“Fundamentalism” is a common enough slur found in ELCA circles, which you seem to use quite freely. Usually it is used when one doesn’t like the fact that others are pointing out that the emperor lacks clothes, and a biblical argument.

Your position lacks any support from the Scriptures and the wisdom of the Fathers. It is inappropriate for you to compare your suggested innovation of “recognizing” homosexual perversion to the homoousios of the Nicene creed and Luther’s insertion of “alone”. Why, because those confessions of faith did not create innovative teachings. Those moves did exactly the opposite of what you seek to do. Homoousios was confessed at Nicea BECAUSE the Scriptures clearly teach that Jesus is divine. And Luther wanted to make crystal clear what Paul clearly taught in his letter to the Romans. Both of these moves were done in continuity with the faith already confessed.

Prof. Hinlicky, you don’t have a biblical argument. The Word of God is clear about homosexual behavior, and that does settle it. This is not a foolish approach to theology, but a faithful one. You say you want a “disputational form of theology”, well and good, but why then do you dismiss cogent critiques by those who stand on solid biblical ground and in the tradition of the church catholic on this issue.

Recognizing homosexual perversion has been done by no one, nowhere, at no time in the church. I don’t see how someone who has claimed to be an “evangelical catholic” can even entertain this idea.

You still have not answered the arguments that are the strongest against your proposal.
1. There is no support in Scripture
2. It is utterly novel

Furthermore, you seem to get cranky when folks call you out, and get rightly scandalized by your strange new teaching. In the comments after your last article, you dismissed the “right wing of American Lutheranism” as “incomprehending and mean-spirited”. I responded with the following, which perhaps needs to be said again…
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I. Incomprehending

I mean really, who has not comprehended your argument? It is a very clearly expressed position. I, and many others, have a problem with it because it departs from the catholic faith, has no basis in Scripture, and is utterly novel.


II. Mean-Spirited

I don't think one who proposes such a novel solution has the right to be touchy when people cry foul. I must return to thinking of our fathers in the faith: Do you seriously wonder what an Aquinas or Chemnitz would say to such a suggestion? I dare say they would hardly have treated you as gently as those of us on the "right wing" of Lutheranism have here.


III. Right Wing

Throughout this post I have assumed that I am one of those whom you are referring to as part of the "right wing". Are you calling my position, which is that it is obviously absurd and anti-catholic to "recognize" gay unions,…"right wing"?

Instead of dismissing “right wing” critiques, perhaps the questions to ask are, "Who is in line with Scripture?" and "Who agrees with the witness of our fathers in the faith?". Your novel proposal fails on both these counts, so I don't know why you are getting so sore and resorting to dismissing arguments due to their "right wing" source.

I mean, come on, you are proposing to "recognize" perversion. I don't think it is "right wing" to be concerned.
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Perhaps this type of response is a bit more robust than the “disputational form of theology” you suggest, but we’ve been rather tame compared to the disputations the theologians of the church have traditionally had. I find it healthy and good to have passionate and energetic debate. But regardless, please spare us from paternalistic and overbearing lecturing on how to argue with you.

The answer of the Scriptures and our fathers in the faith is not “fundamentalism” or a mindless “I believe this”, but rather a big “No!” to sexual perversion.

You wonder what the word of Gospel is to the homosexual. Wonder no more, it is the same word of Gospel that is for you and me, “Christ has paid for your sin, he died on the cross as the perfect sacrifice, you are forgiven.”

Trust in the Word of God Prof. Hinlicky, it goes out and doe not return empty. We do not need creative solutions to the sins of the flesh, but the Word of God.

What then of those redeemed sinners who struggle with homosexual perversion,? They will hear the Word of God and repent of their sin, daily die and rise, repent when they fall into sin, and struggle to avoid it. They will be healed by God’s forgiveness and love. Does that mean that they will be able to lead a heterosexual life with wife and kids…maybe? Will they struggle and remain single the rest of their life…maybe? But they certainly will be healed fully, and brought to the wedding feast of the Son in glory, to sin no more and enjoy life eternal. What they certainly DON’T need is a church that “recognizes” intrinsically sinful relationships.

Ramirez says: "What then of those redeemed sinners who struggle with homosexual perversion,? They will hear the Word of God and repent of their sin, daily die and rise, repent when they fall into sin, and struggle to avoid it. They will be healed by God’s forgiveness and love. Does that mean that they will be able to lead a heterosexual life with wife and kids…maybe? Will they struggle and remain single the rest of their life…maybe? But they certainly will be healed fully, and brought to the wedding feast of the Son in glory, to sin no more and enjoy life eternal. What they certainly DON’T need is a church that “recognizes” intrinsically sinful relationships."

