Binding and Unbinding the Conscience: Luther's Significance for the Plight of the Gay Protestant by Paul E. Capetz
Leave your critique, pro-or-con, in comments. I'll have more to say later in comments section myself. -Shrimp
Wednesday, May 03, 2006
Know your opponents
What would a gay professor of historical theology preach about Luther? Go here where you will find: "Luther’s “reformation” was nothing less than a wholesale rejection of this medieval understanding of Christian existence as the pursuit of holiness. Luther came to realize that his commitment to the monastic life was motivated by fear of God’s judgment. To avoid the possibility of eternal damnation, Luther entered the monastery, hoping thereby to evade God’s wrath against sinners. But soon he discovered that his efforts to be a saint led him to despair of himself. He confessed every impure thought that crossed his mind and engaged in ruthless self-examination to see whether he truly loved God with his whole heart and his neighbor as himself. Eventually, Luther concluded that his inherited understanding of the Christian life was at odds with the basic message of scripture which he believed to find in the teaching of the apostle Paul that we are “justified by faith apart from works of the law” (Rom. 3:28)."
Nothing too wrong with that, he actually preaches what (too bad) many say about Luther and holiness (which I don't believe at all-Luther taught we were to live beyond any self-righteous conceptions of holiness) but we can see that he is trying to abolish something and put something else it its place.
And so Capetz goes on to play around with Bonhoeffer too:
"I discovered later, and I’m still discovering right up to this moment, that it is only by living completely in this world that one learns to have faith. One must completely abandon any attempt to make something of oneself, whether it be a saint, or a converted sinner, or a churchman...By this worldliness I mean living unreservedly in life’s duties, problems, successes and failures, experiences and perplexities. In so doing we throw ourselves completely into the arms of God….That, I think, is faith…and that is how one becomes a [human being] and a Christian (letter of July 21, 1944)."
Capetz spins it out:
"It’s striking that Bonhoeffer appeals to Luther’s example here. I think Bonhoeffer correctly grasped the radical character of Luther’s message about the freedom of the gospel and that he translated it into action in a dramatic way in the context of the modern world. Here was a person who set aside religious scruples to be a human being in solidarity with his fellow human beings and was willing to get his hands dirty with the moral ambiguities of life in this world. Because of his confidence that God accepts the sinner, Bonhoeffer knew that he had no higher calling than to be a human being—not a saint, not a religious type, but a human being, living a secular life in the midst of a godless world. He understood, as did Luther before him, that the gospel frees the conscience to act boldly in the face of life’s tasks. He realized, as did Luther before him, that the gospel frees us from pre-occupation with our own salvation so that we need not (indeed, must not!) withdraw from the world with its all-too-human sorrows and failures as well as its oh-so-human joys and wonders.
"Nevertheless, the gospel frees the human being to live in this world with the bold confidence that God accepts the sinner and, therefore, the sinner can trust in God’s grace."
So just go ahead and sin, right? YOu can read the whole thing here.
Let's see what Capetz does with "telling his own story":
"Although I have never been the victim of a hate crime such as that perpetrated against Matthew Shepard, my life and my career have been adversely affected by homophobia, specifically of the ecclesial variety. Eleven years ago I was ordained as a minister in this church and was called to teach at one of our Presbyterian seminaries. Before I had even packed my bags to assume my new post, however, an anonymous accusation on account of my sexual orientation threatened to take this job away from me. I later discovered, to my great shock and dismay, that this accusation had come from one of my own professors in graduate school. Since the substance of the accusation could not be proven and the person making it denied any responsibility when directly confronted, I was allowed to join the faculty after all. But an ominous cloud hung over my head, for I knew that my job would always be vulnerable to such threats. After a year I took another position at a seminary affiliated with the United Church of Christ which has allowed me to pursue my vocation unhindered by homophobia. While I was glad to find refuge with the U.C.C., there was much sadness, nonetheless, since I had to leave colleagues with whom there was an unusual and rare "meeting of minds" of the sort for which one always yearns yet seldom ever finds in academic settings.
"Nine years later, in the spring of 2000, I asked the presbytery to release me from the exercise of the ordained ministry.5 This decision was made in response to the passage in 1997 of so-called "Amendment B" which implied commitment to a life of permanent celibacy for a gay person holding an ordained office. Up until that point, I had been able to live within the bounds of the constitution in good conscience. To be sure, the "Definitive Guidance" of 1978 had already put into effect what was essentially a policy of "Don't ask, don't tell!" Yet there was still some space for gay officers to serve the church within these ambiguous constraints. The change in the constitution itself forced my hand. For me, the crucial consideration in relinquishing my ordination was a matter of principle: enforced celibacy without the possibility of marriage violates a fundamental tenet of Reformed theology. Previously there had never been a situation in the history of the Protestant church when celibacy was required of an entire caste of persons as a condition of their fidelity to the gospel.6 Remaining silent was no longer an option. I could not continue to represent the church as one of its ministers when the theological principles of its own heritage were ignored for the purpose of excluding gay people. In the meantime, another Presbyterian seminary invited me to apply for a faculty position, but when I explained the reasons for deciding to set aside my ordination, I was informed that there was no point in submitting an application since it could not be taken seriously. I mention these experiences not to make myself the focus of attention here, but simply to illustrate that gay people are not the only victims of homophobia. The entire church suffers the consequences insofar as talent is drained from the ranks of its leaders for the sake of a policy that I have no hesitation in decrying as immoral."
Read the whole remarkable thing here.
Capetz has had a busy career. Read this response to his revisionism of Luther.
There we can read a fellow Presbyterian professor responding to him:
"While every first-year seminarian knows that Luther considered the book of James an “epistle of straw,”only one reading of Luther claims that he created a “canon within the canon.” Luther never said that, nor did he eliminate James from the canon. He did not “reject James,” as Capetz says, for rather than driving a wedge between the formal and material principles, he threw his hands up, offering his doctor’s cap to anyone who could reconcile James and Paul. Both Calvin and Bullinger maintained sola fide and sola scriptura together, suggesting that Capetz is anachronistic in reading back post-critical categories on these arguments. Granted, there is some tension and ambiguity in the Reformers’ use of the Bible, which tension is exacerbated after the development of higher critical methods. But does this not increase, rather than decrease, the need for confessional documents in the public teaching of the church?"
Which is just to say what, that we live in a time where good minds are bent on turning and twisting words until they say what they want them to say, so we need to nail some things down?
No doubt Capetz has had his troubles, but he is hardly a victim. I found him while googling around wondering who had implanted the ideas that Megan Rohrer espoused below about Luther rejecting celibacy as an idea that relates to gay ministerial candidates today.
More reasons for the gay activists to leave the mainlines and start their own liberal church. They have professors, seminarians, laity, and lots of money. Perhaps they can convince themselves to go and sin boldly after all, and "do a Nike" (just do it).
Nothing too wrong with that, he actually preaches what (too bad) many say about Luther and holiness (which I don't believe at all-Luther taught we were to live beyond any self-righteous conceptions of holiness) but we can see that he is trying to abolish something and put something else it its place.
And so Capetz goes on to play around with Bonhoeffer too:
"I discovered later, and I’m still discovering right up to this moment, that it is only by living completely in this world that one learns to have faith. One must completely abandon any attempt to make something of oneself, whether it be a saint, or a converted sinner, or a churchman...By this worldliness I mean living unreservedly in life’s duties, problems, successes and failures, experiences and perplexities. In so doing we throw ourselves completely into the arms of God….That, I think, is faith…and that is how one becomes a [human being] and a Christian (letter of July 21, 1944)."
Capetz spins it out:
"It’s striking that Bonhoeffer appeals to Luther’s example here. I think Bonhoeffer correctly grasped the radical character of Luther’s message about the freedom of the gospel and that he translated it into action in a dramatic way in the context of the modern world. Here was a person who set aside religious scruples to be a human being in solidarity with his fellow human beings and was willing to get his hands dirty with the moral ambiguities of life in this world. Because of his confidence that God accepts the sinner, Bonhoeffer knew that he had no higher calling than to be a human being—not a saint, not a religious type, but a human being, living a secular life in the midst of a godless world. He understood, as did Luther before him, that the gospel frees the conscience to act boldly in the face of life’s tasks. He realized, as did Luther before him, that the gospel frees us from pre-occupation with our own salvation so that we need not (indeed, must not!) withdraw from the world with its all-too-human sorrows and failures as well as its oh-so-human joys and wonders.
"Nevertheless, the gospel frees the human being to live in this world with the bold confidence that God accepts the sinner and, therefore, the sinner can trust in God’s grace."
So just go ahead and sin, right? YOu can read the whole thing here.
Let's see what Capetz does with "telling his own story":
"Although I have never been the victim of a hate crime such as that perpetrated against Matthew Shepard, my life and my career have been adversely affected by homophobia, specifically of the ecclesial variety. Eleven years ago I was ordained as a minister in this church and was called to teach at one of our Presbyterian seminaries. Before I had even packed my bags to assume my new post, however, an anonymous accusation on account of my sexual orientation threatened to take this job away from me. I later discovered, to my great shock and dismay, that this accusation had come from one of my own professors in graduate school. Since the substance of the accusation could not be proven and the person making it denied any responsibility when directly confronted, I was allowed to join the faculty after all. But an ominous cloud hung over my head, for I knew that my job would always be vulnerable to such threats. After a year I took another position at a seminary affiliated with the United Church of Christ which has allowed me to pursue my vocation unhindered by homophobia. While I was glad to find refuge with the U.C.C., there was much sadness, nonetheless, since I had to leave colleagues with whom there was an unusual and rare "meeting of minds" of the sort for which one always yearns yet seldom ever finds in academic settings.
"Nine years later, in the spring of 2000, I asked the presbytery to release me from the exercise of the ordained ministry.5 This decision was made in response to the passage in 1997 of so-called "Amendment B" which implied commitment to a life of permanent celibacy for a gay person holding an ordained office. Up until that point, I had been able to live within the bounds of the constitution in good conscience. To be sure, the "Definitive Guidance" of 1978 had already put into effect what was essentially a policy of "Don't ask, don't tell!" Yet there was still some space for gay officers to serve the church within these ambiguous constraints. The change in the constitution itself forced my hand. For me, the crucial consideration in relinquishing my ordination was a matter of principle: enforced celibacy without the possibility of marriage violates a fundamental tenet of Reformed theology. Previously there had never been a situation in the history of the Protestant church when celibacy was required of an entire caste of persons as a condition of their fidelity to the gospel.6 Remaining silent was no longer an option. I could not continue to represent the church as one of its ministers when the theological principles of its own heritage were ignored for the purpose of excluding gay people. In the meantime, another Presbyterian seminary invited me to apply for a faculty position, but when I explained the reasons for deciding to set aside my ordination, I was informed that there was no point in submitting an application since it could not be taken seriously. I mention these experiences not to make myself the focus of attention here, but simply to illustrate that gay people are not the only victims of homophobia. The entire church suffers the consequences insofar as talent is drained from the ranks of its leaders for the sake of a policy that I have no hesitation in decrying as immoral."
Read the whole remarkable thing here.
Capetz has had a busy career. Read this response to his revisionism of Luther.
There we can read a fellow Presbyterian professor responding to him:
"While every first-year seminarian knows that Luther considered the book of James an “epistle of straw,”only one reading of Luther claims that he created a “canon within the canon.” Luther never said that, nor did he eliminate James from the canon. He did not “reject James,” as Capetz says, for rather than driving a wedge between the formal and material principles, he threw his hands up, offering his doctor’s cap to anyone who could reconcile James and Paul. Both Calvin and Bullinger maintained sola fide and sola scriptura together, suggesting that Capetz is anachronistic in reading back post-critical categories on these arguments. Granted, there is some tension and ambiguity in the Reformers’ use of the Bible, which tension is exacerbated after the development of higher critical methods. But does this not increase, rather than decrease, the need for confessional documents in the public teaching of the church?"
Which is just to say what, that we live in a time where good minds are bent on turning and twisting words until they say what they want them to say, so we need to nail some things down?
No doubt Capetz has had his troubles, but he is hardly a victim. I found him while googling around wondering who had implanted the ideas that Megan Rohrer espoused below about Luther rejecting celibacy as an idea that relates to gay ministerial candidates today.
More reasons for the gay activists to leave the mainlines and start their own liberal church. They have professors, seminarians, laity, and lots of money. Perhaps they can convince themselves to go and sin boldly after all, and "do a Nike" (just do it).
Looking like the promotion of homosexuality as a lifestyle is growing
One of the lines that is thrown out oh so casually is that it seems like God must make people gay since there are so many. Seems to me that this is but another canard, another example of God being blamed for what people are pretty good at all by themselves.
