The letter from Carl Braaten to Mark Hanson that is making its way through the internet is a terribly significant one. It speaks of something beyond some issue of theological error or loss of tradition or the end of a theological school. I was mulling it over yesterday afternoon and, oddly enough, Oedipus Rex came to mind. I know the reference is only a partial one. That particular tragedy is about someone who fought and killed a man whom unknown to him was his father. I wonder if Hanson will is going to be seen as the tragic figure who unknowingly presided over the poisoning of his own mother (our mother the Lutheran tradition in which we were weaned).

Mark Hanson has not done this alone. His predecessors Herbert Chilstrom and H. George Anderson helped administer what they thought was medicine but is increasingly looking to be poison. The committee that set up the ELCA was also involved as far as setting up a structure with little transparency or accountability. Forensics will show that the poison itself can be traced back through Schleiermacher to Lessing, Spinoza, and Descartes.

How do we read the Bible? That's the point. No one's salvation is tied to the ELCA, Rome or any entity. The cross, what God has done and the faith that transports us from death to life is the source of our salvation. That being said, it makes a huge difference what those people who teach and administer and do ministry say about how we are to think, act and feel about God and His purposes. It's about how that is taught in our seminaries which train the preachers who are going to the world to transform it. Since ELCA seminaries for the most part have taught that prophets don't really prophesy, that not even Jesus knew what was coming next, we can't really know what it all means except that God loves everyone and that grace trumps law every time, they have removed any need for repentance (though that is a useful term when we want to call a news conference so that we can give our stump speech condemning systemic evil and the Republicans who perpetuate it).

Going back to the letter, I had Carl Braaten for systematics and was captivated by his lectures. Most of my classmates failed to appreciate him and wished that we had someone like Marcus Borg instead. I still enjoy reading Braaten and his partner in theology and ecumenics, Robert Jenson. They are trustworthy describers of Lutheranism. Myself, I count myself as part of the Great Tradition, but "don't get" the part about some sort of ontology of holiness rooted in hierarchical officials, or the part of having to worship in a proscribed way. That way leaves me cold and I could never be happy if I knew that I had to watch the same figure of a man in a gown leading the people in rote prayers through a magisterially approved liturgy. When they start speaking of "confecting" the Eucharist my antennae go up and I start calling it the Lord's Supper just to help keep that memory alive in our tradition.

I think there is a certain danger shared by those who are either swimming the Tiber or are standing in it up to their ankles or knees and bracing for the plunge. They have idealizations of truth. That is a step down from having a personal relationship with the Truth, and if they have that why do they need second-best? That idealization shows up in how they think about worship and bishops and all kinds of ways of doing things that are just that, merely human ways of doing things.

As an aside, I don't know exactly what Braaten means when he speaks of piety, though I imagine I do and it makes me sad that he bears the same negative prejudice held by the vast majority of academics. Wolfhart Pannenberg said that "there is one thing I certainly am not; I am certainly not a pietist." Like Carter Lindberg in an address to Lutheran seminarians in Philadelphia last April, laid every mistake in the contemporary religious scene at the feel of the Pietists. Though it only clouds the mind, in my opinion that medicine is poison, too. Propositional truth is not the way of salvation (and the first proposition is always that your experience of God may just be undigested food, whatever that means). I know for a fact that we are meant to know God in every sense of the word and it is that knowing that makes people God's world changers. There is just no reason to talk about bracketing experience in order to do theology. I've written about this fairly recently in "Hermeneutics, Tradition, Holiness and the Windsor Report."

However, all that said, I gladly enlist as a soldier in Braaten's army for the cause he has laid out. We are indeed in a fight for the very life of one of the Reformation tradition denominations; if you are waiting for the opening shot, you have slept through it. We can save two years of losses if the membership would speak up at Orlando. Braaten's letter has such a clear, passionate, truthful voice that perhaps even Mark Hanson will realize that as shepherd he led the sheep to the edge of the cliff. Perhaps he loves the church he shepherds enough to resign if asked. Maybe in the next month the sleeping giant will awake and demand this. Such a resolution from the floor of the Churchwide Assembly even if it is not successful will at least be picked up by the media and let the world know that there is a hope that the hull of the ELCA still has integrity. We can perhaps staunch the flow. We must rebuild our educational system. We need to help the faithful clergy. We need to reassure the membership that ours is a sound church built on sound doctrine and the experiments in liberal theology have had their day.