As noted in one of Friday’s postings to this site, seventeen distinguished theologians of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America have called for rejection of the recently published report by an ELCA taskforce on sexuality which “threatens to destabilize the unity and constitution, as well as the historical, biblical, and confessional teachings and practice” of that church by altering its approach to homosexuality. The report’s most “conspicuous logical inconsistency” is that it recommends making no changes in policy while advocating a fundamental shift in policy, asking the church to refrain from disciplining those who act contrary to it.
Against the task force’s recommendation that the church should “trust congregations, synods, candidacy committees and bishops to discern the Holy Spirit’s gifts for ministry among the baptized and make judgments appropriate to each situation” with regard to homosexual ministers, the theologians said the New Testament’s “criterion for the discernment of the gifts of the Holy Spirit is a broadly based, ecclesial determination and not an individual, local preference.”
Quite so. In light of this, however, I would be interested in the response of these scholars to two questions on the ordination of women, concerning which I have not heard similar protests from these environs. First, in what sense is there not a corresponding logical inconsistency between that practice and the historical, biblical, and confessional teachings and practice of Lutheranism? Ordaining women to the pastoral office is a radical departure from what Lutheranism has been up until the last generation. How can ELCA theologians who have not opposed feminism’s inroads now argue, in the name of Lutheran doctrine and tradition, against those being attempted by the advocates of homosexuality?
Second: If the New Testament’s criterion for the discernment of the gifts of the Holy Spirit is supposed to be a broadly based ecclesial determination and not a local preference, how broad a base, logically speaking, should a change as revolutionary and profound as the pastoral ordination of women have? How sits the conscience on a change rejected by Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and the majority of Protestants, put forward and energized primarily by the Protestant churches most affected by and cooperative with a modernity that subjects to its own criteria every attempt to argue from doctrine or tradition?
It is likely that Christian doctrine and tradition in this matter will only be upheld in this generation by those churches that retained their integrity against the revisors of the last. I would like nothing more, however, than to be proved wrong.
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