What do I mean? Do gays promote their lifestyle of not? Have they been successful at convincing liberals to join them in promoting the homosexual lifestyle as a civil rights thing or not? Have they convinced businesses to join them in promoting the homosexual lifestyle as a normal thing or not? Have they convinced teachers to join them in promoting the homosexual lifestyle as a something children should not discriminate against or not? Have they convinced media to join them in promoting the homosexual lifestyle as a good thing or not?
Read the following:
May 2, 2006 – "CBS and the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) have teamed up to produce a series of Public Service Announcements(PSAs) that will be dropped into a day-time soap opera promoting teen homosexuality.
"READ WHOLE ALERT HERE
They go on to say:
"THEN TAKE ACTION: Write a letter of concern to Mr. Moonves asking for CBS to give equal time to Rev Lou Sheldon of the Traditional Values Coalition to present an alternative viewpoint on homosexual behavior. Forward this alert to your friends!
"GLAAD only wants a positive portrayal of homosexuality presented to the American people over public airwaves. This is a betrayal of the public trust. CBS should be willing to prevent a fair and balanced message on homosexuality—and not promote only one viewpoint on this controversial topic.
"Go WRITE THAT LETTER! Better yet, write a letter, send an email and then RING HIS PHONE!!!"
Leslie Moonves -- CBS Entertainment
Title: Chairman and CEO, CBS
Department: Headquarters
E-mail: diversity@cbs.com
Phone: (323) 575-2380
Address: 7800 Beverly Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90036
What do I mean? Do gays promote their lifestyle of not? Have they been successful at convincing liberals to join them in promoting the homosexual lifestyle as a civil rights thing or not? Have they convinced businesses to join them in promoting the homosexual lifestyle as a normal thing or not? Have they convinced teachers to join them in promoting the homosexual lifestyle as a something children should not discriminate against or not? Have they convinced media to join them in promoting the homosexual lifestyle as a good thing or not?
Read the following:
May 2, 2006 – "CBS and the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) have teamed up to produce a series of Public Service Announcements(PSAs) that will be dropped into a day-time soap opera promoting teen homosexuality.
"READ WHOLE ALERT HERE
They go on to say:
"THEN TAKE ACTION: Write a letter of concern to Mr. Moonves asking for CBS to give equal time to Rev Lou Sheldon of the Traditional Values Coalition to present an alternative viewpoint on homosexual behavior. Forward this alert to your friends!
"GLAAD only wants a positive portrayal of homosexuality presented to the American people over public airwaves. This is a betrayal of the public trust. CBS should be willing to prevent a fair and balanced message on homosexuality—and not promote only one viewpoint on this controversial topic.
"Go WRITE THAT LETTER! Better yet, write a letter, send an email and then RING HIS PHONE!!!"
Leslie Moonves -- CBS Entertainment
Title: Chairman and CEO, CBS
Department: Headquarters
E-mail: diversity@cbs.com
Phone: (323) 575-2380
Address: 7800 Beverly Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90036
Lutheran Lesbian and Gay Ministries urges pastors to talk to them first before they tell the truth to their bishops...
Click here for the pdf and scroll down to paage three and read the story on "Coming Out" to bishops. It is interesting to read that they think all but a few bishops think that it is a bishops job to uphold the constitution and policies of the ELCA!
Homosexuality, Conscience, and the Reformation
by Scott H. Hendrix
A comparison of the idea of “bound consciences” reveals that the meaning is different today from what the sixteenth-century reformers meant by it.
The Task Force on Sexuality appeals to “deeply held and conscience-bound positions” to explain the lack of consensus within the ELCA and argues that Martin Luther’s careful approach to moral issues showed a “genuine concern for the integrity of conscience.” Moreover, the report cites Luther’s appeal to his captive conscience at the Diet of Worms and solicits “respect for one another’s bound consciences as a matter of pastoral concern.”
What is meant by the term conscience in these phrases? Did Luther understand his conscience to be captive to the Word of God in the same way that the report describes the captive consciences of Lutherans today? The questions are worth asking because the bound conscience is the basis of the task force’s decision to frame its recommendations in nonbinding terms.
Meaning of Conscience
For Lutheran theologians at the time of the Reformation, the conscience was not an inborn sense of right and wrong. Instead, they inherited from medieval theology the notion of conscience as the point of saving contact between us and God. For medieval mystics that point of contact was a divine spark that could be fanned into the flames of union with God. For scholastic theologians conscience was the capacity of the human being to earn saving merit, with the help of grace, by knowing and doing the will of God. Luther and his colleagues also regarded the conscience as a point of contact with God, but saving contact was established by faith in Christ that was created by the Holy Spirit through the Word.
When sixteenth-century Lutherans fought for the liberation of consciences, they sought to free believers from what they called human traditions — that is, rules and practices that the late-medieval church said were required for salvation but that the reformers could not find in Scripture. Reformers attempted to comfort the “terrified” or “anxious” consciences of the faithful, who felt they could never perform enough religious works to merit salvation. On the one hand, therefore, Luther and his colleagues advocated the freedom of conscience through faith against additional requirements for salvation that would bind the conscience.
On the other hand, reformers also considered the consciences of Christians to be captive to the Word of God, as indeed Luther said about his own conscience at Worms. His conviction that salvation came through faith in Christ alone was not only a theological opinion but the central message of Scripture as he, a professor of Bible, taught it. He was unable, therefore, to recant his teaching, because it would violate his conscience: not his moral sense of right or wrong but his religious conviction, formed and sustained by the Holy Spirit through Scripture, that Christ alone was the way of salvation. Luther’s conscience was not the only basis of his decision at Worms. A lesser-known part of his reply appeals to the consciences of the faithful that “have been miserably ensnared, vexed, and flayed” by human teachings and papal regulations. Luther felt keenly a responsibility for consciences besides his own that had found freedom through his writings.
The report of the task force appears to equate the bound consciences of Lutherans disagreeing about homosexuality with the captive consciences of Luther at Worms and other sixteenth-century believers. The views of ELCA Lutherans are based, to be sure, on divergent interpretations of Scripture and tradition, but those views would bind consciences in the Reformation sense only if Lutherans today believed that their salvation depended on those views. Luther and his colleagues would remind us that our salvation depends on faith in Christ alone, not on our personal convictions about sexual orientation, even though the Bible could be used to support those convictions.
Sixteenth-century Lutherans regarded homosexuality as a sin, because for them it was condemned by the Bible. Luther’s appeal to a captive conscience does not, therefore, tell the whole story of his use of Scripture. Like many theologians before him, he distinguished ceremonial from moral prescriptions in the Old Testament and held Christians to the commandments. Accepting the condemnation of homosexuality did not, in his opinion, contradict salvation by faith alone. On the basis of 1 Corinthians 14:34 Luther also rejected the ordination of women (LW 41:154-55). Appealing to specific cases of the reformers’ biblical interpretation, therefore, makes it possible to hold different views on issues of polity and conduct.
Different Sense Today
The task force report agrees, but it uses “bound consciences” in a sense different from that of the Reformation. The report implies that ELCA Lutherans are free to be bound by the dictates of their conscience in the modern sense: their personal judgment about the morality of homosexuality. An appeal to the Reformation would argue, however, that Lutherans are free to disagree not because our consciences are bound in the modern sense but because they are free in the Reformation sense — that is, not because our consciences are bound to personal convictions that may invoke Scripture but because they are liberated in Christ from additional requirements for salvation.
Lutherans will continue to disagree about homosexuality, but this disagreement is not a matter of conscience in the Reformation sense and need not prevent the setting of church policy. The Augsburg Confession approves of regulations that do not “burden consciences... as if such things were necessary for salvation” (art. XV, 2) but it does not require the church’s policy to be uniformly binding or to include a teaching to which everyone must adhere. In fact the Apology (art. XV, 5152) recommends the moderate exercise of liberty in such matters, “so that the inexperienced may not take offense and, on account of an abuse of liberty, become more hostile to the true teaching of the gospel... We judge that the greatest possible public concord which can be maintained without offending consciences ought to be preferred to all other interests.” That advice echoes the stance taken by Luther on the mass, images, and vows after he returned to Wittenberg from the Wartburg Castle in 1522:“Now do not make a must out of what is free” (Luther’s Works 51:74).
On an issue so controversial, no church policy can avoid offending some consciences, and the “moderate exercise of liberty” is not easily determined. Nevertheless, the recommendations of the task force have strong precedents that could be stronger yet by emphasizing the Reformation appeal to consciences liberated by faith.
Found http://www.elca.org/lutheranpartners/archives/0507_09.html.
A comparison of the idea of “bound consciences” reveals that the meaning is different today from what the sixteenth-century reformers meant by it.
The Task Force on Sexuality appeals to “deeply held and conscience-bound positions” to explain the lack of consensus within the ELCA and argues that Martin Luther’s careful approach to moral issues showed a “genuine concern for the integrity of conscience.” Moreover, the report cites Luther’s appeal to his captive conscience at the Diet of Worms and solicits “respect for one another’s bound consciences as a matter of pastoral concern.”
What is meant by the term conscience in these phrases? Did Luther understand his conscience to be captive to the Word of God in the same way that the report describes the captive consciences of Lutherans today? The questions are worth asking because the bound conscience is the basis of the task force’s decision to frame its recommendations in nonbinding terms.
Meaning of Conscience
For Lutheran theologians at the time of the Reformation, the conscience was not an inborn sense of right and wrong. Instead, they inherited from medieval theology the notion of conscience as the point of saving contact between us and God. For medieval mystics that point of contact was a divine spark that could be fanned into the flames of union with God. For scholastic theologians conscience was the capacity of the human being to earn saving merit, with the help of grace, by knowing and doing the will of God. Luther and his colleagues also regarded the conscience as a point of contact with God, but saving contact was established by faith in Christ that was created by the Holy Spirit through the Word.
When sixteenth-century Lutherans fought for the liberation of consciences, they sought to free believers from what they called human traditions — that is, rules and practices that the late-medieval church said were required for salvation but that the reformers could not find in Scripture. Reformers attempted to comfort the “terrified” or “anxious” consciences of the faithful, who felt they could never perform enough religious works to merit salvation. On the one hand, therefore, Luther and his colleagues advocated the freedom of conscience through faith against additional requirements for salvation that would bind the conscience.
On the other hand, reformers also considered the consciences of Christians to be captive to the Word of God, as indeed Luther said about his own conscience at Worms. His conviction that salvation came through faith in Christ alone was not only a theological opinion but the central message of Scripture as he, a professor of Bible, taught it. He was unable, therefore, to recant his teaching, because it would violate his conscience: not his moral sense of right or wrong but his religious conviction, formed and sustained by the Holy Spirit through Scripture, that Christ alone was the way of salvation. Luther’s conscience was not the only basis of his decision at Worms. A lesser-known part of his reply appeals to the consciences of the faithful that “have been miserably ensnared, vexed, and flayed” by human teachings and papal regulations. Luther felt keenly a responsibility for consciences besides his own that had found freedom through his writings.
The report of the task force appears to equate the bound consciences of Lutherans disagreeing about homosexuality with the captive consciences of Luther at Worms and other sixteenth-century believers. The views of ELCA Lutherans are based, to be sure, on divergent interpretations of Scripture and tradition, but those views would bind consciences in the Reformation sense only if Lutherans today believed that their salvation depended on those views. Luther and his colleagues would remind us that our salvation depends on faith in Christ alone, not on our personal convictions about sexual orientation, even though the Bible could be used to support those convictions.
Sixteenth-century Lutherans regarded homosexuality as a sin, because for them it was condemned by the Bible. Luther’s appeal to a captive conscience does not, therefore, tell the whole story of his use of Scripture. Like many theologians before him, he distinguished ceremonial from moral prescriptions in the Old Testament and held Christians to the commandments. Accepting the condemnation of homosexuality did not, in his opinion, contradict salvation by faith alone. On the basis of 1 Corinthians 14:34 Luther also rejected the ordination of women (LW 41:154-55). Appealing to specific cases of the reformers’ biblical interpretation, therefore, makes it possible to hold different views on issues of polity and conduct.
Different Sense Today
The task force report agrees, but it uses “bound consciences” in a sense different from that of the Reformation. The report implies that ELCA Lutherans are free to be bound by the dictates of their conscience in the modern sense: their personal judgment about the morality of homosexuality. An appeal to the Reformation would argue, however, that Lutherans are free to disagree not because our consciences are bound in the modern sense but because they are free in the Reformation sense — that is, not because our consciences are bound to personal convictions that may invoke Scripture but because they are liberated in Christ from additional requirements for salvation.
