Originally posted March 27, 2011, at Recovery Worship of Fargo. Republished with permission of the author.
It is an interesting time to be church.
Some say denominationalism is dead. While I serve a worshiping community that does not consider itself a denomination, we probably would not exist today if it were not for the ELCA, so I would disagree with the theory that denominationalism is dead.
Some denominations act as if they are dead, or dying, or simply running in place, as they have been for centuries. They view the world through the eyes of those Patriarchal Fathers who lived in a time and a place much different from where we are today.
We Lutherans are as guilty of this as other denominations. Many in Lutheran congregations today quote Luther as if he lived next door.
Luther lived in Germany in the 1500s when the pope ruled supreme over Europe and few questioned his leadership and survived.
What Luther and other scholars of his day knew of the Bible, the culture of first century Palestine, even the Greek and Hebrew language was different from what scholars know today.
Yet, we hold on to every word that Luther wrote as if God had spoken it. Before you email the presiding bishop and demand that he withdraw my ordination papers don’t get me wrong, Luther is important, but I think we need to understand that his writings are from a different time and place and their relevance to us today in 2011 needs to be reviewed.
I think the church is in the midst of a reformation. The Episcopalians in the United States were first, along with one or two other protestant denominations.
We ELCA members took the plunge at the last churchwide assembly.
I am speaking now of issues far wider than sexuality; I am talking about what it means to be church.
By the simple act of ordaining people who are in committed same sex relationships, we have set ourselves free to be church.
Sure, we have seen a relatively small number of congregations leave, and that is OK, for them, and for us.
We live in a time of some great scholars who are very different, from N.T. Wright to Rob Bell.
They challenge us to think — something rarely seen in some denominations.
Bell especially challenges us to rethink scriptures, not in some modern New Age way but by doing something that people who say they read the Bible literally don’t do — reading it as a whole and not picking one or two passages and building a fortress church around those words.
He, along with N.T. Wright, wants us to stop using the Bible as a weapon in the grand war between good and evil.
Read Revelation. God wins! Love wins! The church of the future will be the church with the largest capacity to love.
In a hundred years, I believe people will look back at the church of today and see the reformation that is happening. Those denominations that are brave enough to change will thrive.
Find a link to Ray Branstiter’s blog Recovery Worship of Fargo at Lutheran Blogs.
This is the scariest post I have read on a Lutheran website in a long time, probably since reading Dr Benne's outline of what he hoped NALC would be. It makes me really worried about the future of the ELCA. Although I can't speak for CORE or other people concerned about where the ELCA is headed, if this post sums up the entirety of the problem, I think they are absolutely right to be very concerned.
To sum up quickly with Lutheran jargon, you've completely lost the Gospel here. With no Gospel, there is no church. Maybe a social justice club, or a group that helps at soup kitchens once or twice a month, but nothing that can be called church.
To try to explain that more clearly, the church has to be centered on one thing: the Gospel, which is that on account of Jesus' suffering, death and resurrection, God promises to forgive sinners. The problem is that Gospel is totally absent from your post. It doesn't matter whether you read the Bible verse by verse, pericope by pericope or "as a whole", unless you get Gospel out of it. And in order to get Gospel out, you need to divide Scripture between Law and Gospel.
At the end of the day, this is what makes Luther and the Reformers so important both to the 1500's and to us today-- their focus was on the Gospel, alone and only, for salvation. Luther's writings are extremely full of this distinction, which is why those writings are so helpful to us, and why it is well worth studying them whereever and whenever possible.
I have to agree with Peter. Luther's theology is not "dated". Simply saying it's important but needs to be checked is disconcerting, especially since his theology is centered in God's promise of forgiveness and justification. To argue its relevance or place in our time ultimately attacks what Luther was citing, the centrality of God's promise in scripture in the church.
And actually, I would kindly note that as an ordained minister you are to consider the Lutheran Confessions as true witness to the gospel, not merely as a historical document with some good stuff.
And I don't think it is also accurate to say that because someone highlights specific verses regarding something does not mean they do not regard the account of scripture as a whole.
And while I agree it is good and helpful to better understand the culture and surrounding context of the scriptures to understand their meaning, if we ultimately believe that without that scripture loses its voice we make several dangerous leaps: 1) we assume that the voice of scripture is dependent on not the Holy Spirit but scholarship, and in the time before such scholarship, the scripture was silent or could not speak. Such would assume God kept the church without his voice for some time. 2) We should never make decisions, because scholarship keeps changing. Since we "know" more than Luther did in Luther's time, the same will be said 50 years from now, so how can we in good conscience make a decision with the knowledge that we don't have the full voice of God and the generation after us will "have it more"? 3) No one has been able to truly understand, hear, proclaim the full voice of God in scriptures since the time of the early church. That ultimately our constant discovery is paired with a growing distance from that culture and so we cannot rely on it's voice for us. Again, this undermines the work of the Holy Spirit in the church.
The Gospel is very important to Christians. But remember that Jesus took a revolutionary approach to it, and alienated the mainstream Jews. He said, "It is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a man, but what comes out." I personally read with interest the old rules of living that are found in the Torah, but I do not follow them. A woman, in my opinion, is not unclean because she had a baby. Luther wanted everyone to be able to read their Bible for themselves and think about what it means. The big revolution in the lives of Jesus and Martin Luther was to shed our nature of hostility and suspicion and reach out to the "other." I am very proud to be part of ELCA -- this organization has demonstrated the courage that Martin Luther says is given through God's grace. Join the revolution!
Rachael,
I'm not sure it's entirely accurate to say that Jesus took a revolutionary approach to the Gospel, seeing as His life, death and resurrection IS the Gospel. The closest thing you have to the Gospel prior to Jesus are God's promises to Abraham and to David. All of the examples you give are of the Law, which Jesus certainly sharpened. Although God's Law must be understood in the context of any given culture, it still does 2 things in all cultures: order society, and convict us of our disorder. One particular disorder we may be convicted of today is our failure to "reach out to the other", but 'you must reach out to the other, or at least try really, really hard' is a statement of Law. That's not Good News.
If the revolution is just a shake-up of the Law (call it Moses 3.0), it's going to kill the church, because that's what all Law ultimately does. We need life, and that comes from the forgiveness of sins on account of Christ's death and resurrection, alone and only.