"As a confessional church, the Lutheran community affirms the normative authority of Scripture and tradition. Lutherans also insist that Christ and the gospel are the hermeneutical key for interpreting both Scripture and tradition. The gospel, which always points us to Christ, is, therefore, the interpretative lens in light of which the biblical and theological heritage of the church must be understood, evaluated and affirmed."

As I mentioned in my previous blog post on the two contending teachings about reconciliation vying for the heart and mind of Christians in the ELCA, some faculty at the Lutheran School of Theology have responded to criticisms of the Task Force draft Social Statement and Recommendations with a new statement. I asserted that this is a truly sad attempt at alleging fidelity to the Scriptures as understood in the Lutheran Confessions. Sad, because if what they write is sincere, these teachers need a crash course in Remedial Lutheran Theology.

But let us look and see, beginning with the otherwise unobjectionable opening affirmation of the Christ-centered, gospel hermeneutic as quoted above, a central and pertinent instance of which would be, for example, our Lord's own critique of casual divorce law by concession to human weakness in the law of Moses in contrast to our heavenly Father's original purpose for marriage in Mark 10:2-12.

A “confessional church” means that we are not to make up our own religion, as supposedly led by the Spirit in new times, but rather that we are led by the Spirit in new times to “same-say” (NT Greek: homologizein translated into Latin as confessio) what we have seen and heard from the Scriptures and confessed through the ages: Christ alone, grace alone, faith alone as God’s justification of the lost creature. This is indeed the universal or catholic faith, handed on by the tradition of the Gospel in and through church, since "Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever." Whatever else purports to be divine revelation for us today is to be exposed and critiqued as false teaching. This may include pious opinions, however old, even if seemingly based on Scripture, as for example when Luther rejected Karlstadt’s biblicism and iconoclasm, who wanted to overturn Saxon and Roman civil law in Germany and institute Levitical law in its place.

We do not then equate the "earthen vessel," i.e., the Bible, or even venerable opinion based on it in the tradition of the church, as the "treasure" it contains, but as its servant and bearer, holy with a derived holiness. We do not consequently go off on tangents in reading the Bible, discovering ideas (e.g., the rapture, the curse of Ham, the 144,000 elect, polygamy, the silence of women in the church etc.) that reflect times and conditions in the past as if they were meant as teaching for us today, obscuring the central teaching of Jesus Christ for us and for our salvation. We instead have a learned clergy that is able to read and interpret the Bible correctly, so that we too may be led to same-say the Gospel of Christ in our own, ever new and changing conditions.

Such correct reading is what is really at issue in this controversy: what the Gospel is and what it means for us today in regard to the proposed innovations regarding same-sex unions. In point of historical fact, what the Lutheran confessors of the 16th century taught is that the Gospel desegregates male and female from the false, artificial and injurious religious work of monastic vows and unites them in the holy estate of marriage (Augsburg Confession and the Apology XXIII). If we were really a "confessional church," holding the Lutheran confession as correct interpretation of Scripture, this is what we would be asserting under our own new circumstances. We would be asserting the life-long, monogamous union of male and female as the divine work in the world to which we are delivered by the Gospel which liberates us from self-chosen religious works.

Now this is so, because for the 16th Century confessors, the Gospel in all its radical power is known in its truth and purity in distinction not merely from human law and self-chosen religious works but chiefly and above all from divine Law. The Gospel is what it is and is known as such in its great "Nevertheless" of grace, free to us but costly to God, the merciful acceptance of the sinner who is truly otherwise condemned by divine Law as the failure to be the creature whom God intends.

In the new LSTC statement, however, we hear nary a word of this. It is not the "Nevertheless of justification" of the sinner by grace by the life of solidarity and atoning death of the Son of God that is put forward as the gospel, but instead the supposed model of Jesus as "boundary crosser." There is a grain of Scriptural truth in this latter, as we shall duly note, but it is not the Gospel put forward by the 16th Century reformers in the confessional documents to which the ELCA is pledged. And that is why the new LSTC statement, if sincere, is also sadly self-deceived in spite of the lip-service given in this opening statement to the ELCA as a "confessional church."

Paul R. Hinlicky is the Tise Professor of Lutheran Studies at Roanoke College in Salem, Virginia.