Lutherans will continue to disagree about homosexuality, but this disagreement is not a matter of conscience in the Reformation sense and need not prevent the setting of church policy. The Augsburg Confession approves of regulations that do not “burden consciences... as if such things were necessary for salvation” (art. XV, 2) but it does not require the church’s policy to be uniformly binding or to include a teaching to which everyone must adhere. In fact the Apology (art. XV, 5152) recommends the moderate exercise of liberty in such matters, “so that the inexperienced may not take offense and, on account of an abuse of liberty, become more hostile to the true teaching of the gospel... We judge that the greatest possible public concord which can be maintained without offending consciences ought to be preferred to all other interests.” That advice echoes the stance taken by Luther on the mass, images, and vows after he returned to Wittenberg from the Wartburg Castle in 1522:“Now do not make a must out of what is free” (Luther’s Works 51:74).
On an issue so controversial, no church policy can avoid offending some consciences, and the “moderate exercise of liberty” is not easily determined. Nevertheless, the recommendations of the task force have strong precedents that could be stronger yet by emphasizing the Reformation appeal to consciences liberated by faith.
Found http://www.elca.org/lutheranpartners/archives/0507_09.html.
goodsoil is officially recommending noncompliance at the synod level!
Shrimp here: The following is under the link: "One More Step: Synod Assemblies....In the 2006 Synod Assembly season, we hope each synod will pass a resolution that takes at least one real step further in fully including LGBT people. How you can help!In the 2006 Synod Assembly season, we hope each synod will pass a resolution that takes at least one real step further in fully including LGBT people.
"For some synods, that may mean becoming a Reconciling in Christ (RIC) synod. For others, it means finding a way to refrain from policies that discriminate against LGBT members of the ELCA. And some synods, we hope, will discern that now is the time to refuse to comply with those policies. Goodsoil's template resolutions allow for all of these possibilities."
Refuse to comply? If this is really where you are at (burn the church down ot the ground) how about we make a deal? You lose this assembly season and just take the money you are raising to fight and use it to build a denomination?
Goodsoil, you are basically saying, "Play by the rules until we can't win using them, then break them." Good grief!
Why should solid Lutherans get out? Why not revisionists?
Read it here.
"For some synods, that may mean becoming a Reconciling in Christ (RIC) synod. For others, it means finding a way to refrain from policies that discriminate against LGBT members of the ELCA. And some synods, we hope, will discern that now is the time to refuse to comply with those policies. Goodsoil's template resolutions allow for all of these possibilities."
Refuse to comply? If this is really where you are at (burn the church down ot the ground) how about we make a deal? You lose this assembly season and just take the money you are raising to fight and use it to build a denomination?
Goodsoil, you are basically saying, "Play by the rules until we can't win using them, then break them." Good grief!
Why should solid Lutherans get out? Why not revisionists?
Read it here.
The battle for hearts and minds (and votes)
Shrimp here: The spin is in! You have to visit the goodsoil web site in their cover story they write, "In a response as nuanced as the resolution itself, the Church Council said, in part, "that the resolution contains inherently conflicting statements that may be read as being in conflict with the constitution and bylaws of this church".
Well, duh, the Church Council is in control of revisionists (remember the Recommendations 1, 2, and 3 were much more radical than anything the revisionist sexuality statement said). Council didn't nuance, read between the lines, they said, "We're really sorry, you are going to have to try again. Please come back with something that doesn't make us culpable in splitting the ELCA."
Here's the beginning of their spin. Read it and visit the site. And thanks to goodsoil for putting the Almen pdf up on the web! if they keep it up they are going to show everyone in all synods how to bring them up before a disciplinary hearing in a way that will stick!
ELCA News Service Misrepresents Church Council Decision
-- 2006-05-02
The ELCA News Service, among others, has stated erroneously that the ELCA Church Council found a Metropolitan New York Synod (MNYS) resolution to be in conflict with ELCA Church rules when the Council’s action clearly stated only that the MNYS resolution may be read as being in conflict.
Because the Church Council’s ruling was not definitive, it is important that Synod Assemblies continue to voice concerns regarding the relationship between the ELCA’s mission and its processes for discipline and candidacy. Your help is needed to bring this issue before your Synod Assembly.
At its April 1-2, 2006 meeting, the Church Council of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America responded to a MNYS request received last fall for an evaluation of a resolution the synod adopted at a special assembly on October 29, 2005. The resolution stated in sum that the MYNS would not disqualify a candidate for ministry in a committed same-gender relationship solely on the basis of the relationship. The MYNS said in the resolution that it would put that fact in the context of what was best for the mission of the synod and the church before rendering judgment.
In a response as nuanced as the resolution itself, the Church Council said, in part, "that the resolution contains inherently conflicting statements that may be read as being in conflict with the constitution and bylaws of this church" (emphasis added).
Go there (and take care!).
Well, duh, the Church Council is in control of revisionists (remember the Recommendations 1, 2, and 3 were much more radical than anything the revisionist sexuality statement said). Council didn't nuance, read between the lines, they said, "We're really sorry, you are going to have to try again. Please come back with something that doesn't make us culpable in splitting the ELCA."
Here's the beginning of their spin. Read it and visit the site. And thanks to goodsoil for putting the Almen pdf up on the web! if they keep it up they are going to show everyone in all synods how to bring them up before a disciplinary hearing in a way that will stick!
ELCA News Service Misrepresents Church Council Decision
-- 2006-05-02
The ELCA News Service, among others, has stated erroneously that the ELCA Church Council found a Metropolitan New York Synod (MNYS) resolution to be in conflict with ELCA Church rules when the Council’s action clearly stated only that the MNYS resolution may be read as being in conflict.
Because the Church Council’s ruling was not definitive, it is important that Synod Assemblies continue to voice concerns regarding the relationship between the ELCA’s mission and its processes for discipline and candidacy. Your help is needed to bring this issue before your Synod Assembly.
At its April 1-2, 2006 meeting, the Church Council of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America responded to a MNYS request received last fall for an evaluation of a resolution the synod adopted at a special assembly on October 29, 2005. The resolution stated in sum that the MYNS would not disqualify a candidate for ministry in a committed same-gender relationship solely on the basis of the relationship. The MYNS said in the resolution that it would put that fact in the context of what was best for the mission of the synod and the church before rendering judgment.
In a response as nuanced as the resolution itself, the Church Council said, in part, "that the resolution contains inherently conflicting statements that may be read as being in conflict with the constitution and bylaws of this church" (emphasis added).
Go there (and take care!).
Sunday, April 16, 2006
Lutheran Conservatives Fear Contextualization of Scripture
Shrimp here: This is what it is all aboit folks, the reason for this blog.
by Pauline J. Chang
Lutherans read the Bible. This is the title of a proposed multi-year project to get the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) members and congregations to focus on the authority and interpretation of Scripture.
At first look, the emphasis on the Bible seems to stand in line with what confessing and traditional Lutherans have been saying all along: we must return to the heart of our faith, which is the Holy Scripture.
However, some conservative Lutherans fear that this core will get lost in the process of a larger denominational framework that has often placed the virtues of diversity and humanity above the absolute truth of God.
“I’m not confident that this process will reveal in a helpful way of how far some people in the ELCA have become from Martin Luther and the reformers and how little we focus on the authority of Scripture when we read the Bible,” said Mark Chavez, president of the Word Alone Network – a grouping of conservative Lutheran churches within the ELCA. “I’m not confident that this process will point out to everybody that most of the academic community in North America rejects absolute truth.”
The multi-year special focus on Scripture was adopted at the denomination’s Church Council meeting in early April, with plans to produce congregational resources on the topic by 2007. By then, a working group would be selected to lead the project and test out the resources at various Lutheran seminaries and colleges.
“[We] developed a consensus that the initial response should involve the members of this church in reading the Bible, informed by resources that would help them understand and use a Lutheran approach to the Scripture," the report to the council said.
The idea for the project began last year in the North Carolina Synod, following the release of a controversial church-wide report on homosexuality that addressed the thorny issue from varying viewpoints – from the traditionalists who reject the act as a grave sin, to the contextualists who view it as a celebration of diversity.
While the North Carolinian request made no mention on the report on homosexuality, it used terms familiar to traditional Lutherans, such as “authority of Scripture” and “biblical renewal.”
“In a round-about way the [Lutherans Read the Bible] project is related to the sexuality debate,” said Chavez. “The North Carolina synod did ask us to focus on the bible precisely for what was happening in the sexuality studies.”
Chavez fears that this original request will eventually get lost as the denomination struggles over which view – traditional or contextual – best represents the Lutheran view.
“I hope I’m wrong, but I think they are going to come up with different categories with the way Lutherans read the Bible,” said Chavez. “One of the categories will be a contextualist’s and the other will be the so-called Biblical literalist’s.”
“The practice so far has been to carefully select people to participate in this who are going to favor the contextual understanding,” he added. “This is a symptom of a deeper problem we have in our culture, academia and churches, where there is a prevailing assumption that the church is very relative and dependent on the context of things.”
Ultimately, Chavez said he believes the project can be positive for the church since it will get the denomination to focus “a lot more attention on the church and authority on Scripture all along.”
“My hope for this end project is that through this process, we really would take a serious look at how Martin Luther and the 16th century reformers approached the authority of the word of God,” he said.
Read about it at The Lutheran If you have'nt read the Craig Nessan essay which lays out the contextual hermeneutic go here.
Wednesday, April 12, 2006
We get letters....
Someone wants you to know:
"The Forum Letter reported Bishop Landahl's participation in the installation of Pastor Goldstein at St. Francis Lutheran Church in San Francisco. The editor guessed that he wished to express sympathy for the noble struggle to "change ELCA policies toward sexual minority pastors," and then added: "This is not to suggest that, as a bishop in the ELCA, he is not also equally charged with upholding those policies St. Francis seeks to change."
"In January, February, and March of 2006 Bishop Landahl sent letters to the pastors in the Metro Chicago Synod that each began, "This kind of letter is difficult to write." Three pastors were removed from the ELCA roster for having sexual affairs outside of marriage. Two had sexual affairs with women in their congregations. The third case, however, was a single pastor who had had an affair with an adult male. A pastor in the Metro Chicago Synod reported that a little probing uncovered the following facts in the case: this pastor's affair took place over a year and a half ago, it did not involve anyone in his congregation, the informant who filed the complaint to the bishop's office was the ex-wife of this pastor's ex-lover who filed her complaint six months after her divorce, and the effect of removing this pastor from the roster was that he was shy a half of year of being in the Health Plan for 30 years, which would have enabled him to continue to receive health benefits (he has a diabetic condition). Our informant in the Metro Chicago Synod who knows this pastor well reports that said pastor repented of his action, made a confession and received absolution. Nevertheless, he was given the maximum penalty of being removed from the roster. Vision and Expectations was enforced. Then Bishop Landahl went off to be an "ecumenical guest" at St. Francis to preside at the installation of a pastor who has made no secret of his gay orientation."
Perhaps this was passed on to me because we carried the news about Landahl's participation in Pr Goldstein's installation, perhaps because Goldstein them visited this site in an effort to "continue the dialogue" or perhaps it is pure mischief, bu tthe fact it that these people and the congregation at St. Francis, San Francisco is trying to provide another test case in an effort to keep the issue alive.
I myself am torn between clossing this blog down now that it has become a tool for them or beat them at their own game (mischief that is). What do you think?
"The Forum Letter reported Bishop Landahl's participation in the installation of Pastor Goldstein at St. Francis Lutheran Church in San Francisco. The editor guessed that he wished to express sympathy for the noble struggle to "change ELCA policies toward sexual minority pastors," and then added: "This is not to suggest that, as a bishop in the ELCA, he is not also equally charged with upholding those policies St. Francis seeks to change."
"In January, February, and March of 2006 Bishop Landahl sent letters to the pastors in the Metro Chicago Synod that each began, "This kind of letter is difficult to write." Three pastors were removed from the ELCA roster for having sexual affairs outside of marriage. Two had sexual affairs with women in their congregations. The third case, however, was a single pastor who had had an affair with an adult male. A pastor in the Metro Chicago Synod reported that a little probing uncovered the following facts in the case: this pastor's affair took place over a year and a half ago, it did not involve anyone in his congregation, the informant who filed the complaint to the bishop's office was the ex-wife of this pastor's ex-lover who filed her complaint six months after her divorce, and the effect of removing this pastor from the roster was that he was shy a half of year of being in the Health Plan for 30 years, which would have enabled him to continue to receive health benefits (he has a diabetic condition). Our informant in the Metro Chicago Synod who knows this pastor well reports that said pastor repented of his action, made a confession and received absolution. Nevertheless, he was given the maximum penalty of being removed from the roster. Vision and Expectations was enforced. Then Bishop Landahl went off to be an "ecumenical guest" at St. Francis to preside at the installation of a pastor who has made no secret of his gay orientation."
