an essay on the Episcopacy and a critique of the Task Force Study Guide

You are kind, as always, to express interest in my writings. I fear, though, that my writings here might disappoint or frustrate you. For one thing, my essay "If I Were Bishop" is not about the sexuality issues facing the church. It is more along the lines, "If I were one of the final three candidates to be bishop, what would I say about the episcopal office in order to honestly let the synod know what kind of bishop they would be getting if I were bishop?" Two things about that: (1) It is a ridiculous supposition. You are young and strong and popular, whereas I cannot recall actually ever being on the winning side of an important vote in our synod. You would be much more likely to succeed in some of my recommendations than I would. In any case, I have already reached my life's ambition in being a parish pastor. (2) It is because it is that kind of an essay that it seemed best to me to write it anonymously. I did not want to bring any embarrassment or awkwardness to you or to our Metro Synod. Furthermore, it doesn't matter to me whether my essay is published. If you were to ask me to withdraw my submission and call it off, that would fine. You could keep it in your files and use it as seems best to you.

Now, about the matters of sexuality, I regretfully disagree with you about trying to avoid a vote on this matter. At this stage, I think that would simply double the wickedness. By permitting the distribution of this particular Study Guide on Sexuality, the ELCA misleads people into thinking they could actually change the faith of the Church. And then, would we turn around and say, "No, let's not vote"? The damage has already been done. Forbidding the vote would eliminate one possible means of rejecting the theology of the Study Guide. I think that the only way forward is for the Council of Bishops to meet in solemn assembly to decide what pastoral counsel they will give to the ELCA Assembly, along with the firm call that the ELCA ought to listen to their voice. The bishops can do much better than the Study Guide, plus they are called to it by God by the laying on of hands for the episcopal office.

I bet that already you can see that I am talking about a different conception of the bishop.

A final comment before sharing my essays: This has been my attempt, and I have prayed about it a lot, not to yield to my annual depression at the approach of our NY Metro Synod Assembly, but rather to do something more constructive. I do want to serve the larger church, not just my own dear parish. This has been my fitful, strained, and perhaps naive attempt to help.

Here are my notes in response to the Sexuality Study Guide. After that I've attached my essay about the office of bishop.

8) Given what you have learned from this study about the various views among members of the ELCA, what course do you think our church should follow?

Until it seems good to the whole ecumenical Church in solemn deliberative assembly to depart from the age-old teachings on human sexuality, the ELCA should humbly abide by those traditional teachings. It would take solemn deliberations akin to Vatican II in substance and excellence, but even more breadth, including the Eastern Orthodox, to warrant changing traditional teaching on sexuality. It would need to be a substantial deliberation, encompassed in prayer and holding itself accountable to the Holy Spirit's traditional means for preserving the apostolic faithfulness of the Church -- that is, the Bible, the Creeds and dogmatic substance of the Church, the sacramental and liturgical substance of the Church, and the Episcopal Office. Meanwhile we might continue to study, pray, and offer the argument to ourselves and to the ecumenical Church that the teaching should change, but we should not change it ourselves lest we trespass in decisions that we are too small and ill-prepared to make, and, even worse, become false shepherds leading our flock astray.

Please write any additional comments here or on a separate sheet of paper.

I am a discouraged parish pastor - feeling worn out and cast aside by the liberal ways of the ELCA. I wonder how it has come to be, and how we have reached such a state, that clergy who try to stand up for the holy tradition are held in dishonor. When we were ordained, we took our place with Timothy of old, to whom Paul appealed: "O Timothy, guard what has been entrusted to you." But in the ELCA and maybe even in some of the local synods there seems to be little cherishing of old-fashioned clergy and lay people who try to do that. Instead, we are too often thought of as mean and stupid. We hardly have any strength left to walk to a microphone or write an essay.

I have worked my way through "Journey Together Faithfully" - both the Study Guide and the accompanying background Bible study. I have written many comments in the margins of both documents, and I could go into detailed commentary, but instead let my try to express some general themes:

1) The Study Guide is stunning for how cool it is toward the Church's traditional teaching on sexuality. It works according to a picture like this: "On this side we have the traditional teaching. We have the Bible and the long tradition of how the Church has understood the Bible, including the teaching of saints, martyrs, early church fathers, doctors of the Church, and most of the ecumenical Church across the world today. And then, on the other side, we have liberal Christians who think about sexual matters in such-and-such a way." The Study Guide never hints that the traditional teaching is weighty, Spirit-led, and worthy of acceptance - indeed much more worthy of acceptance than the proposed departures from traditional teaching. The Study Guide gives no presumption in favor of traditional teaching, and I deeply regret that such a Study Guide has gone out into our parishes. When the Study Guide presents things this way, as if the traditional teaching of the Church is one option to be weighed alongside others, then the cause of the tradition is already lost.

