on at the 2028 Churchwide Assembly. Given everything that is happening and the
direction in which everything is going, it is hard to imagine that providing a place of dignity,
belonging, and respect for traditional views and those who hold them will survive.

Most Lutherans know of Martin Luther’s famous appeal to “bound conscience” at the Diet of Worms in 1521.  He insisted: “Unless I am convinced by the testimony of the Scriptures or by clear reason… my conscience is captive to the Word of God.”  His appeal to “bound conscience” meant that his theological and inner moral compass were not free but held captive by the authority of Scripture and clear reason.  For Luther, this wasn’t about subjective feeling but about obedience to God’s revealed truth, a profound conviction that led him to refuse to recant his writings, seeing it as right and safe only to follow God’s Word.   

There are no doubt many uses of the phrase in the history of Lutheranism since the 16^th century, but the use we want to examine is its use in the midst of a controversy in the ELCA over the nature of marriage and its attendant sexual ethics.  While we will focus on the ELCA since 1989, it is important to note that agitation to change traditional teachings on those subjects was already present in the merging churches—the American Lutheran Church, the Lutheran Church in America, and the Association of Evangelical Lutheran Churches—especially in their youth divisions, as well as in their seminaries.

The Past

In the first Assembly of the ELCA in 1989, I roomed with a Virginia pastor who later became the Bishop of Virginia. He was assigned to attend the newly emerging youth organization. Every evening he would sorrowfully recount to me the ways that the adult leaders were propagandizing the youth into accepting practicing homosexual pastors and homosexual marriage.  We could already see what was to come in the new church.

Soon thereafter there were theological gatherings to resist the revisionism pushed by the new church and its Bishop, especially the Called to Faithfulness Conferences held in Northfield, Minnesota. By the turn of the century the newly organized Word Alone led many congregations out of the ELCA as a protest against its agreement with the Episcopal Church that all ordinations must be in the “apostolic succession,” which generally meant that Lutheran ordinations had to have an Episcopal Bishop among the presiders.  Those churches then became Lutheran Congregations in Mission for Christ.

Word Alone also sponsored the emergence of a protest movement against the moral revisionism of the ELCA.    I was present at its first gathering at St. Olaf College in 2003, which was organized and led by retired ELCA Bishop, Paull Spring.  Soon it took the name of Solid Rock and began organizing resistance to proposed changes in sexual ethics that would come about in the Churchwide Assembly of 2003. Solid Rock morphed into Coalition for Reform (CORE) with Roy Harrisville, Jr., as its executive.  Enough resistance was organized in both 2003 and 2005 that the revisionists did not get their way.  In 2005 a report noted that  “When Christians disagree about an ethical issue of this magnitude, one important category for determining the policy of the church may be the recognition that participants in this debate are disagreeing not out of pride or selfish desires, but because their consciences are bound to particular interpretations of Scripture and tradition. The careful way Luther approached moral dilemmas (e.g., in The Estate of Marriage [Luther’s Works 45: 17-49] or Whether Soldiers, Too, Can Be Saved [Luther’s Works 46: 93-137]) showed a genuine concern for the integrity of disputants.”  This report would become the groundwork for the “bound conscience” clause of 2009.

The Assembly of 2007 was supposed to be a truce concerning these issues, but at the end of the Assembly a Bishop proposed a successful amendment that no discipline should be used against those who were already disobeying church rules on sexual ethics.

After much work by a rather loaded task force on those issues, it proposed a social statement entitled Human Sexuality: Gift and Trust, The statement turned out to be ambiguous about every crucial issue and passed by a single vote at 666.  The Assembly also passed provisions for allowing partnered gay pastors and gay marriage.

Though the task force that drafted Human Sexuality was loaded with revisionists, there was enough resistance that the “bound conscience” provision was inserted as a concession to the traditionalists and as a defensive move to prevent a wholesale rebellion in the ELCA.  It recognized four “conscience-bound” positions that Lutherans could faithfully hold on the matter of same-sex relationships, ranging from full opposition to full affirmation of same-sex marriage and the ordination of LGBTQ+ clergy.

When hearings were held about the provision during the Assembly of 2009, I attended one and posed the question about whether it was simply a sop to traditionalist pastors and congregations at the local level to prevent wholesale losses, but that it would not protect traditionalists in any other facet of the church.  That has turned out to be true.  The upper levels of the church have been purged of recalcitrants.

The provision has been crucial for maintaining a painful compromise within the ELCA amid diverse views on human sexuality at the local level. Though hundreds of congregations left after 2009, those traditionalist pastors and congregations that stayed sheltered under the bound conscience provision. I have taught a number of such pastors at the Lutheran Institute of Theology, but they are worried about the future.  One has already transferred to the NALC.

The Present

What is going on to make such pastors and their congregations apprehensive?  The ELCA has already edited the statement and its rules to allow for same sex marriage language and is contemplating a more systematic application of the diversity, equity, and inclusivity ideology, which would definitely not include those traditionalists who cannot agree with the LGBT gender agenda. They are the oppressors and should be silenced or expelled.  Further, the elite of the ELCA have committed themselves to new fervid anti-racist policies that signal panic about the loss of black members even after decades of affirmative action, including the election of a black man as Presiding Bishop.