Perhaps this was passed on to me because we carried the news about Landahl's participation in Pr Goldstein's installation, perhaps because Goldstein them visited this site in an effort to "continue the dialogue" or perhaps it is pure mischief, bu tthe fact it that these people and the congregation at St. Francis, San Francisco is trying to provide another test case in an effort to keep the issue alive.
I myself am torn between clossing this blog down now that it has become a tool for them or beat them at their own game (mischief that is). What do you think?
Smear is smear
Megan is writing up a storm! In comments below she posted a link to Extraordinary Candidacy Project Resources where one finds the provocatively misnamed and phantastically written: Word Alone Supports the Ordination of Non-Celibate GLBTQ Individuals in the Lutheran Church: Exegesis of 1 Corinthians 7:17-40 By: Vicar Megan Rohrer.
http://www.ecpsems.org/resources/wordalone.pdf
Megan, the main thing to point out to you and everyone is that it is purely your opinion that WordAlone is "against homosexuals." All tehy are trying to come against is the teaching that homosexual pracitce is not a sin. We've seen this tactic before, but it is a smear, and I challenge you to stop it.
http://www.ecpsems.org/resources/wordalone.pdf
Megan, the main thing to point out to you and everyone is that it is purely your opinion that WordAlone is "against homosexuals." All tehy are trying to come against is the teaching that homosexual pracitce is not a sin. We've seen this tactic before, but it is a smear, and I challenge you to stop it.
Friday, April 07, 2006
Every once in a while...
...I need to explain that this blog is called Shellfish because I think the "silly shellfish argument" is ludicrous. That does not mean that I think revisionists and gay activists are ludicrous. Far from it, they are forces to be reckoned with. In my opinion they are idealists,true crusaders, and if their cause is right they would be a great blessing to the church. However, when they are wrong, they are dangerous, and as we see in the mainline churches, quite capable of derailing the train, sinking the ship, or whatever, choose your metaphor.
Go here to see the shellfish argument laid out and taken apart.
In the last few days though, we have seen a new version of silly shellfish. Statements like the following can only need to a quite new religion. It comes from a commment left below, so I hope the author will not think I am not out of line by posting it here, but all I am doing here is what I might do in the comment section itself. Having gone back and forth a few times with her already, and concerned that the person is already doing some ministry and perhaps preparing for a career in it, it is legitimate concern:
"To be honest I think that we could be back and forth for days and days because one of the beauties of the scripture is that it is able to speak through many times, with the stories of many people (some more sinful than others) and even when God is violent or nonviolent, male or female (though more rightly probably male AND female), homosexual or heterosexual that the omnipresent message of the text is that God is with us and God saves us." (you'll find that in commments here)
I wrote the following in response which I put here not that it is utterly brilliant, but because I do not want anyone to miss it, and it is for practical reasons almost as much as our wish that this silly game would end:
Megan, I myself am not going to answer all your questions. I wish you well, but the way to help you is to refer you to someone else who can take you under their wing and point out your recklessness, lack of training in logic, the principles of hermeneutics, and the value and meaning of tradition. You live in a seminary community, right?
What I mean is this. You try to make the point that Luther had no problem with lesbians, but only male homosexuals because you know of a place where he says men should not try and be like women. You cannot argue that a person is neutral or negative on an issue because their opinion on certain subjects is not on record. If the record is silent, it is silent; it cannot endorse the question you bring to it.
This is sort of like the problem that people have when they want to argue that Jesus endorses homosexuality because he does not explicitly condemn it. He doesn't condemn everything that Scripture condemns--if he did the NT would be as many pages as the OT. However, when he endorses marriage as between a man and a woman, that taken with the fact that he says he came not to abolish the law would negate the proposition that Jesus endorses same sex marriage. But beyond that, the Christ does speak of sexual immorality:
Revelation 21:6-8 He also said to me, "It is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. To the one who is thirsty I will give water free of charge from the spring of the water of life. 7 The one who conquers will inherit these things, and I will be his God and he will be my son. 8 But to the cowards, unbelievers, detestable persons, murderers, the sexually immoral, and those who practice magic spells, idol worshipers, and all those who lie, their place will be in the lake that burns with fire and sulfur."
You'll note that that also has implications to the argument that it doesn't matter so much what sins we do since we are all sinners.
Megan, from what you've written in the last few days, you simply must understand that your position is antinomian. You have been condemned by Luther himself.
You think the Bible is beautiful because you can spin out many explanations. No, the bible is beautiful because it speaks of salvation and does this by pointing out our need for salvation and the promise of God to save those who accept their need for a savior.
In the future if you want an answer from me keep it to one question (some writers might get paid by the word, we don't).
Now, any of the rest of you have the time, please go at it. But do be nice and remember, Jude is in the canon, that is, the reason we do apologetics, especially with people who work in the church, especailly with seminarians, is not to prove we are right, but because the answer matters, and if it doesn't have eternal consequesnces we should all resign the pastorate and put up the counselor's shingle, or better yet, run for political and not ecclesial office.
Peace and blessed Holy Week,
Shrimp
Also, rethink your positions. Try out your arguments on someone who is not a radical (I'm sure you can find one in the Bay area if you try hard). Have a good day!
Thursday, April 06, 2006
Did you see "The Three Bishops" tour?
I just learned that LTSP has provided us with web casts of each speech.
Watch them. Then give your answers to the pop quiz:
Each of the three bishops is a revisionist (we know by their actions) in their own way. Name the type of revisionism they represent.
If you need to crib go here.
OK, no answers as of April 7. Must be to hard. Let me give a hint. One is a "pragmatic revisionist"? Name which fits that description and why.
Watch them. Then give your answers to the pop quiz:
Each of the three bishops is a revisionist (we know by their actions) in their own way. Name the type of revisionism they represent.
If you need to crib go here.
OK, no answers as of April 7. Must be to hard. Let me give a hint. One is a "pragmatic revisionist"? Name which fits that description and why.
Wednesday, April 05, 2006
Passing on some information from a friend:
On the last page of the ELCA Church Council Response to Metro NY (7) it says, "Yet, in any careful reading of the whole resolution, the plain meaning of the statements must be considered." If only they read the Bible and its prohibitions of sexuality the same way!
I think these sections need to be scrutinized as we look for ways of helping our bishops enforce the rules governing the sexual behavior of ordained persons:
"Further, the synod has responsibility to exercise discipline as specified in the Constitution, Bylaws, and Continuing Resolutions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and in applicable policy documents...Discipline hearing committees are made up of six members of the synod discipline committee and six members of the churchwide discipline committee, with a hearing officer appointed by the presiding bishop from the Committee of Hearing Officers elected by the ELCA Church Council...In fact, oversight and review of the decision of a discipline hearing committee is vested solely in the Committee on Appeals, which is elected by the ELCA Churchwide Assembly."
This is important:
"In regard to such discipline, the word “may” is used in bylaw 20.21.04. The “may” reference, however, does not imply that a synodical bishop or synod has the latitude to ignore the bylaws of this church or “Definitions and Guidelines for Discipline.” In that bylaw, “may” relates to the need to gather information before determining that “cause for discipline may exist.”
I really like this part, and I wonder if it cannot be used with both professors who are also ordained in the ELCA as well as with bishops?
Ordained ministers, according to bylaw 20.21.01., “shall be subject to discipline” for the following:
“a. preaching and teaching in conflict with the faith confessed by this church;
“b. conduct incompatible with the character of the ministerial office;
“c. willfully disregarding or violating the functions and standards established by this church for the office of Word and Sacrament;
“d. willfully disregarding the provisions of the constitution or bylaws of this church; or
“e. willfully failing to comply with the requirements ordered by a discipline hearing committee under 20.23.08.”
…Further, under bylaw 20.21.02. in regard to ordained ministers:
“The disciplinary actions which may be imposed are:
“a. private censure and admonition by the bishop of the synod;
“b. suspension from the office and functions of the ordained ministry in this church for a designated period or until there is satisfactory evidence of repentance and
amendment; or
“c. removal from the ordained ministry of this church.”
…When there are indications that a cause for discipline may exist, and before charges are filed with the secretary of this church, the synodical bishop must seek to resolve the matter by consultation as required by bylaw 20.21.04. in the Constitution, Bylaws, and Continuing Resolutions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.Information that a rostered person is allegedly a non-celibate homosexual is—under “Definitions Response of the Church Council to the Resolution of the Metropolitan New York Synod (April 2006) - page 6 and Guidelines for Discipline”—an indication of a potential cause for discipline. Information that a
congregation has called someone not on the clergy roster is similarly such an indication. In an effort to resolve the matter by consultation, the bishop may appoint an advisory or consultation committee to provide advice as described in bylaw 20.21.05.
…It is in the bishop's discretion how much investigation to do. In order to make a decision or to try to reach a resolution, however, it is necessary to gather as much information as possible about the situation. Every case is different, and these cases can be particularly difficult. It would be important to know, for example, exactly what the “committed relationship” entails and what evidence exists that it violates “Definitions and Guidelines for Discipline.” Except for the attempted resolution under bylaw 20.21.04., the synodical bishop has discretion about the following:
1) Whether to censure and admonish under ELCA constitutional provision 20.18.
2) Whether to appoint an advisory or consultation committee.
3) Whether to file formal disciplinary charges against the pastor, rostered layperson, or a congregation.
4) Whether to request resignation from call or from the roster.
And from the footnotes, a reminder: The document, “Vision and Expectations: Ordained Ministers in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America,” in the section on “Sexual Conduct,” reads: “The expectations of this church regarding the sexual conduct of its ordained ministers are grounded in the understanding that human sexuality is a gift from God and that ordained ministers are to live in such a way as to honor this gift. Ordained ministers are expected to reject sexual promiscuity, the manipulation of others for purposes of sexual gratification, and all attempts of sexual seduction and sexual harassment, including taking physical or emotional advantage of others. Single ordained ministers are expected to live a chaste life. Married ordained ministers are expected to live in fidelity to their spouses, giving expression to sexual intimacy within a marriage relationship that is mutual, chaste, and faithful. Ordained ministers who are homosexual in their self-understanding are expected to abstain from homosexual sexual relationships.”
The full, official report is a 7 page document that was posted to the ELCA COMMUNICATORS ONLINE meeting on LutherLink in pdf form.
I think these sections need to be scrutinized as we look for ways of helping our bishops enforce the rules governing the sexual behavior of ordained persons:
"Further, the synod has responsibility to exercise discipline as specified in the Constitution, Bylaws, and Continuing Resolutions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and in applicable policy documents...Discipline hearing committees are made up of six members of the synod discipline committee and six members of the churchwide discipline committee, with a hearing officer appointed by the presiding bishop from the Committee of Hearing Officers elected by the ELCA Church Council...In fact, oversight and review of the decision of a discipline hearing committee is vested solely in the Committee on Appeals, which is elected by the ELCA Churchwide Assembly."
This is important:
"In regard to such discipline, the word “may” is used in bylaw 20.21.04. The “may” reference, however, does not imply that a synodical bishop or synod has the latitude to ignore the bylaws of this church or “Definitions and Guidelines for Discipline.” In that bylaw, “may” relates to the need to gather information before determining that “cause for discipline may exist.”
I really like this part, and I wonder if it cannot be used with both professors who are also ordained in the ELCA as well as with bishops?
Ordained ministers, according to bylaw 20.21.01., “shall be subject to discipline” for the following:
“a. preaching and teaching in conflict with the faith confessed by this church;
“b. conduct incompatible with the character of the ministerial office;
“c. willfully disregarding or violating the functions and standards established by this church for the office of Word and Sacrament;
“d. willfully disregarding the provisions of the constitution or bylaws of this church; or
“e. willfully failing to comply with the requirements ordered by a discipline hearing committee under 20.23.08.”
…Further, under bylaw 20.21.02. in regard to ordained ministers:
“The disciplinary actions which may be imposed are:
“a. private censure and admonition by the bishop of the synod;
“b. suspension from the office and functions of the ordained ministry in this church for a designated period or until there is satisfactory evidence of repentance and
amendment; or
“c. removal from the ordained ministry of this church.”
…When there are indications that a cause for discipline may exist, and before charges are filed with the secretary of this church, the synodical bishop must seek to resolve the matter by consultation as required by bylaw 20.21.04. in the Constitution, Bylaws, and Continuing Resolutions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.Information that a rostered person is allegedly a non-celibate homosexual is—under “Definitions Response of the Church Council to the Resolution of the Metropolitan New York Synod (April 2006) - page 6 and Guidelines for Discipline”—an indication of a potential cause for discipline. Information that a
congregation has called someone not on the clergy roster is similarly such an indication. In an effort to resolve the matter by consultation, the bishop may appoint an advisory or consultation committee to provide advice as described in bylaw 20.21.05.