I get it now. We happily married heterosexuals sit enthroned on our pure doctrine and watch while struggling and despairing homosexuals dutifully follow our prescription for ever more self-destructive and possibly even fatal behavior, since we can't see our way to making even a tiny bit of room for them to find stable and loving, if still disordered, relationships. But no fear! God will forgive them (assuming they still have the energy to repent after a lifetime of this, or the slightest desire to spend eternity in the company of other Christians), and our church will remain untainted. Whew.

"The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses’ seat, so practice and observe whatever they tell you—but not what they do. For they preach, but do not practice. They tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on people’s shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to move them with their finger." Matthew 23:2-4

I teach my students that only after they succeed in stating the argument that they oppose with such insight, sympathy and clarity that the opponent herself would cry out, ‘That’s it! I couldn’t have said it better myself!’ – then, and only then, do they have a chance to criticize the real thing rather than a convenient fiction of their own imagination. By this light, Pastor Ramirez should go back to school. His polemical style slays mighty dragons – but the slash and thrust of his sword miss the real target.

Right off the bat, he informs readers that Hinlicky’s “position lacks any support from the Scriptures and the wisdom of the Fathers.” But he doesn’t bother to tell readers what he understands that “position” to be. Instead he resorts to a cruel innuendo in the next sentence by alluding in passing to Hinlicky’s supposed position of “’recognizing’ homosexual perversion.” Later on this cruel language is repeated, “I mean, come on, you are proposing to "recognize" perversion.” Indeed, Pastor Ramirez insights upon this account of my “position,” asking, “who has not comprehended your argument? It is a very clearly expressed position.” And he concludes his post emphatically: “What they [i.e. the “perverts”] certainly DON’T need is a church that “recognizes” intrinsically sinful relationships.”

Well, Pastor Ramirez, here’s a bad fact for you to wrestle with: I do not recognize what I have said in your supposedly “very clear” account of my position. What I do see in your way of arguing time and again are the afore-cited instances of the injustice of blind polemic. You owe me an apology – if you are indeed capable of separating what I actually say from what you willfully and wildly make out of it.

With his caricature set up, in any case, Pastor Ramirez can ignore the biblical basis for my real teaching that God mercifully accepts the contrite, even though their sin and its consequences do not entirely disappear in this life – a formulation directly derived from Luther’s teaching on justification, in turn largely based upon St. Augustine – both I think significant “fathers” of the Church, each accused in their own day and age of “innovation” in defense of the mercy of Jesus and the free grace of God.

Third, falsely supposing then that Hinlicky doesn’t “have a biblical argument,” Pastor Ramirez deliberately echoes my language from the previous post with the counter: “The Word of God is clear about homosexual behavior, and that does settle it.” In other words –just as I had defined the concept of fundamentalism in the previous post--, “God said it. I believe it. That settles it.” Pastor Ramirez thinks my resort to this concept, fundamentalism, is a “smear.” No, Pastor Ramirez, it is a concept which denotes the logical fallacy of begging the question. Your assertion begs the question of whether you understand what God has said and why He has said it and to whom He has said it. These latter questions are real ones that we who teach from the Scriptures must ask and answer in order to discern the Word of God incarnate in the mercy of Christ and apply it appropriately to penitents in the confessional. That practice of pastoral conversation is what I have been talking about, as readers will recall.

Still one might suppose that Pastor Ramirez is right when he says that Hinlicky “seems to get cranky when folks call [him] out, and get rightly scandalized by your strange new teaching” and later insists that he has no “right to be touchy when people cry foul.” Yes, I admit to losing patience from time to time with people who argue like Pastor Ramirez does. For this I beg the reader’s patience. I am trying. Ah, but if only Pastor Ramirez hit his real target, which, I fear, is the mercy of Jesus and the free grace of God!

I wonder in any case whether he actually bothered reading the previous post conceding to Bob Benne that my proposal for “recognition, not blessing” had failed its intended purpose of accommodating an urgently felt pastor need to orthodoxy and saving the unity of the ELCA. As I said in a prior post in response to Pastor Ley, I don’t have any ego invested in this idea. Its time has come and tragically gone – so it appears. But the matter of a pastoral and evangelical approach to gay and lesbians persons convicted by the Law that their same-sex desires is a disorder of God’s creation remains real, also for those of us abandoning the shipwrecked ELCA. Any port in a storm, I suppose, but in the long run very few of us, I predict, will be drawn to board Pastor Ramirez’s “right-wing Lutheranism.”