Those moves certainly signal that the bound conscience provisions are in grave danger.  Further, the task force that has been organized to examine and propose future policy has a majority of “progressives” that are likely to favor a withdrawal of the bound conscience provision.  But it seems that such a proposal is some distance in the future.  Meanwhile, traditionalist pastors and congregations are in uneasy limbo.

The Future

My hunch is that the bound conscience clause will go. There are certainly many level-headed members of the ELCA who prudentially see what will happen:  lots of losses of pastors and congregation with no gains.  More perceptive folks will see the further accommodation of the ELCA to secular progressive culture, much like sister liberal mainline denominations have done. Such accommodation means continued decline.

However, I think the “commanding heights” of the ELCA will push forward with their agenda, including the abolishment of the bound conscience clause.  The ELCA will continue down the slippery slope of accommodation.  When we in CORE were defeated decisively in 2009, we wagered that the ELCA would be unable to say “no” to anything in the sexual revolution. To confirm that wager, it has even made the grave error of propagandizing for transgenderism for children.

There is a long shot chance that the elite themselves will not push their agenda so quickly, or that synod representatives at the ELCA Assembly of 2028 will rebel and resist. But it is more likely that the Assembly will be managed well by the dominant elite, as it has been in most of them. They will make sure that their agenda will prevail.  And there will be one more step away from the Lutheranism whose teachings on marriage and sexuality are clearly grounded in Scripture and Tradition, to which our bound consciences yet cling.

 

It is 2025—an auspicious year.  We are a quarter way into the 21st century.  The Lutheran Reformation is just beginning to essay its second half millennium, and just as the printing press projected the ideas of a firebrand priest named Luther across the continent before a decadent hierarchy could crush him as they did Jan Hus a century before, so now the internet can empower the Church to reform and retool for the changing challenges of ministry.

I know, I know; from shadow-banning, to AI, to the identity crisis in young people, to the manipulation of the masses through algorithmic engineering, the internet actually seems to be the source of most of our ministry challenges.  Fair enough.  I do not mean to downplay any of the challenges theological or pastoral that this new and increasingly ubiquitous reality presents to the proclamation of the gospel, the cultivation of genuine Christian discipleship, and ultimately, the salvation of persons.  The kinetic component of the spiritual warfare that has always been the province of the Church now seems to be moving at a speed that is dizzying and whose geographic boundaries are less clear; the narratives the Church would historically recognize as spiritual propaganda used to largely be “over there,” as the world was divided into Christendom and the mission field.  Now we carry these narratives around in our pocket via the raucous voices of not just traditional pundits, but social influencers and YouTube “experts” whose probity and veracity are vouched for primarily by the number of subscribers they can capture and retain.

Complicating the picture further is the fact that this technology was born in the bosom of Western culture precisely at the moment that Nietzsche’s “death of God” made all things possible and French post-structuralism was teaching anyone college-educated that right and wrong were merely social constructs meant to obscure what was in fact the raw exercise of power, and that this logic informs the programming of not only the Artificial Intelligence about which we are all concerned, but the search engines we use to learn about them.  Social observer Ted Gioia estimates that we have at most twelve more months within which the average, well-educated person will be able to tell what is real from what is computer-generated in their news feed, and historian/social philosopher Mary Harrington has noted that functional literacy—the ability to focus on, digest, and synthesize information gained through long-form reading—is already plunging so precipitously that it will soon be at medieval levels, despite the ubiquity of text in our lives. Clergy may shortly become “clerics” once again, an elite defined by their competency with written language.

“Where is the good news in this?” we may well ask.  It is that the Church has some unique opportunities before Her at this time.  This past weekend, like an incarnation of Robert Jenson’s prediction in his October 1993 First Things article How the World Lost Its Story, a couple from a Pentecostal background visited my church for the first time precisely because they discovered on our worship stream solid Biblical preaching married to the singing of the Kyrie and Gloria.  The husband had been discovering through YouTube videos what he may never have discovered even 20 years ago, when the only spiritual voice was that of his pastor; he was learning that the mode of worship he had grown up with was novel, not apostolic, and he was seeking a firmer foundation for himself and his family.  For my part, I am excited at the prospect that the fervent piety that characterized their upbringing might leaven the at-times stolid, business-as-usual daily demeanor of central Pennsylvania Lutheranism.  I am hopeful that it can do this without fueling Lutheranism’s historic pendulum swing from Pietism to Neo-Orthodoxy since they come seeking, not escaping from, the liturgical, Sacramental life of the historic Church. 

Can you imagine what the fervency of such piety married to orthodox Biblical faith grounded in profound liturgical formation might look like?  I can.  Think Polycarp, Maximos the Confessor, Francis of Assisi, Martin Luther… There is much more to say in future articles about the opportunities that this historical moment affords the Church, but one at least is the healing of some of our historic divisions through wider mutual knowledge and appreciation.  John Paul II prayed that the 3^rd millennium of Christianity would be the millennium of healing our divisions.  Wouldn’t it be just like God to use what is seemingly a great weapon in the hands of our ancient Enemy to accomplish that seemingly impossible task?