…It is in the bishop's discretion how much investigation to do. In order to make a decision or to try to reach a resolution, however, it is necessary to gather as much information as possible about the situation. Every case is different, and these cases can be particularly difficult. It would be important to know, for example, exactly what the “committed relationship” entails and what evidence exists that it violates “Definitions and Guidelines for Discipline.” Except for the attempted resolution under bylaw 20.21.04., the synodical bishop has discretion about the following:
1) Whether to censure and admonish under ELCA constitutional provision 20.18.
2) Whether to appoint an advisory or consultation committee.
3) Whether to file formal disciplinary charges against the pastor, rostered layperson, or a congregation.
4) Whether to request resignation from call or from the roster.
And from the footnotes, a reminder: The document, “Vision and Expectations: Ordained Ministers in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America,” in the section on “Sexual Conduct,” reads: “The expectations of this church regarding the sexual conduct of its ordained ministers are grounded in the understanding that human sexuality is a gift from God and that ordained ministers are to live in such a way as to honor this gift. Ordained ministers are expected to reject sexual promiscuity, the manipulation of others for purposes of sexual gratification, and all attempts of sexual seduction and sexual harassment, including taking physical or emotional advantage of others. Single ordained ministers are expected to live a chaste life. Married ordained ministers are expected to live in fidelity to their spouses, giving expression to sexual intimacy within a marriage relationship that is mutual, chaste, and faithful. Ordained ministers who are homosexual in their self-understanding are expected to abstain from homosexual sexual relationships.”
The full, official report is a 7 page document that was posted to the ELCA COMMUNICATORS ONLINE meeting on LutherLink in pdf form.
Two Questions:
Passing on questions from friends. The first is for the folks at goodsoil.org "Why are you saying it is a new day?" That is, what new bit of resistance are you doing? the second is for Robert Goldstein. "You are on the roster but your congregation is not?" second part of that question is "So, then, you maintain celibacy?" If Robert and soomeone from good soil could respond in comments? Thank you.
"New Day at St. Francis
-- 2006-03-27
"On Sunday, March 26, Pr. Robert Goldstein was formally installed as the Lead Pastor of St. Francis Church. The Rev. Paul R. Landahl, bishop of the Metropolitan Chicago Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America preached; the Rev. Dr. Susan Strouse of First United Lutheran Church in San Francisco was presiding minister. The rite of installation was performed by the Rev. Daniel Solberg of St. Paulus Lutheran Church and dean of the Conference of San Francisco Lutheran Churches.
Pastor Robert Goldstein is on the ELCA clergy roster and has been a pastor of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and its predecessor, the Lutheran Church in America, since 1975. He formerly served congregations in New Jersey and Chicago.
Born in Melbourne, Australia, Pr. Goldstein received his B.A. in biblical languages and literature from Abilene Christian University, and a B.D. and S.T.M. at Yale, where he specialized in the philosophical writings of Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard. He received a Ph.D. in philosophical theology from Princeton Theological Seminary.
An openly gay man, Pastor Goldstein has been a proponent of equal rights for women and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.
St. Francis Lutheran Church was one of two congregations expelled from the ELCA at the end of 1995 because it called and ordained a gay man and a lesbian couple as pastors in 1990 in violation of a rule requiring congregations to call only clergy approved by the ELCA. The three candidates were ELCA seminary graduates, and were denied approval for call solely because they would not commit to lifelong abstention from homosexual sexual relationships as required by ELCA policy. St. Francis is an independent Lutheran congregation. It continues to participate in activities of the ELCA's local San Francisco Conference and regional Sierra Pacific Synod. The congregation has been granted voice but not vote at synod assemblies." The rest is at goodsoil.org
"New Day at St. Francis
-- 2006-03-27
"On Sunday, March 26, Pr. Robert Goldstein was formally installed as the Lead Pastor of St. Francis Church. The Rev. Paul R. Landahl, bishop of the Metropolitan Chicago Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America preached; the Rev. Dr. Susan Strouse of First United Lutheran Church in San Francisco was presiding minister. The rite of installation was performed by the Rev. Daniel Solberg of St. Paulus Lutheran Church and dean of the Conference of San Francisco Lutheran Churches.
Pastor Robert Goldstein is on the ELCA clergy roster and has been a pastor of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and its predecessor, the Lutheran Church in America, since 1975. He formerly served congregations in New Jersey and Chicago.
Born in Melbourne, Australia, Pr. Goldstein received his B.A. in biblical languages and literature from Abilene Christian University, and a B.D. and S.T.M. at Yale, where he specialized in the philosophical writings of Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard. He received a Ph.D. in philosophical theology from Princeton Theological Seminary.
An openly gay man, Pastor Goldstein has been a proponent of equal rights for women and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.
St. Francis Lutheran Church was one of two congregations expelled from the ELCA at the end of 1995 because it called and ordained a gay man and a lesbian couple as pastors in 1990 in violation of a rule requiring congregations to call only clergy approved by the ELCA. The three candidates were ELCA seminary graduates, and were denied approval for call solely because they would not commit to lifelong abstention from homosexual sexual relationships as required by ELCA policy. St. Francis is an independent Lutheran congregation. It continues to participate in activities of the ELCA's local San Francisco Conference and regional Sierra Pacific Synod. The congregation has been granted voice but not vote at synod assemblies." The rest is at goodsoil.org
Tuesday, March 28, 2006
Gay Priest To Lead Lutheran Congregation In SF
(KCBS) SAN FRANCISCO
A Lutheran church in San Francisco installed an openly gay priest as its lead pastor, setting itself up for a possible confrontation with the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America.
With prayers and hymns, the Reverend Robert Goldstein took over as lead pastor of the Saint Francis Lutheran Church on Sunday.
The 61-year-old Goldstein says the Lutheran churches in the United States are polarized over whether openly gay and lesbian ministers who are sexually active should serve as pastors.
The denomination does ordain openly gay and lesbian clergy, but requires them to remain celibate.
Martin Luther ended celibacy as a requirement for priests when he founded the church in the 16th century.
"It's part of a struggle. Today it's also part of a celebration,” Goldstein told KCBS reporter Henry Mulak after the service.
The pastor expects that in the end, the entire denomination will follow the example being set by St. Francis, which holds that the national body’s double standard on celibacy violates one of the founding principals of the faith.
"This congregation's been a leader in that, and because it was a leader, it was removed from the roster of congregations of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America,” Goldstein said.
St. Francis was expelled from the denomination for ordaining a gay man and a lesbian in 1995.
Goldstein still a member of the that body and could face expulsion for serving in the San Francisco church.
“Serving this congregation is a way of bearing witness to the larger church that one of your pastors is here, serving this congregation with joy and faith and confidence,” Goldstein said.
(jro)
Joe Rogers
(© MMVI, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)
Robert Goldstein has posted comments to the story below about his installation. You may engage him there or if he posts here.
Friday, March 24, 2006
Work launched on guide to reading, understanding the Bible
Shrimp here: Nod, nod, wink, wink, work under way, alright! Work to end our way of life as we know it (or remember it fondly).
Please don't take this the wrong way Presiding Bishop Mark Hanson and Professor Craig Nessan. I am sure you are principled human beings, love Jesus and all that, and you really believe in the causes for which you are true crusaders. I am glad you want to feed the world and understand that part of human righteousness. However, you are about to make a mess of hermeneutics in the Lutheran church and give unpricipled nut jobs an authority to point to, so they can give the National Man Boy Love Association permission to meet in the church basement.
And, because almost no one can see this except us crustacaens, The Lutheran magazine happily is pressed into serive in its April 2006 edition. Do read every word carefully. You humans can still read, right?
"Work is under way on a major resource to help ELCA members read the Bible with understanding and in a Lutheran approach, Presiding Bishop Mark S. Hanson told the Conference of Bishops gathered March 2-7 in Lake Geneva, Wis.
“Book of Faith: Lutherans Read the Bible” will be developed over the coming year with an anticipated introduction at synod assemblies in spring 2007, the bishop said.
“We are increasingly a biblically illiterate church,” he said, one in need of such a guide.
The 2005 Churchwide Assembly authorized the project as an examination of how “word and witness go together,” Hanson said.
To help the bishops, Craig L. Nessan, academic dean and professor of contextual theology at Wartburg Seminary, Dubuque, Iowa, presented a 20-page paper, “The Authority of Scripture.” He noted that biblical literalism developed in the late 19th century as a way of defending the authority of Scripture against other interpretations.
Today, he said, “in an era where many people are searching for something reliable to stand upon, literalist teaching about the Bible and its authority has proven very attractive and durable.”
Martin Luther took a different view, Nessan said, quoting him: “It is not enough simply to look and see whether this is God’s word, whether God has said it; rather we must look and see to whom it has been spoken, whether it fits us. That makes all the difference between night and day."
For the sake of the people of God, somebody stop these people. Go here to verify that this butchery and misdirection and misuse of Luther actually happened in a publication that has Luther as the base of its name. More importantly, go here to read the paper that Hanson had Nessan present to the Council of Bishops (damage has already been done).
Yes, damage has already been done, but if this thing becomes an official document of the ELCA, said body is doomed.
Revisionists have hammer and tongs. They are shaping the ELCA to fit their dreams of the perfect social agenda agency. As someone said over at alpb, Hanson will be able to do what Griwold only dreamed of...
Please don't take this the wrong way Presiding Bishop Mark Hanson and Professor Craig Nessan. I am sure you are principled human beings, love Jesus and all that, and you really believe in the causes for which you are true crusaders. I am glad you want to feed the world and understand that part of human righteousness. However, you are about to make a mess of hermeneutics in the Lutheran church and give unpricipled nut jobs an authority to point to, so they can give the National Man Boy Love Association permission to meet in the church basement.
And, because almost no one can see this except us crustacaens, The Lutheran magazine happily is pressed into serive in its April 2006 edition. Do read every word carefully. You humans can still read, right?
"Work is under way on a major resource to help ELCA members read the Bible with understanding and in a Lutheran approach, Presiding Bishop Mark S. Hanson told the Conference of Bishops gathered March 2-7 in Lake Geneva, Wis.
“Book of Faith: Lutherans Read the Bible” will be developed over the coming year with an anticipated introduction at synod assemblies in spring 2007, the bishop said.
“We are increasingly a biblically illiterate church,” he said, one in need of such a guide.
The 2005 Churchwide Assembly authorized the project as an examination of how “word and witness go together,” Hanson said.
To help the bishops, Craig L. Nessan, academic dean and professor of contextual theology at Wartburg Seminary, Dubuque, Iowa, presented a 20-page paper, “The Authority of Scripture.” He noted that biblical literalism developed in the late 19th century as a way of defending the authority of Scripture against other interpretations.
Today, he said, “in an era where many people are searching for something reliable to stand upon, literalist teaching about the Bible and its authority has proven very attractive and durable.”
Martin Luther took a different view, Nessan said, quoting him: “It is not enough simply to look and see whether this is God’s word, whether God has said it; rather we must look and see to whom it has been spoken, whether it fits us. That makes all the difference between night and day."
For the sake of the people of God, somebody stop these people. Go here to verify that this butchery and misdirection and misuse of Luther actually happened in a publication that has Luther as the base of its name. More importantly, go here to read the paper that Hanson had Nessan present to the Council of Bishops (damage has already been done).
Yes, damage has already been done, but if this thing becomes an official document of the ELCA, said body is doomed.
Revisionists have hammer and tongs. They are shaping the ELCA to fit their dreams of the perfect social agenda agency. As someone said over at alpb, Hanson will be able to do what Griwold only dreamed of...
The Meaning of Marriage (Part 1)
Interview With Princeton's Robert George
PRINCETON, New Jersey, MARCH 20, 2006 (Zenit.org).- Debates about the institution of marriage are often characterized as clashes between religious adherents and secularists, which imply the debate is one between faith and reason.
However, a new collection of essays from across the academic disciplines argues that marriage need not be defended solely through appeals to religious authority or tradition.
Robert P. George is co-editor with Jean Bethke Elshtain of "The Meaning of Marriage: Family, State, Market and Morals" (Spence). He is McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University and serves on President George Bush's Council on Bioethics.
George shared with ZENIT some of the arguments presented in the book as to why marriage is an "intrinsic good." Part 2 of this interview will appear Tuesday.
Q: What compelled you to compile this book of essays on the meaning of marriage? What is so special about this collection?
George: These essays are important because they demonstrate that marriage isn't a sectarian issue or even a narrowly religious one.
Quite the contrary, the essays demonstrate the public importance of marriage and our ability as rational people to grasp the meaning, value and significance of marriage even when we do not invoke or appeal to special revelation or religious tradition.
Last December, Jean Bethke Elshtain and I hosted a three-day conference, sponsored by the Witherspoon Institute, that brought together leading scholars from across the academic disciplines -- history, ethics, economics, law and public policy, philosophy, sociology, psychiatry, political science -- to discuss marriage.