Dr. Hinlicky, I don't know that I can see how Pr. Ramirez has necessary gotten you wrong. He was deinitely attacking your position, but I'm not certain how that brings about misrepresentation. Something I've noticed about you as a thinker. 1. When faced with people who wish to attack your position, you use the tactic of attempting to shame them for misrepresenting you, without giving any real way in they've misrepresented you. In our LOGIA exchange, you really never responded to my arguments. All you actually did is 1. Called me a Fundamentalist. 2. Say I had misrepresented you, but then not tell me how. Therefore this response to Ramirez sounds all too familiar to me. 2. I've read a great deal of your writings (contrary to what you claimed about me in our earlier exchange) and I've found that as a thinker, you tend to want it "both ways." So, in this instance, if I understand your position correctly (correct me if I'm wrong), you want to recognize homosexual unions as producing analogous goods to heterosexual ones, while not blessing them- in other words, not saying that God has intended this as part of his plan, but recognizing that there's good in them. To my hearing, this sounds like "I was against gay marriage before I was for it."
I think all Rameriz his saying is that although that may be true, Scripture doesn't allow us to even recongize those unions, since it so utterly condemns homosexual practice as to make that an unbearable compromise. In the same manner, to my reading of you, you also want to maintain something of a classical Reformation understanding of the authority of Scripture- while using the language of "gospel" as sole authority (it always sounds like gospel-reductionism, but then you turn around an claim law-authority as well, which is highly confusing and/or contradictory to my thinking). Similarly, you want to say that Scripture cannot be understood without tradition, but that Scripture has the final say- even though this would logically mean that Scripture could be understood without tradition, since otherwise it could not be recognized as standing in conflict with tradition.
So, perhaps you could just tell Pr. Rameriz how he misrepresented you. I can't see how you've done that. I say this all with the upmost respect for you as a theologian.

Dr Kilcrease, I believe your query is sincere. Your rephrasing of Ramirez’s case is sufficient improvement over his own that I am happy to try again to have a meaningful exchange of views, perhaps even debate, with you (readers can check the “Blogia” feature of Logia.org for our exchange some months ago over the authority of Scripture and judge whether it is as Dr. Kilcrease says; needless to say, I think not).
Your basic question about Ramirez’s misrepresentation is easy to answer: the possibility I floated some time ago under the title ‘recognition, not blessing’ suggested that under carefully considered conditions (I won’t repeat them all here again) a pastor, and perhaps also a Christian community, could find some appropriate form of recognizing a same-sex couple on the grounds that, there being no other recourse in a fallen creation still awaiting the fullness of redemption, some goods in that union sufficiently resemble the goods of Christian marriage, while the threatening evils of the so-called ‘gay lifestyle’ are sufficiently destructive to justify this expediency as the lesser evil. In Ramirez’s reading, however, I was without qualification recognizing sexual perversion. In reality, I called for recognizing fellow Christians as persons, and, socially, as a couple. Ramirez has me endorsing an intrinsically sinful act.
Certainly my argument for this very distinction may or may not persuade, since the unnatural sexual relation is included in recognition of them as a couple. But to argue as though I do not intend this distinction is a misrepresentation. You at least --unlike Ramirez-- try to get me right, when you have me “not saying that God has intended this as part of his plan, but recognizing that there's good in [it].” Yes, such anomalies and perplexities abound in a fallen world: think only of “just war” or “divorce on the grounds of infidelity” or “abortion in the case of a rape.” The scholastic distinction between God’s antecedent and consequent will is very helpful here: originally God intends neither sin nor punishment, but under the conditions of a fallen world, some sins are less evil than others and some punishments are needed to hinder even greater evils. Thus God now permits these.
Unfortunately, you add to your rephrasing of my idea: “to my hearing, this sounds like ‘I was against gay marriage before I was for it.’" Well, that’s cute, but it doesn’t cut much ice if you are dealing pastorally with fellow Christians under the conditions I have specified and are trying to think in a sober way theologically about something that may preserve life rather than destroy it – the very purpose of the Law, according to our Lord.
If we dug a little deeper, we would see that the biblical exegesis differs. I take as primary (as readers of this blog well know) the texts setting forth Christian marriage in Mark 10 & parallels and Genesis 1 and 2, supported by Paul’s treatment of same-sex desire as one consequence among others of universal human idolatry in Romans 1. I don’t appeal to the Leviticus texts, because, as Luther taught, they have no application to us Gentiles; in the area of positive or civil law, it is natural law and human reason which must work out the concrete form of neighbor love – including love of homosexual persons. This amounts to a biblical basis quite different from Ramirez’s crude and undifferentiated claim that Scripture clearly says thus and so and that settles that. The truth is Scripture hardly notices homosexuality. Consequently, we have to build our cases theologically, certainly first of all and on the basis of Scripture. In short, as we have previously debated, I hold to prima scriptura, not sola scriptura (a term Luther never used).
Now, whether as a thinker I habitually want it both ways readers may judge. I want both the Law to have its say and the Gospel to have its say, the latter always as God’s proper and final word. This leads to morally complex analysis, such as I have striven to provide in this difficult case – once again, without presuming that my particular argument for ‘recognition, not blessing’ has been persuasive. Many people whom I respect have not found it persuasive, beginning with Bob Benne, to whom I recently concede the uselessness of my proposal. But it is still useful to discuss how we conduct theological debate without committing injustices against those we oppose.