2) The Study Guide too often fails to lift up the Lutheran teaching on the EXTERNALITY of the Word of God, with the harmful result that the Study Guide supposes that the "experience" of people determines the meaning of the Biblical text, rather than the other way around. For example, on page 17 we read this: "For other homosexual people among us their experience of themselves does not seem to correspond with what the Bible calls an abomination. They appeal to the experience of their own sexuality as natural for them and to their devotion to Christ and commitment to a faithful and loving union. Others looking at the Bible are persuaded by this appeal." Do you see my worry? If we permit our own experience to determine what the Biblical text says, then the Bible loses its power to critique our experience. We deprive the Bible of its ability to work for a transformation of our desires. In the end, our experience becomes trump, we lose the ability to put to death "the old Adam, the old Eve," and there is little left outside us that can move us along in the direction of the beauty of holiness of life. I count this culture of "experience" determining the meaning of the Biblical text as yielding an evaporation of God's Word, with a resulting inability anymore to say "In the Name of the Lord, No! Not this! The Christian path leads elsewhere. You can do better than this." Indeed, I count this culture as contributing to the "Texas Disaster," in which no one entrusted with authority at Trinity Lutheran Seminary in Columbus, Ohio, nor in the Northern Texas-Northern Louisiana Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, would say No to Gerald Patrick Thomas Jr.

3) The logic of the Study Guide is muddied at times. Here is an example: On page 31, we read, "Lutheran theologians understand these ?orders' to be something God has providentially established to bring order to a sinful world. Thus, marriage and family are hedges against promiscuity and a protection for children. The same purposes could be extended to same-sex unions." But the fact that God smiles on marriage between a man and a woman and that such marriages have such-and-such a character, does not mean that God smiles on ANYTHING that also has such-and-such a character. Honest labor might make one prosperous, and robbing and stealing might likewise make one prosperous, but it does not follow that God smiles equally on each. More generally, we must not suppose that we know PRIOR to God's law what such things as "life" and "wholeness" and "hedge against promiscuity" and "protection of children" mean. Luther makes a similar point in his commentary on the last petition of the Lord's Prayer: the meaning of "evil" in the petition "but deliver us from evil" receives its meaning from the preceding petitions. Thus, whether we knew it or not prior to the teaching of the Lord, "evil" includes such things as failing to "hallow" God's name, not letting the "kingdom come" for us too, living by some will other than "thy will be done," etc. What I am getting at is that we learn what is good and true and lovely in human life from the Bible, not the other way around. We do not determine the meaning of the Bible text according to our prior notions of what is good and true and lovely.

4) I think that it is pretense to suggest that the Bible is compatible with homosexual erotic behavior. This is not a matter of a text or two or three or ten. It is a matter of the man/woman structure of the Bible from Genesis to Revelation.

5) For me, one of the strangest and maybe the cruelest arguments is the one about what the Holy Spirit knew back in olden days. Consider this line from page 30: "According to this view, contemporary concepts of "sexuality," "heterosexuality," "homosexuality," and "sexual orientation" were unknown to the biblical writers, even though there were doubtless people of homosexual orientation." But doesn't it seem possible that the reason early Christian "people of homosexual orientation" and early Christians as a whole did not use such conceptuality as "sexuality," "heterosexuality," "homosexuality," and "sexual orientation" is that such conceptuality is only relevant to those who are seeking some way to evade the teaching of the Bible? That is, faithful early Christians simply tried to obey the Bible, whatever their orientation. They eschewed conceptuality that would lead them away from the Bible. As for whether or not such conceptuality was "unknown to them," or whether they could have invented such conceptuality if they had wanted to evade the Bible, that is what is unknown.

6) The Study Guide fails to address an obvious question about "blessing" homosexual unions: In whose NAME are you going to bless? If the blessing is in the name of some foreign god, then okay, except that then you are guilty of idolatry. But if you are blessing "in the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit" then you must face the possibility of blasphemy, which is a terrible sin.

I think that what grieves me the most in trying to offer even so elementary comments as these is that things have so worked out in the ELCA that attempts to stand up for the holy traditions of the Church are interpreted far and wide as being contrary to LOVE. It is supposed that we are troglodytes and mean-hearted people who are insensitive to and uncaring for homosexual people, while we had supposed that we were practicing love toward homosexual people. For how can there by love apart from God's will for his people? I just don't get it.

In any case, this Study Guide, "Journey Together Faithfully," is swept along by its own theological stance: that the traditional teaching of the Church can be set forth as one option among others. I fear the methodology of this Study Guide. The ELCA has no authority to break faith with traditional teaching, and I regret that the Study Guide suggests that we can.

I hope that the Task Force recommendations to the 2005 Assembly and the eventual Social Statement on Human Sexuality will surprise and delight the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church with evident devotion to the mind of Christ as He has revealed it in the traditional teaching of His Church. I offer these thoughts with prayer for us all.