Scholars presented papers on their academic discipline's contribution to our understanding of marriage, and each of the disciplines offered profound insights into the importance of marriage both for individuals and for the nation.
The papers did not invoke revelation, religious authority or sectarian reasoning. This was the best of what's been termed "public reason" at work.
And the conclusions from everyone at the conference were that: a) marriage matters; b) marriage is in crisis; and c) we could be facing the virtual abolition of marriage if we go down the road of same-sex "marriage."
Professor Elshtain of the University of Chicago and I decided to compile these essays into a book because the information and arguments we were fortunate enough to have heard at the conference need to be disseminated throughout our nation. Every American who cares about civil society, child well-being and the condition of marriage in our culture needs to know about the scholarly findings reported in this collection.
Right now there is a public debate going on about marriage, but all too often it has devolved into shouting matches about same-sex "marriage" alone.
Our project tried to avoid this pitfall, and to examine the entire range of social problems at stake in the discussion of marriage: fatherlessness, cohabitation, divorce, out of wedlock childbearing, etc.
While I cannot mention every chapter in the book, there are three essays written from a social science perspective that I will mention.
Don Browning of the University of Chicago and Elizabeth Marquardt -- author of "World's Apart" -- have a fascinating essay, "What About the Children? Liberal Cautions on Same-Sex Marriage."
Maggie Gallagher, the president of the Institute for Marriage and Public Policy, has an insightful essay entitled, "(How) Does Marriage Protect Child Well-Being?"
W. Bradford Wilcox, assistant professor of sociology at the University of Virginia, concludes the book with a reflection on marriage's impact on the least well off in society, in his essay, "Suffer the Little Children: Marriage, the Poor and the Commonweal."
Other essays include an argument on how the acceptance of same-sex "marriage" would erase the grounds of principle for rejecting polygamy and polyamory, that is, multiple partner sexual unions; an illuminating discussion of how "no-fault divorce" -- unilateral divorce -- has weakened marriage as an institution, and how the lessons learned from our mistake in embracing "no-fault" divorce might make us cautious as we contemplate even more radical changes; and arguments about the importance of marriage for the legal, political and economic welfare of our society.
When a generation ago people began to discuss "no-fault" divorce, few even considered whether allowing Adam to more easily divorce Eve would have anything other than positive effects on marriage and society as a whole.
In hindsight we can see how the introduction of "no-fault" divorce altered -- for the worse -- people's understanding of the meaning of marriage, with profoundly damaging social consequences.
That experience should make us very skeptical of claims that we can recognize the relationship of Adam and Steve as a "marriage" without further eroding a sound public understanding of what marriage means and what it truly is.
Q: Turning from the book as a whole to your particular contribution, a chapter on practical philosophy and marriage: What do you mean in your essay when you say that marriage is an "intrinsic good"?
George: I mean that marriage is properly understood as more than a means to ends that are extrinsic to it.
The value of marriage is not merely instrumental. Marriage is a basic human good -- an irreducible aspect of the well-being and fulfillment of a man and woman who unite themselves to each other as spouses.
When one understands marriage properly as the permanent and exclusive union of sexually complementary spouses whose comprehensive, loving and faithful sharing of life is founded upon their "one-flesh" bodily unity, one sees that marriage provides a reason for action whose intelligibility as a reason does not depend on further goals or objectives to which it is a mere means.
In uniting a man and a woman at every level of their being -- the biological, the emotional, the dispositional, the rational, the spiritual -- marriage is intelligibly choiceworthy as an end in itself.
Just as the most fundamental point of non-marital friendship is friendship itself, and not other ends to which friendships may be useful as means, the most fundamental point of marriage is marriage itself.
Q: You note that much of the confusion about sex and marriage in our culture finds its roots in the thought of 18th-century Scottish philosopher David Hume. How is this so?
George: I don't want to place too much of the blame on poor old David Hume.
As I point out in my chapter of "The Meaning of Marriage," Hume himself held rather conservative views about marriage, recognizing it as a profoundly important social institution, one which needs and deserves support and protection by the formal institutions of society and by the customs and mores of the people.
The problem is not in what Hume taught about marriage; it is in what Hume taught about practical reason and moral truth.
As I've observed, a sound understanding of marriage recognizes it as an intrinsic good, or what, following Germain Grisez, I have called a basic human good -- something persons have reason to choose precisely because they grasp its worth as an irreducible aspect of human well-being and fulfillment.
But Hume teaches that there are no basic human goods, no more-than-merely-instrumental reasons for choice and action. Rather, Hume supposes, all of our ends are given by subrational motivating factors, such as feeling, desire, emotion -- what Hume called "the passions."
Reason, then, is reduced to a purely instrumental role in the domain of deliberation, choice and action. Reason cannot identify what is intelligibly desirable and thus choiceworthy; its role, on the Humean account of the matter, is merely to identify efficient means by which we can achieve whatever ends we happen to desire.
As Hume summed up his position, "reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions, and may pretend to no other office than to serve and obey them."
To the extent that Hume's teaching has been accepted, whether formally or merely implicitly, by contemporary men and women, it has led them to adopt a form of subjectivism -- sometimes called "moral non-cognitivism" -- that undermines a sound understanding of marriage and other basic human goods.
This is particularly damaging in the case of marriage, because marriage is the kind of good that can be participated in fully only by those who, however informally, understand it properly. Its capacity to enrich our lives as spouses -- and, where the marriage is blessed with children, as parents -- is significantly dependent on our understanding it and grasping its more-than-merely-instrumental value.
[Tuesday: Public reasons for defending marriage]
PRINCETON, New Jersey, MARCH 20, 2006 (Zenit.org).- Debates about the institution of marriage are often characterized as clashes between religious adherents and secularists, which imply the debate is one between faith and reason.
However, a new collection of essays from across the academic disciplines argues that marriage need not be defended solely through appeals to religious authority or tradition.
Robert P. George is co-editor with Jean Bethke Elshtain of "The Meaning of Marriage: Family, State, Market and Morals" (Spence). He is McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University and serves on President George Bush's Council on Bioethics.
George shared with ZENIT some of the arguments presented in the book as to why marriage is an "intrinsic good." Part 2 of this interview will appear Tuesday.
Q: What compelled you to compile this book of essays on the meaning of marriage? What is so special about this collection?
George: These essays are important because they demonstrate that marriage isn't a sectarian issue or even a narrowly religious one.
Quite the contrary, the essays demonstrate the public importance of marriage and our ability as rational people to grasp the meaning, value and significance of marriage even when we do not invoke or appeal to special revelation or religious tradition.
Last December, Jean Bethke Elshtain and I hosted a three-day conference, sponsored by the Witherspoon Institute, that brought together leading scholars from across the academic disciplines -- history, ethics, economics, law and public policy, philosophy, sociology, psychiatry, political science -- to discuss marriage.
Scholars presented papers on their academic discipline's contribution to our understanding of marriage, and each of the disciplines offered profound insights into the importance of marriage both for individuals and for the nation.
The papers did not invoke revelation, religious authority or sectarian reasoning. This was the best of what's been termed "public reason" at work.
And the conclusions from everyone at the conference were that: a) marriage matters; b) marriage is in crisis; and c) we could be facing the virtual abolition of marriage if we go down the road of same-sex "marriage."
Professor Elshtain of the University of Chicago and I decided to compile these essays into a book because the information and arguments we were fortunate enough to have heard at the conference need to be disseminated throughout our nation. Every American who cares about civil society, child well-being and the condition of marriage in our culture needs to know about the scholarly findings reported in this collection.
Right now there is a public debate going on about marriage, but all too often it has devolved into shouting matches about same-sex "marriage" alone.
Our project tried to avoid this pitfall, and to examine the entire range of social problems at stake in the discussion of marriage: fatherlessness, cohabitation, divorce, out of wedlock childbearing, etc.
While I cannot mention every chapter in the book, there are three essays written from a social science perspective that I will mention.
Don Browning of the University of Chicago and Elizabeth Marquardt -- author of "World's Apart" -- have a fascinating essay, "What About the Children? Liberal Cautions on Same-Sex Marriage."
Maggie Gallagher, the president of the Institute for Marriage and Public Policy, has an insightful essay entitled, "(How) Does Marriage Protect Child Well-Being?"
W. Bradford Wilcox, assistant professor of sociology at the University of Virginia, concludes the book with a reflection on marriage's impact on the least well off in society, in his essay, "Suffer the Little Children: Marriage, the Poor and the Commonweal."
Other essays include an argument on how the acceptance of same-sex "marriage" would erase the grounds of principle for rejecting polygamy and polyamory, that is, multiple partner sexual unions; an illuminating discussion of how "no-fault divorce" -- unilateral divorce -- has weakened marriage as an institution, and how the lessons learned from our mistake in embracing "no-fault" divorce might make us cautious as we contemplate even more radical changes; and arguments about the importance of marriage for the legal, political and economic welfare of our society.
When a generation ago people began to discuss "no-fault" divorce, few even considered whether allowing Adam to more easily divorce Eve would have anything other than positive effects on marriage and society as a whole.
In hindsight we can see how the introduction of "no-fault" divorce altered -- for the worse -- people's understanding of the meaning of marriage, with profoundly damaging social consequences.
That experience should make us very skeptical of claims that we can recognize the relationship of Adam and Steve as a "marriage" without further eroding a sound public understanding of what marriage means and what it truly is.
Q: Turning from the book as a whole to your particular contribution, a chapter on practical philosophy and marriage: What do you mean in your essay when you say that marriage is an "intrinsic good"?
George: I mean that marriage is properly understood as more than a means to ends that are extrinsic to it.
The value of marriage is not merely instrumental. Marriage is a basic human good -- an irreducible aspect of the well-being and fulfillment of a man and woman who unite themselves to each other as spouses.
When one understands marriage properly as the permanent and exclusive union of sexually complementary spouses whose comprehensive, loving and faithful sharing of life is founded upon their "one-flesh" bodily unity, one sees that marriage provides a reason for action whose intelligibility as a reason does not depend on further goals or objectives to which it is a mere means.
In uniting a man and a woman at every level of their being -- the biological, the emotional, the dispositional, the rational, the spiritual -- marriage is intelligibly choiceworthy as an end in itself.
Just as the most fundamental point of non-marital friendship is friendship itself, and not other ends to which friendships may be useful as means, the most fundamental point of marriage is marriage itself.
Q: You note that much of the confusion about sex and marriage in our culture finds its roots in the thought of 18th-century Scottish philosopher David Hume. How is this so?
George: I don't want to place too much of the blame on poor old David Hume.
As I point out in my chapter of "The Meaning of Marriage," Hume himself held rather conservative views about marriage, recognizing it as a profoundly important social institution, one which needs and deserves support and protection by the formal institutions of society and by the customs and mores of the people.
The problem is not in what Hume taught about marriage; it is in what Hume taught about practical reason and moral truth.
As I've observed, a sound understanding of marriage recognizes it as an intrinsic good, or what, following Germain Grisez, I have called a basic human good -- something persons have reason to choose precisely because they grasp its worth as an irreducible aspect of human well-being and fulfillment.
But Hume teaches that there are no basic human goods, no more-than-merely-instrumental reasons for choice and action. Rather, Hume supposes, all of our ends are given by subrational motivating factors, such as feeling, desire, emotion -- what Hume called "the passions."
Reason, then, is reduced to a purely instrumental role in the domain of deliberation, choice and action. Reason cannot identify what is intelligibly desirable and thus choiceworthy; its role, on the Humean account of the matter, is merely to identify efficient means by which we can achieve whatever ends we happen to desire.
As Hume summed up his position, "reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions, and may pretend to no other office than to serve and obey them."
To the extent that Hume's teaching has been accepted, whether formally or merely implicitly, by contemporary men and women, it has led them to adopt a form of subjectivism -- sometimes called "moral non-cognitivism" -- that undermines a sound understanding of marriage and other basic human goods.
This is particularly damaging in the case of marriage, because marriage is the kind of good that can be participated in fully only by those who, however informally, understand it properly. Its capacity to enrich our lives as spouses -- and, where the marriage is blessed with children, as parents -- is significantly dependent on our understanding it and grasping its more-than-merely-instrumental value.
[Tuesday: Public reasons for defending marriage]
The Meaning of Marriage (Part 2)
(from zenit.org)
Interview With Princeton's Robert George
PRINCETON, New Jersey, MARCH 21, 2006 (Zenit.org).- Proponents of same-sex "marriage" often claim that allowing same-sex couples to marry cannot possibly harm anyone else's marriage, as the relationship is distinctly private.
This argument prompted scholars from across the disciplines to gather together to offer distinctly "public reasons" for the preservation of the institution of marriage as a male-female union.