I have responded further down to Prof. Hinlicky for more room.

Professor Hinlicky, I've followed closely your scholarship over the past few years, as a seminarian and now as a recently ordained pastor. I have a good deal of respect for your thinking. I was encouraged to see you among the rigorous thinkers who challenged the direction of the ELCA, particularly with respect to the decisions regarding sexual ethics at cwa this past summer.

A good argument is a moral accomplishment, I think, and I am glad to see the engagement between yourself, Professor Benne, Professor Kilcrease, and yes, my friend & colleague Pastor Ramirez, too.

I know that his words are sharp, but I think that he states clearly the confusion that many of us experience when we encounter your position on "recognition not blessing" of homosexual partnerships.

For those of us in the ELCA, even those of us who would describe ourselves as traditionalists, your position seems like the de facto position within the ELCA. I can vouch for many parishes where openly gay couples worship and participate in the life of the congregation, albeit without any recognition that makes them "public and accountable" in the eyes of the congregation.

In a certain sense, I suppose that this is a legitimate area for pastoral discretion and discernment regarding the invocation of Law. After all, we do welcome, teach, care for, and commune all sorts of persons whom classic orthodox Christian teaching would argue are living outside of God's clear and expressed intent. Within certain parameters, every pastor has proper leeway to decide when to issue a call to repentance and renewal. In some cases-- here addiction is the clearest case in my mind-- Christian men and women are never able to fully overcome obstacles to God's call.


My good-faith attempt to understand what you're arguing is this: homosexual partnerships are sufficiently different from other violations of God's Law (or, in your nuanced language drawn from Romans, consequences of a more general alienation from God) to merit a reception different than that of the addict or gossip. The goods of gay partnerships are sufficiently analogous to the goods of marriage to merit our clear and public recognition of such goods.

It seems to me that no one really wants to deny the recognition of certain goods in gay partnerships.

However, such goods do not, in my mind belong to the province of gay partnerships, but to friendship more broadly. Fidelity, self-giving love, companionship, mutual accountability, sanctification, even-- these belong to friendship. And here, I want to be clear that I'm not referring to the "facebook" variety of friendship, but to the robust Aristotelian concept of friendship that is taken up and transformed by Jesus, especially in the gospel of John.

What I want to argue is that homo-erotic acts distort and undermine these goods of friendship. They are destructive to the human body, to the social fabric, to our selves that are given by God as male & female. The Biblical account in Genesis, I think, and evoked throughout the rest of scripture is that the sexual givenness of our bodies is only rightly expressed between male & female, who together are fruitful.

I think that a tacit recognition that many people either have not heard, or have not heard clearly the intent of God is perfectly acceptable for Pastors and lay-teachers of the Church. As a friend of mine says, "perhaps before we work on the sixth commandment, why don't we pay attention to the eighth commandment, or wherever you're struggling and have a reasonable hope to grow." It's a different ballgame in Liberal Protestant communions like the ELCA, certainly than it is in the communion of my dear friend Pr. Ramirez, the LCMS. It will take time and patience to clearly lay out once again the intent of God for our bodies here.

But this patient approach to teaching classical Christian morality is no different than, say, resurrecting the pastoral practice of private confession & absolution. It ain't gonna happen overnight.

Be that is it may, it is no excuse for abandoning the teaching altogether, or embracing a "lesser evil." I do not believe that God ever calls us to do that. Let's not forget that Romans 1 does not end there, but culminates in Romans 8: "The law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin & death."

