The LSTC faculty statement continues by invoking reformatory precedents for its liberal Protestant theology of reconciliation:

"Luther’s challenge of the medieval church’s distinction between the spiritual and temporal estates and his affirmation of the universal priesthood of the baptized, the abolition of the slave trade and slavery, the flowering of ecumenism and inter-religious dialogue, opposition to racism and apartheid, and support for the ordination of women are striking examples of theological, ecclesiastical and social changes inspired by the transformative power of the gospel. [Note: I have altered the paragraphing here. PRH]. In our time, Christ and his message of grace empower the community of faith to understand specific scriptural passages differently than in the past, to change traditional ecclesiastical policies and practices, and to affirm sisters and brothers who share a common baptismal identity, who confess the same faith in Christ and whose call to ministry is an expression of the Holy Spirit’s presence in their lives. In recent times, the church has repented of interpretations of scripture that justified slavery, silenced women, oppressed people of color, and maligned the Jewish people."

The errors in historical and theological judgment committed in this brief account of history could take an entire book to refute. As a fellow scholar, I can only offer here brief refutations of an all too convenient account of the facts rendered by this simplistic progressivist narrative sufficient to show how insubstantial it really is. The deeper problem, however, is that the LSTC statement regards overcoming certain ideological abuses of Scripture as the fundamental theological task, when it never tells us why and on what grounds the gospel traduces itself first and foremost as canonical Scripture. How can anyone discern abuse apart from a prior account of right use? The result of this superficial procedure is that abstract ideas like grace or liberation functionally replace authoritative texts as the material of theology; pre-eminently, the notion of grace as sheer acceptance or radical welcome replaces the historical, biblical Christ whom we meet in the Bible.

Noteworthy in the LSTC statement is how progressive history leaps from Jesus to Luther. Not even Paul or John gets mentioned. But this use of Luther as prophet of progressivism also gets Luther wrong. The opening claim that Luther’s significance consists in “challenging” the distinction between temporal and spiritual estates is bizarre, considering that Luther, as in the Second Galatians commentary, regarded the right distinction between these two as the very key to his theology. He had notoriously denied to the peasants, for the same reasons, the political reading they were making of his theology of the universal priesthood. In any case, Luther’s problem with late medieval theology was not primarily its putatively ideological readings of Scripture but its failure to read Scripture seriously in its plain sense as the source of faith's knowledge of the redeeming God and sinful humanity. There is, as we have seen, precious little of this latter in the LSTC faculty statement in any case. In short, the truncated Luther invoked by the LSTC faculty corresponds to nothing in historical reality.

The analogy often made to slavery and the status of women is fraught with difficulties. First, Christianity elevated the role of women and children in traditional society by making the household an analogue of the Reign of God, as in the Deutero-Pauline epistles. Luther’s significance for the question before us lies in his development of this biblical precedent. Industrialization and modern forms of late capitalist political economy have wreaked havoc on that traditional Christian estate. Calling the resultant atomized, individualized condition of women who are now free to act as badly as men ever did “liberation” is just a lot of theological confusion. It is the needs of the capitalist work force, not directly God’s creatio continua or the fresh blowings of the Spirit, that have pressed Euro-American society towards equal citizenship. As the church in such society we can and must receive such change, but not uncritically, as is habitual in liberal Protestantism. The real issue is always the right kind of change that is to be tested by the written Word of God, rightly interpreted.

The ELCA and its predecessor bodies never worked through any such theology for the ordination of women. They just bowed down to the imperative of the Zeitgeist, as today with regard to homosexuality. In any event, the question about ordaining women has never been about a handful of verses in I Corinthians or the Pastoral Epistles. Only the inverted fundamentalism of historical critics, who live to negate whatever the inerrantists affirm, could have such a superficial understanding of theology as proof-texting. Refuting the abuse of Scripture for ideological purposes certainly is a task for Christian theology, but it cannot accomplish this by the historical-critical approach of dissolving authoritative texts into the misunderstandings of the past from the standpoint of the self-evidently superior thinking of the present day. In this way, the text never gets to challenge our contemporary thinking, or to frame the questions for theology, which is what the Lutheran Scripture-principle demands.

The particular offense of American slavery was its racism; as political economy forms of “slavery” had been ubiquitous--and on any sober reading of contemporary global labor relations, hardly overcome. On the basis of the Bible, moreover, Christians always knew that both racism and chattel slavery were wrong. On the first claim, see The Forging of Races: Race and Scripture in the Protestant Atlantic World, 1600-2000 by Colin Kidd (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Regarding the second claim, recall, or read if you never have, John Locke's theologically significant Second Treatise of Government, which Jefferson knew. Locke’s 17th century argument against buying and selling humans as animals weighed on Jefferson’s conscience, and he actually wrote this judgment into the first draft of the Declaration. The striking of those lines from the Declaration constituted betrayal of the national covenant, as Lincoln diagnosed, not by a liberal Protestant re-reading of the Bible, but by a Scriptural reading of the dreadful work of the hidden God in the bloodbath of the Civil War--so Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address.

I could go on deconstructing the other examples the LSTC statement introduces in its version of history. Most outrageous is its listing of progress in ecumenical and interfaith dialogue, since adoption of the Recommendations will destroy all possibilities of ecumenical progress with Rome, Orthodoxy, and Evangelicalism, and turn Muslims away from the table in droves. Of course, it will also destroy what little ecclesial unity remains in the misbegotten ELCA. Equally egregious is the claim of overcoming Scriptural defamation of Judaism, since it is the better, Pauline theology of Judaism in Romans 9-11 over the problematic theologies of John 8 or Matthew 23, which has emerged since the Holocaust in Christian reassessment of its relation to the faith of the Jewish people. In other words, true progress in the self-interpretation of the Bible comes about from clearer texts overcoming darker texts, not by abolishing texts willy-nilly.

In every case, it was never some Spirit-inspired insight of the vague gospel of inclusion, as claimed by the LSTC faculty, that led Christians forward. When theological progress was made, it came from closer reading of Scripture, including the divine Law which is holy, just, and good. The gospel enables Christians, just as Jesus exemplifies in Mark 10:2-12, to distinguish the original, creative intention and blessing of God from forms of law compromised by sin and codified in human tradition, even Mosaic law. What the right distinction of Law and Gospel serves to show is that Scripture, rightly interpreted, regards both divorce and homosexuality as falling short of the form of co-humanity that God wills for His creation. That is why the texts Genesis 1:26-28 and Mark 10:2-12 are the authoritative ones in this controversy.

Texts, not ideas. Jesus, not vague ideas of grace--cheap grace, the liberal Protestant heresy, as Bonhoeffer named it, the preaching of grace without repentance. The LSTC faculty statement, on the basis of a shaky narrative as we have just seen, calls us to new and different interpretations of specific texts of Scripture as a form of repentance. In reality they ask us to ignore Genesis 1:26-28 and the biblical Jesus' invocation of it in Mark 10:2-12. It is these faculty members who should “repent” of this sloppy if not intellectually dishonest and religiously deceptive statement.

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