Their results have been gathered into a new book, "The Meaning of Marriage: Family, State, Market and Morals" (Spence), co-edited by Robert P. George and Jean Bethke Elshtain.
George is McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University and serves on President George Bush's Council on Bioethics.
The scholar shared with ZENIT why the ability to choose and meaningfully participate in marriage is dependent upon legal and cultural institutions that support that choice.
Part 1 of this interview appeared Monday.
Q: You describe the good of marriage as a "one-flesh communion of persons." Is that a distinctly religious concept?
George: No. The intrinsic value of marriage, understood as a comprehensive, multilevel sharing of life founded upon the bodily communion of sexually complementary spouses and naturally ordered to procreation and the upbringing of children, can be grasped, and has been grasped, by people of different faiths and by those of no particular faith.
The teachings of most, if not all, religions extend to marriage in one way or another, but the good of marriage can be known, and is known, by reason, even when unaided by revelation.
Even when it comes to providing a critical reflective account of marriage, John Finnis has made the point that the greatest philosophers of ancient Greece and jurists of pre-Christian Rome were able to articulate the foundations of a sound understanding of this great human good.
Of course, the language of "one-flesh union" derives from the Hebrew Bible and is powerfully reaffirmed by Jesus in the Gospels. For Jews and Christians, revelation reinforces and illuminates a great truth of natural law.
Q: Section 1652 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church states: "By its very nature, the institution of marriage and married love is ordered toward the procreation and education of the offspring and it is in them that it finds its crowning glory." The Catechism thus appears to describe marriage in purely instrumental terms. Can you clarify how your position is consistent?
George: Sure. I have already remarked that married love and the institution of marriage are naturally ordered toward procreation and the upbringing of children.
But this is not to say that children are extrinsic ends to which marital union, in its sexual dimension or otherwise, is a mere means. "Ordered toward" does not mean "is merely a means to."
Perhaps the best evidence that the Church recognizes the intrinsic value of marriage and does not treat it merely as a means to procreation is her clear and unwavering teaching that people can have reason to marry, and may legitimately marry, and can be fully and truly married, even when the infertility of one or both spouses renders procreation impossible for them.
Marriages of infertile spouses are true marriages. They are not pseudo-marriages. They are not second-class marriages.
Because human beings are constituted as they are, thus constituting the human good as it is, it is intrinsically fulfilling for men and women to unite in a form of communion apt for -- "ordered toward" -- procreation and the upbringing of children even where, in their particular case, they will not be able to conceive or rear children.
Spouses truly become "one flesh" in their marital intercourse even when temporary or permanent infertility means that conception will not take place. It is worth noting that for Jews and Christians marriages are consummated by completed sexual intercourse, not by achieving the conception of a child.
However, nothing in the affirmation of this great truth contradicts the equally great truth that children conceived as the fruit of marital communion are indeed the "crowning glory" of marital love.
Children are not operational objectives of the sexual union of spouses or of the institution of marriage; rather, they, are gifts supervening on marital love to be welcomed and cherished as perfective participants in the community -- the family -- established by their parents' marital communion.
Q: Does the Church's recognition of the validity of infertile marriages contradict its teaching that marriage is necessarily the union of a man and a woman, rather than a union of any two persons, including persons of the same sex?
George: No. The key thing to see is that the Church, consistently with what we know by the light of natural reason, understands marriage as fundamentally and irreducibly a sexual relationship.
Any two -- or more -- people can live together, caring for each other and sharing each other's lives in many dimensions. But for a marriage to be brought into existence and be completed, a comprehensive, multilevel sharing of life must be founded on the bodily -- biological -- union of spouses.
A man and woman pledged to permanent fidelity to each other must become "one flesh" by virtue of the consummation of their union by intercourse in which they fulfill the behavioral conditions of procreation -- whether or not the non-behavioral conditions necessary for conception to take place happen to exist.
In the absence of true biological union, persons cannot be sharing each other's lives in the uniquely marital way; their sharing of life cannot be a comprehensive sharing, one in which their communion at other levels is founded on their bodily communion.
It is by performing marital acts -- acts that are procreative in type, whether or not they are reproductive in effect; and even if, due to disease, defect or a woman's age they cannot result in procreation -- that a man and woman pledged in permanent fidelity to each other consummate and renew their marriage as a one-flesh union.
This is why marriages cannot be between more than two persons, however fond they are of each other and however committed to the group each may sincerely be; and it is why marriages cannot be between persons of the same sex.
Once we understand marriage as truly a one-flesh union, we see that sexual activity between or among members of polyamorous groups or between partners of the same sex, however much they may desire it or find it satisfying, is inherently non-marital.
Whatever one makes of claims that sexual play can enhance the emotional bonding of participants in polyamorous or same-sex relationships, plainly it cannot unite the sex partners maritally. Whatever its motive, objective or point, it cannot be biological, "one-flesh," unity -- the very foundation and defining principle of marriage.
Please note, by the way, that the Church's teaching here reflects her understanding of the body as fully participating in the personal reality of the human being, and not as a mere subpersonal instrument for achieving ends or inducing satisfactions desired by the conscious and desiring aspect of the self -- considered, as in dualistic theories, as the real person who inhabits and uses a body.
The biological union of spouses in procreative type acts can be true personal communion, precisely because we are our bodies -- though, of course, we are not only our bodies -- we are body-soul composites. We are not non-bodily persons -- minds, souls, consciousnesses -- residing in, or supervening on, and using non-personal bodies.
Q: If marriage is so self-evidently good, then why does the state need to intervene to preserve it? Couldn't it be preserved in churches and religious communities where it is celebrated and lived in the fullest sense?
George: This is a superficially appealing proposition.
Its appeal fades, however, the moment we consider both: a) the importance of marriages, and thus marriage considered as an institution, to the well-being of society and the state; and b) the vulnerability of marriage as an institution to social pathologies and to ideologies hostile to marriage that weaken the institution's immunities to these pathologies.
The most powerful and basic reason for the public's interest in marriage and its institutional health is its unique suitability for protecting children and rearing them to be upright people and responsible citizens.
As Brad Wilcox, Maggie Gallagher and other social scientists who have contributed to "The Meaning of Marriage" have shown, few things are as important to the public weal -- and in our current circumstances almost nothing is more urgent -- than creating and maintaining a set of social conditions in which children being raised by their moms and dads is the norm.
Certainly religious communities and other institutions of civil society have an indispensable role to play, but law has a role to play, too. The law is a teacher.
It will teach either that marriage is a reality in which people can choose to participate, but whose contours people cannot make and remake at will -- e.g., a one-flesh communion of persons united in a form of life uniquely suitable to the generation, education and nurturing of children -- or the law will teach that marriage is a mere convention, which is malleable in such a way that individuals, couples, or, indeed, groups, can choose to make of it whatever suits their desires, interests or subjective goals, etc.
The result, given the biases of human sexual psychology, will be the development of practices and ideologies that truly tend to undermine the sound understanding and practice of marriage, together with the development of pathologies that tend to reinforce the very practices and ideologies that cause them.
Oxford University philosopher Joseph Raz, himself a liberal who does not share my views regarding sexual morality, is rightly critical of forms of liberalism which suppose that law and government can and should be neutral with respect to competing conceptions of moral goodness.
In this regard, he has noted that: "Monogamy, assuming that it is the only valuable form of marriage, cannot be practiced by an individual. It requires a culture which recognizes it, and which supports it through the public's attitude and through its formal institutions."
Of course, Professor Raz does not suppose that, in a culture whose law and public policy do not support monogamy, a man who happens to believe in it somehow will be unable to restrict himself to having one wife or will be required or pressured into taking additional wives.
His point, rather, is that even if monogamy is a key element in a sound understanding of marriage, large numbers of people will fail to understand that or why that is the case -- and therefore will fail to grasp the value of monogamy and the intelligible point of practicing it -- unless they are assisted by a culture that supports, formally by law and policy, as well as by informal means, monogamous marriage.
What is true of monogamy is equally true of the other elements of a sound understanding of marriage.
In short, marriage is the kind of good that can be chosen and meaningfully participated in only by people who have a sound basic understanding of it and choose it with that understanding in mind; yet people's ability to understand it, and thus to choose it, depends crucially on institutions and cultural understandings that both transcend individual choice and are constituted by a vast number of individual choices.
Interview With Princeton's Robert George
PRINCETON, New Jersey, MARCH 21, 2006 (Zenit.org).- Proponents of same-sex "marriage" often claim that allowing same-sex couples to marry cannot possibly harm anyone else's marriage, as the relationship is distinctly private.
This argument prompted scholars from across the disciplines to gather together to offer distinctly "public reasons" for the preservation of the institution of marriage as a male-female union.
Their results have been gathered into a new book, "The Meaning of Marriage: Family, State, Market and Morals" (Spence), co-edited by Robert P. George and Jean Bethke Elshtain.
George is McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University and serves on President George Bush's Council on Bioethics.
The scholar shared with ZENIT why the ability to choose and meaningfully participate in marriage is dependent upon legal and cultural institutions that support that choice.
Part 1 of this interview appeared Monday.
Q: You describe the good of marriage as a "one-flesh communion of persons." Is that a distinctly religious concept?
George: No. The intrinsic value of marriage, understood as a comprehensive, multilevel sharing of life founded upon the bodily communion of sexually complementary spouses and naturally ordered to procreation and the upbringing of children, can be grasped, and has been grasped, by people of different faiths and by those of no particular faith.
The teachings of most, if not all, religions extend to marriage in one way or another, but the good of marriage can be known, and is known, by reason, even when unaided by revelation.
Even when it comes to providing a critical reflective account of marriage, John Finnis has made the point that the greatest philosophers of ancient Greece and jurists of pre-Christian Rome were able to articulate the foundations of a sound understanding of this great human good.
Of course, the language of "one-flesh union" derives from the Hebrew Bible and is powerfully reaffirmed by Jesus in the Gospels. For Jews and Christians, revelation reinforces and illuminates a great truth of natural law.
Q: Section 1652 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church states: "By its very nature, the institution of marriage and married love is ordered toward the procreation and education of the offspring and it is in them that it finds its crowning glory." The Catechism thus appears to describe marriage in purely instrumental terms. Can you clarify how your position is consistent?
George: Sure. I have already remarked that married love and the institution of marriage are naturally ordered toward procreation and the upbringing of children.
But this is not to say that children are extrinsic ends to which marital union, in its sexual dimension or otherwise, is a mere means. "Ordered toward" does not mean "is merely a means to."
Perhaps the best evidence that the Church recognizes the intrinsic value of marriage and does not treat it merely as a means to procreation is her clear and unwavering teaching that people can have reason to marry, and may legitimately marry, and can be fully and truly married, even when the infertility of one or both spouses renders procreation impossible for them.
Marriages of infertile spouses are true marriages. They are not pseudo-marriages. They are not second-class marriages.
Because human beings are constituted as they are, thus constituting the human good as it is, it is intrinsically fulfilling for men and women to unite in a form of communion apt for -- "ordered toward" -- procreation and the upbringing of children even where, in their particular case, they will not be able to conceive or rear children.
Spouses truly become "one flesh" in their marital intercourse even when temporary or permanent infertility means that conception will not take place. It is worth noting that for Jews and Christians marriages are consummated by completed sexual intercourse, not by achieving the conception of a child.
However, nothing in the affirmation of this great truth contradicts the equally great truth that children conceived as the fruit of marital communion are indeed the "crowning glory" of marital love.
Children are not operational objectives of the sexual union of spouses or of the institution of marriage; rather, they, are gifts supervening on marital love to be welcomed and cherished as perfective participants in the community -- the family -- established by their parents' marital communion.
Q: Does the Church's recognition of the validity of infertile marriages contradict its teaching that marriage is necessarily the union of a man and a woman, rather than a union of any two persons, including persons of the same sex?
George: No. The key thing to see is that the Church, consistently with what we know by the light of natural reason, understands marriage as fundamentally and irreducibly a sexual relationship.
Any two -- or more -- people can live together, caring for each other and sharing each other's lives in many dimensions. But for a marriage to be brought into existence and be completed, a comprehensive, multilevel sharing of life must be founded on the bodily -- biological -- union of spouses.
A man and woman pledged to permanent fidelity to each other must become "one flesh" by virtue of the consummation of their union by intercourse in which they fulfill the behavioral conditions of procreation -- whether or not the non-behavioral conditions necessary for conception to take place happen to exist.
In the absence of true biological union, persons cannot be sharing each other's lives in the uniquely marital way; their sharing of life cannot be a comprehensive sharing, one in which their communion at other levels is founded on their bodily communion.