You cite Just War as an example of the occasional resort that we Christians must make to "the lesser evil." I protest! Just war is the Christian form of service to neighbors that suffer evil & harm; we are called to bring a rightly ordered peace to our fellow humans, including our enemies. Challenges to & lapses in that particular kind of discipleship are no excuse for abandoning it altogether. Rather, they are a call to repentance and renewal.

Perhaps those of us here in conversation can temper each other's positions. I think that perhaps a certain form of recognition of those who understand themselves to be gay might faithfully look like this: a call to intimate but celibate friendship. Obviously, an account of what such a friendship might look like, and what sort of role the Church would play in it is open to question. And, like your own proposal, it's likely to get laughed off the court by interlocutors on both "wings" of the house. But I think that only this proposal does justice to the analogical goods of partnerships for those who are homosexual in inclination, while also honoring the intent of God that is clearly offered in scripture.

Dear Pastor Nathan:

Thank you for this very helpful contribution to fair-minded disputation. I readily grant that the possibility I have floated (not my firm, fixed “position”!) of ‘recognition, not blessing’ seems “confusing,” as you say, to traditionalists who oppose the CWA decisions in August, not least of all because I too, as you also acknowledge, am one of those traditionalist who also rejects the ELCA’s new policies.

That is why I gave the history of my idea in response to Pastor Ley’s post, which started this latest series of exchanges, i.e., to explain how what I intended by the notion had been hijacked (the true source of the “confusion!”). Mercifully, however, you don’t dwell on this and instead go to the heart of the real problem for those of us now seeking a renewed and realigned Lutheranism, namely, that we are trying to figure out how to being Christians and Christian communities post-Christendom, where our own people’s lives have been penetrated by social forces inimical to God’s moral purposes for us, where our own heads are filled with ideas contrary to our heavenly Father’s will for us. Thus you perceptively write:

“In a certain sense, I suppose that this is a legitimate area for pastoral discretion and discernment regarding the invocation of Law. After all, we do welcome, teach, care for, and commune all sorts of persons whom classic orthodox Christian teaching would argue are living outside of God's clear and expressed intent. Within certain parameters, every pastor has proper leeway to decide when to issue a call to repentance and renewal. In some cases-- here addiction is the clearest case in my mind-- Christian men and women are never able to fully overcome obstacles to God's call.”

This is surely right. Hence your “good-faith attempt to understand what [Hinlicky is] arguing” for once, God be praised, gets the idea right (provided we recall all that I have said about pastoral conversation in a Christian context): “The goods of gay partnerships are sufficiently analogous to the goods of marriage to merit our clear and public recognition of such goods.” And you add to this, “It seems to me that no one really wants to deny the recognition of certain goods in gay partnerships.” (I have my doubts about some disputants in this debate on this score, but I will gratefully let it pass.) I like very much what you go on to say about friendship. The case you develop here is a constructive attempt to deal with the real problem before us: “a certain form of recognition of those who understand themselves to be gay might faithfully look like this: a call to intimate but celibate friendship. Obviously, an account of what such a friendship might look like, and what sort of role the Church would play in it is open to question. And, like your own proposal, it's likely to get laughed off the court by interlocutors on both "wings" of the house. But I think that only this proposal does justice to the analogical goods of partnerships for those who are homosexual in inclination, while also honoring the intent of God that is clearly offered in scripture.”

This proposal reminds me of Bob Benne’s attempt to “thread the needle” some years back when he argued for the blessing of the domicile. At that time, however, Benne knew that such blessing would tacitly overlook the sexual relation of the homosexual persons living in that domicile and so he called for a “gentle hypocrisy” on the matter. He has since abandoned this proposal, just as I am willing to be persuaded that my own notion of ‘recognition, not blessing’ is unworthy of the support of those who are serious about being Christians in this society, with all its anomalies and perplexities. But the case needs to be made.

What you suggest in this regard is something neither Benne nor I have actually said, so far as I know: “What I want to argue is that homo-erotic acts distort and undermine these goods of friendship. They are destructive to the human body, to the social fabric, to our selves that are given by God as male & female. The Biblical account in Genesis, I think, and evoked throughout the rest of scripture is that the sexual givenness of our bodies is only rightly expressed between male & female, who together are fruitful.” Most of us up until now have shied away from this argument, not wanting to heap further burdens on a vulnerable sexual minority in need of social understanding and civil protection. Without compromising these latter commitments to tolerance and civil justice, I would like to challenge you to make this argument. I do so because I think you are profoundly right to note that “it will take time and patience to clearly lay out once again the intent of God for our bodies here. But this patient approach to teaching classical Christian morality is no different than, say, resurrecting the pastoral practice of private confession & absolution. It ain't gonna happen overnight.”