It is by performing marital acts -- acts that are procreative in type, whether or not they are reproductive in effect; and even if, due to disease, defect or a woman's age they cannot result in procreation -- that a man and woman pledged in permanent fidelity to each other consummate and renew their marriage as a one-flesh union.
This is why marriages cannot be between more than two persons, however fond they are of each other and however committed to the group each may sincerely be; and it is why marriages cannot be between persons of the same sex.
Once we understand marriage as truly a one-flesh union, we see that sexual activity between or among members of polyamorous groups or between partners of the same sex, however much they may desire it or find it satisfying, is inherently non-marital.
Whatever one makes of claims that sexual play can enhance the emotional bonding of participants in polyamorous or same-sex relationships, plainly it cannot unite the sex partners maritally. Whatever its motive, objective or point, it cannot be biological, "one-flesh," unity -- the very foundation and defining principle of marriage.
Please note, by the way, that the Church's teaching here reflects her understanding of the body as fully participating in the personal reality of the human being, and not as a mere subpersonal instrument for achieving ends or inducing satisfactions desired by the conscious and desiring aspect of the self -- considered, as in dualistic theories, as the real person who inhabits and uses a body.
The biological union of spouses in procreative type acts can be true personal communion, precisely because we are our bodies -- though, of course, we are not only our bodies -- we are body-soul composites. We are not non-bodily persons -- minds, souls, consciousnesses -- residing in, or supervening on, and using non-personal bodies.
Q: If marriage is so self-evidently good, then why does the state need to intervene to preserve it? Couldn't it be preserved in churches and religious communities where it is celebrated and lived in the fullest sense?
George: This is a superficially appealing proposition.
Its appeal fades, however, the moment we consider both: a) the importance of marriages, and thus marriage considered as an institution, to the well-being of society and the state; and b) the vulnerability of marriage as an institution to social pathologies and to ideologies hostile to marriage that weaken the institution's immunities to these pathologies.
The most powerful and basic reason for the public's interest in marriage and its institutional health is its unique suitability for protecting children and rearing them to be upright people and responsible citizens.
As Brad Wilcox, Maggie Gallagher and other social scientists who have contributed to "The Meaning of Marriage" have shown, few things are as important to the public weal -- and in our current circumstances almost nothing is more urgent -- than creating and maintaining a set of social conditions in which children being raised by their moms and dads is the norm.
Certainly religious communities and other institutions of civil society have an indispensable role to play, but law has a role to play, too. The law is a teacher.
It will teach either that marriage is a reality in which people can choose to participate, but whose contours people cannot make and remake at will -- e.g., a one-flesh communion of persons united in a form of life uniquely suitable to the generation, education and nurturing of children -- or the law will teach that marriage is a mere convention, which is malleable in such a way that individuals, couples, or, indeed, groups, can choose to make of it whatever suits their desires, interests or subjective goals, etc.
The result, given the biases of human sexual psychology, will be the development of practices and ideologies that truly tend to undermine the sound understanding and practice of marriage, together with the development of pathologies that tend to reinforce the very practices and ideologies that cause them.
Oxford University philosopher Joseph Raz, himself a liberal who does not share my views regarding sexual morality, is rightly critical of forms of liberalism which suppose that law and government can and should be neutral with respect to competing conceptions of moral goodness.
In this regard, he has noted that: "Monogamy, assuming that it is the only valuable form of marriage, cannot be practiced by an individual. It requires a culture which recognizes it, and which supports it through the public's attitude and through its formal institutions."
Of course, Professor Raz does not suppose that, in a culture whose law and public policy do not support monogamy, a man who happens to believe in it somehow will be unable to restrict himself to having one wife or will be required or pressured into taking additional wives.
His point, rather, is that even if monogamy is a key element in a sound understanding of marriage, large numbers of people will fail to understand that or why that is the case -- and therefore will fail to grasp the value of monogamy and the intelligible point of practicing it -- unless they are assisted by a culture that supports, formally by law and policy, as well as by informal means, monogamous marriage.
What is true of monogamy is equally true of the other elements of a sound understanding of marriage.
In short, marriage is the kind of good that can be chosen and meaningfully participated in only by people who have a sound basic understanding of it and choose it with that understanding in mind; yet people's ability to understand it, and thus to choose it, depends crucially on institutions and cultural understandings that both transcend individual choice and are constituted by a vast number of individual choices.
Monday, March 20, 2006
The United Methodist Church: Weeping for Tammuz
The United Methodist Church: Weeping for Tammuz
Paganism in Our Churches, Part II
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Lee Duigon » Bio
March 13, 2006
[God] said furthermore unto me, Son of man, seest thou what they do? even the great abominations that the house of Israel committeth here [in the Temple], that I should go far off from my sanctuary? but turn thee yet again, and thou shalt see greater abominations.
And he brought me to the door of the court; and when I looked, behold a hole in the wall …
And he said unto me, Go in, and behold the wicked abominations that they do here.
So I went in, and saw; and behold every form of creeping things, and abominable beasts, and all the idols of the house of Israel, pourtrayed upon the wall round about …
Then he brought me to the door of the gate of the Lord’s house which was toward the north; and, behold, there sat women weeping for Tammuz [a pagan deity] …
Then he said unto me, Hast thou seen this, O son of man? Is it a light thing to the house of Judah that they commit the abominations which they commit here?…
Therefore will I also deal in fury.
Ezekiel 8:6–18
[T]here be some that trouble you, and would pervert the gospel of Christ.
But though we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel unto you than that which we have preached unto you, let him be accursed.
Galatians 1:7–8
Today Paul Woodall is the pastor of the fastest-growing church in the town of Gove, Kansas.
Three years ago, Pastor Woodall and his flock seceded from the United Methodist Church, lost their building, and had to transfer their worship services to a small, struggling Baptist church nearby. The UMC dismissed Woodall from its ministry, and he soon dropped out of a legal battle over possession of the church building.
Why did Woodall and his people leave the UMC?
Because, he said, the denomination was rife with paganism and anti-Biblical practices — “same-sex unions, homosexual ordination, Sophia worship, goddess worship, Wicca worship, pagan practices, anti-trinitarianism, opposition to the virgin birth and the deity of Christ,” as reported on the UMC’s own website [http://archives.umc.org/umns/usnews_archive.asp?story={BC93801A-41D9-454A ...].
And why did he make that accusation?
“Because I saw it with my own eyes,” he told Chalcedon. “As a pastor, I encountered these things. So did members of this congregation. It was going on in a UMC church right down the road from us.
“We went there one night and saw what was supposed to be a ‘Christian healing service’ — with Tibetan prayer bells, a Baha’i prayer, and a chant. The chant went, ‘Come, Lord Jesus … Ommmm.’” [ “Om” is a Buddhist incantation.]
“We researched the matter and found a great deal of information on the Internet. We were shocked to find out this was going on in most of the mainline denominations today; and it was really bad in the UMC.
“So we left the UMC. That was the stand we took. And today our church [the Gove Community Bible Church] is exploding with new members.”
The rest is here.
Paganism in Our Churches, Part II
Bookmark this page E-mail this article to a friend Print this article
Lee Duigon » Bio
March 13, 2006
[God] said furthermore unto me, Son of man, seest thou what they do? even the great abominations that the house of Israel committeth here [in the Temple], that I should go far off from my sanctuary? but turn thee yet again, and thou shalt see greater abominations.
And he brought me to the door of the court; and when I looked, behold a hole in the wall …
And he said unto me, Go in, and behold the wicked abominations that they do here.
So I went in, and saw; and behold every form of creeping things, and abominable beasts, and all the idols of the house of Israel, pourtrayed upon the wall round about …
Then he brought me to the door of the gate of the Lord’s house which was toward the north; and, behold, there sat women weeping for Tammuz [a pagan deity] …
Then he said unto me, Hast thou seen this, O son of man? Is it a light thing to the house of Judah that they commit the abominations which they commit here?…
Therefore will I also deal in fury.
Ezekiel 8:6–18
[T]here be some that trouble you, and would pervert the gospel of Christ.
But though we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel unto you than that which we have preached unto you, let him be accursed.
Galatians 1:7–8
Today Paul Woodall is the pastor of the fastest-growing church in the town of Gove, Kansas.
Three years ago, Pastor Woodall and his flock seceded from the United Methodist Church, lost their building, and had to transfer their worship services to a small, struggling Baptist church nearby. The UMC dismissed Woodall from its ministry, and he soon dropped out of a legal battle over possession of the church building.
Why did Woodall and his people leave the UMC?
Because, he said, the denomination was rife with paganism and anti-Biblical practices — “same-sex unions, homosexual ordination, Sophia worship, goddess worship, Wicca worship, pagan practices, anti-trinitarianism, opposition to the virgin birth and the deity of Christ,” as reported on the UMC’s own website [http://archives.umc.org/umns/usnews_archive.asp?story={BC93801A-41D9-454A ...].
And why did he make that accusation?
“Because I saw it with my own eyes,” he told Chalcedon. “As a pastor, I encountered these things. So did members of this congregation. It was going on in a UMC church right down the road from us.
“We went there one night and saw what was supposed to be a ‘Christian healing service’ — with Tibetan prayer bells, a Baha’i prayer, and a chant. The chant went, ‘Come, Lord Jesus … Ommmm.’” [ “Om” is a Buddhist incantation.]
“We researched the matter and found a great deal of information on the Internet. We were shocked to find out this was going on in most of the mainline denominations today; and it was really bad in the UMC.
“So we left the UMC. That was the stand we took. And today our church [the Gove Community Bible Church] is exploding with new members.”
The rest is here.
Lutheran warns Church of Norway could split over homosexuality
Ecumenical News International
Daily News Service
20 March 2006
Lutheran warns Church of Norway could split over homosexuality
By Oivind Ostang
Oslo, 20 March (ENI)--The head of the (Lutheran) Church of
Norway's doctrinal commission, Professor Torleiv Austad, has
warned that the denomination may split over the issue of
homosexuality.
The commission was divided when it drew up a report in January as
to whether people living in same-sex relationships should hold
consecrated office. This led to suggestions that the church might
choose to have two equally official views on the matter,
something rejected by Austad.
"The situation is such that those caring for ecumenical
fellowship and for the unity of the Church of Norway should not
enforce decisions putting the two views side by side and allowing
the practice of both," Austad wrote in Luthersk Kirketidende (the
Lutheran Church Times), a quarterly theological publication.
The commission was evenly split on the proposal with a 6-5
episcopal majority in favour of same-sex cohabitants holding
consecrated office.
Austad told the daily newspaper Vart Land earlier in March, "My
hope is that one will see that the two understandings of
homosexuality are so different that both cannot simultaneously be
practised in liturgy and church order. One will simply have to
choose."
He said that before the matter reaches a general synod meeting in
2007, the Church of Norway national council ought to initiate a
thorough theological study of what practical consequences might
be drawn from the commission's report.
A Church of Norway bishop, Odd Bondevik of More diocese, has said
he might resign if the church introduces a liturgy for same-sex
partnerships or formally accepts homosexual cohabitants holding
consecrated office.
In a mid-February lecture, Bondevik said, "I am uncertain where
to draw the exact line in this matter. However, putting
homosexual partnership on the same footing as marriage, is in any
case heresy."
Daily News Service
20 March 2006
Lutheran warns Church of Norway could split over homosexuality
By Oivind Ostang
Oslo, 20 March (ENI)--The head of the (Lutheran) Church of
Norway's doctrinal commission, Professor Torleiv Austad, has
warned that the denomination may split over the issue of
homosexuality.
The commission was divided when it drew up a report in January as
to whether people living in same-sex relationships should hold
consecrated office. This led to suggestions that the church might
choose to have two equally official views on the matter,
something rejected by Austad.
"The situation is such that those caring for ecumenical
fellowship and for the unity of the Church of Norway should not
enforce decisions putting the two views side by side and allowing
the practice of both," Austad wrote in Luthersk Kirketidende (the
Lutheran Church Times), a quarterly theological publication.
The commission was evenly split on the proposal with a 6-5
episcopal majority in favour of same-sex cohabitants holding
consecrated office.
Austad told the daily newspaper Vart Land earlier in March, "My
hope is that one will see that the two understandings of
homosexuality are so different that both cannot simultaneously be
practised in liturgy and church order. One will simply have to
choose."
He said that before the matter reaches a general synod meeting in
2007, the Church of Norway national council ought to initiate a
thorough theological study of what practical consequences might
be drawn from the commission's report.
A Church of Norway bishop, Odd Bondevik of More diocese, has said
he might resign if the church introduces a liturgy for same-sex
partnerships or formally accepts homosexual cohabitants holding
consecrated office.
In a mid-February lecture, Bondevik said, "I am uncertain where
to draw the exact line in this matter. However, putting
homosexual partnership on the same footing as marriage, is in any
case heresy."
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