I disagree with you about the justification for embracing a lesser evil, but we can save that debate for another occasion... Thanks again for this contribution, sharing with you the hope that “perhaps those of us here in conversation can temper each other's positions.”

What then you ask....they may remain accepted, recognized, vindicated, relieved by their approval in ELCA. End your sorrows Paul. They have a happy home where they can roam free and live the lives they choose.

Isn't that enough? Why not join that parade and bring your Gospel of John to bear upon their lives. Why are those who follow a Biblical faith still not free from those that decry....what then?

Hinlicky writes:

"The way we handle apparent disagreements now sets precedents for what will follow."

Perhaps L-CORE should have taken such a statement into account before initiating the formation of a new Lutheran body.

This sort of post isn't helpful. There is plenty of blame to go around!

I. For Starters

I believe Mr. Kilcrease has said much of what I was going to say about theological disputation, and probably clearer, and that Pastor Nathan has injected quite a bit of light and gentleness upon the whole conversation. I will push forward in response to some of what Prof. Hinlicky has said in his most recent post because I do think this is actually a fruitful disputation, and we may be getting to the point at hand.

II. The Point At Hand

Prof. Hinlicky, you say above…

“I floated some time ago under the title ‘recognition, not blessing’ suggested that under carefully considered conditions (I won’t repeat them all here again) a pastor, and perhaps also a Christian community, could find some appropriate form of recognizing a same-sex couple on the grounds that, there being no other recourse in a fallen creation still awaiting the fullness of redemption, some goods in that union sufficiently resemble the goods of Christian marriage, while the threatening evils of the so-called ‘gay lifestyle’ are sufficiently destructive to justify this expediency as the lesser evil.”

I get your argument; I know you don’t want to bless homosexual actions out of what you know the Scriptures to say about them. What I don’t agree with is:

1. there is no other recourse than your proposal for these individuals

In short, preach the Law in all its severity, and the Gospel in all of its sweetness. I know why you won’t suggest blessing homosexual unions because I know that you know it is condemned in Scripture, and I rejoice over this. But, this is also precisely why I am utterly dumbfounded why you would propose “recognizing” them.

2. the goods in the union of homosexuals resemble the goods in marriage

As I, and many others, including Prof. Benne, have pointed out, this logic would much better apply to incest. How does your logic keep you from letting this “recognizing but not blessing” run wild. Homosexual behavior is clearly connected to bestiality and incest in Leviticus, which of course applies to Christians because these things are part of the natural law. In other words, you don’t need to have the Scriptures to know that sexual behavior between an animal and a man is wrong. You don’t need the Scriptures to know that sexual behavior between two people who are utterly and intrinsically incapable of procreation is disordered. The Word of God affirms and makes clear the natural law (of course it does a lot more than this)

Pastor Nathan is dead on: any goods that exist between two people in a homosexual relationship, are present despite the intrinsically sinful sexual behavior that they engaging in.

And this gets us to what you say next…

Hinlicky-“In Ramirez’s reading, however, I was without qualification recognizing sexual perversion.”

You haven’t read me right. I get that you don’t want to bless perversion. We all know that this is a qualification to your proposal of “recognizing”. I know you don’t think homosexual behavior is right, and I know that you know the church can’t bless it.

Hinlicky-“In reality, I called for recognizing fellow Christians as persons, and, socially, as a couple. Ramirez has me endorsing an intrinsically sinful act.”

This precisely gets to the point. First, the church doesn’t need to recognize any one as persons, it should be obvious that people are people. But to my point, and I think everyone else’s who has had beef with you over this…IF YOU ARE “RECOGNIZING THEM AS A COUPLE, YOU ARE IN SOME SENSE AND TO A CERTAIN DEGREE ENDORSING AN INTRINSICALLY SINFUL ACT. I did not put this in all caps to come across as yelling, but to draw attention to the fact that this is the heart of the beef with your proposal.

III. Still At A Loss

Here are the three points you have not adequately defended your proposal against…

1. Your proposal IS unbiblical. We are nowhere given license to endorse intrinsically sinful behavior as the church.

Hinlicky-“Pastor Ramirez can ignore the biblical basis for my real teaching that God mercifully accepts the contrite, even though their sin and its consequences do not entirely disappear in this life – a formulation directly derived from Luther’s teaching on justification, in turn largely based upon St. Augustine – both I think significant “fathers” of the Church, each accused in their own day and age of “innovation” in defense of the mercy of Jesus and the free grace of God.”

This really doesn’t help or prove your case at all. If I was a kleptomaniac, and fell back into stealing time and time again after repenting time and time again, am I still mercifully accepted by God? Yes, of course, I agree that sin and its consequences don’t entirely disappear from this life. But it doesn’t follow that if I struggle with this-even my whole life- that the church should “recognize” in some fashion my commitment to only stealing on Tuesdays and Thursdays because it is a lesser evil. No, the church should say, “Don’t steal!” Therapy doesn’t work for all kleptomaniacs, or pedophiles for that matter. But just because sin doesn’t disappear in this life doesn’t mean that you lessen the severity of the Law. Out of love for you neighbor, and precisely because you hope for their repentance, you preach the Law. We don’t want to recognize in any fashion intrinsically sinful behavior that is going to continue over and over again to the harm of that person’s soul.

2. The problem of novelty. And this, by the way, is the problem I am most interested in you addressing. Saying that Luther and Augustine were charged with innovation isn’t a case against what I have charged you with. I am saying that you have created an utterly novel teaching that has absolutely no support from the Church’s Tradition. Augustine and Luther when charged with innovation mounted a rebuttal with support for their position from the Scriptures and the Fathers. Could you please show me any shred of evidence, perhaps something that Luther or Augustine said, or any Father of the church has said, that suggests that the church ought to “recognize” homosexual behavior akin to your proposal. Has the church ever talked about certain homosexual behavior as “a lesser evil” to be “recognized” in some fashion? Or can you admit and concede that the church in all times and all places has had one clear thing to say to any and all types of homosexual behavior, “Repent and sin no more!” As one who has claimed the label “evangelical catholic” and especially in view of your adherence to prima Scriptura, I think it is your duty to answer this objection.

3. The Gospel. I saved the problem I am most befuddled with till the end.

Hinlicky-“if only Pastor Ramirez hit his real target, which, I fear, is the mercy of Jesus and the free grace of God!”
Did you not read what I wrote? Let me repeat it, “You wonder what the word of Gospel is to the homosexual. Wonder no more, it is the same word of Gospel that is for you and me, “Christ has paid for your sin, he died on the cross as the perfect sacrifice, you are forgiven.”

And what kind of question is, “what is the word of Gospel for…?” Fill in the blank with whoever you like and the answer is always the same wonderful word for all: Christ has died for you, paid your ransom, your sins are forgiven.

Jesus says, “I do not condemn you, go and sin no more.” I know what the Law of God is, and the Gospel of Christ.

IV. In Conclusion

By the way, I know that you, Prof. Hinlicky, have admitted that your proposal is not going to save the unity of the ELCA.

I don’t care about the unity of the ELCA, I care about false doctrine. I care about what you are proposing because I care about the conversation between the “conservatives” of the ELCA and Missourians. I believe we ought to be talking and fighting because we are all claiming the same Scriptures and Book of Concord.

Two sincere suggestions to all who engage in theological disputation:

1. Man-up. Zeal and “sharp words” betray tenacity for the truth that is virtuous. My anger and hatred of false doctrine is good. God hates false doctrine. I am rightly scandalized by such a proposal by a Lutheran theologian.

2. People play rough in a theological arena like this because it is not a pastoral conversation; it is not caring for souls on a personal level. What it is, is a place for theologians, pastors and lay, to knock around ideas and each other. Theologians play rough because they love the truth and they love souls, they love each other, and they know that this stuff is worth fighting over.

Sincerely,

Pastor Ramirez

Pastor Ramirez:

I appreciate the improved tone of this latest post, though I fear that in the end your notion of theological disputation is one I profoundly dissent from. I think as a result the conversation I will have with Pastor Nathan will in fact be more fruitful. I will save that for the end, however, and try to give you the benefit of a doubt in the meantime, trying to practice my notion of fair-minded theological disputation in response to the somewhat clarified objections you have posted.

There is more to the Christian life than preaching from the pulpit, and there is more to a preacher’s ministry than general proclamation. Care of souls concretizes and personalizes the word and promise of Christ, “I am yours and you are mine,” even where sin remains unacknowledged and/or stubbornly persisting. There is and can be no certainty of faith apart from this gracious non-imputation of persisting sin in the life of those who believe – for any of us, not just Christians who are homosexual. Our repentance, while real, is only partial and fragmentary.

Thus when I said that I fear the real, if unwitting target of your polemic is the mercy of Jesus and the free grace of God in which we can rest, at peace with God, I indicated what my “beef” with you is. Jesus means the freedom to go into dark and morally ambiguous places courageously to change what can be changed, gracefully to accept what cannot be changed, wisely discerning the difference, leaving final judgment and our salvation to God. But you seem to have no tolerance for such a Jesus, dying on the cross, to all eyes abandoned by God, bearing the sin of the world, since we cannot and will not fully repent until all things are made new. As the Lutheran fathers therefore taught against perfectionism, in repentance contrition suffices. And as Luther said again and again, “I am only talking to those who want to be Christians, who suffer from troubled consciences, who want to know how live in the world as they must before God.” This is where I am coming from, and where, I fear, you are not – though I will be happy to be corrected, if that is possible.

What I am getting at is that you finally clearly acknowledge one-half of the Law-Gospel dialectic in my analysis of this difficult pastoral problem, but then say you remain “dumbfounded” why I can still contemplate “recognition” of homosexual couples, when I know that Scripture does not bless such. I suspect here that you are not taking my language with the exegetical precision I intend. I am not using the word “blessing” in the popular way to mean “approving” nor the word “recognition” to mean “condoning.” I mean the “blessing” of Genesis 1:26-28, historically a key text in Christian, not to mention Lutheran theological anthropology. (It is, by the way, a terrible irony of the present moment in history that when finally we have overcome rationalistic prejudices to clearly see that the image of God resides in the partnership of the man and the woman who together, and only together, are to reflect the creative God of love in the care of the world, that modern forces of atomistic individualism attack this very partnership in no-fault divorce laws, in ideological feminism, and in the gay liberation movement.) For obvious reasons in any case, this scriptural “blessing” cannot be pronounced over a same-sex couple and so I have denied this possibility of gay marriage in a Christian context. “Recognition” on the other hand is not a scriptural term, but the concept is there, as in the aforementioned reference to Luther’s ‘joyful exchange:’ “I am yours and you are mine.” One would have to excommunicate homosexuals as such if such recognition were not evangelically possible. On the other hand, if it is possible, then such recognition in a Christian context takes us as we are, “just as I am without one plea but that thy blood was shed for me.” That acceptance will include homosexual persons in their unions, recognizing them but not blessing them (just as de facto we rightly recognize all sorts of us broken beings who live outside our heavenly Father’s will: the unscripturally divorced, unwed couples, those who have aborted or caused abortions, etc.)

I promised Prof. Benne that under current “church political” conditions not to go further beyond this evangelical minimum in explicating what I mean by ‘recognition’. This much however does make clear that such since recognition does not mean condoning an evil as if it were a good, but rather accepting a person in spite of persisting sin and/or disorder, my logic does not “run wild.” It is a concrete pastoral word, not the pronouncement of a new general principle. Until we have real unity on this point, there really is no point to talking further about the goods analogous to marriage that might be found in homosexual unions. On this, see my reply to Pastor Nathan forthcoming.

You say my proposal is unbiblical because Scripture nowhere gives us license to endorse intrinsically sinful behavior. I do not call for endorsing sin, but mercifully recognizing sinners still not fully made new. “Yes,” you concede, “of course, I agree that sin and its consequences don’t entirely disappear from this life.” Ponder this thought for moment and, pray God, ‘man up’ to it. Realize that for all of us our righteousness in the life consists for the most part in the forgiveness of our sin, as Augustine taught and Luther repeated. Ponder also the problem of an obsessive preoccupation with the sexual sins of individuals, an area of this troubled life where he who is without sin can cast the first stone. Ponder how every time our parishioners buy a lottery ticket, they bow down and worship the idol Lady Luck and ask when was the last time any of us “out of love for our neighbor, and precisely because of hope for their repentance, preached the Law since we don’t want to recognize in any fashion intrinsically sinful behavior that is going to continue over and over again to the harm of that person’s soul.” If you have to preach the Law like this, you are never going to get to the gospel. Instead of being an ambassador of Christ appealing for reconciliation with the God who has first reconciled us, you are going to be God’s Cop, policing the congregation in the name of God’s Law, but in reality making a pharisaic caricature of God’s holy Law, which is holy because it aims to preserve life, not burden or destroy it – even our distorted life. No, my friend, what is truly biblical is really to let the merciful word of the gospel have the final and determinative word “since by the works of the law no flesh will be justified in His sight.” So we pasotrs have the grace to enter into the dark places where only the light of Christ shines.

You also say that my concern to have a concrete word of Gospel for Christians who find themselves homosexual is a “an utterly novel teaching that has absolutely no support from the Church’s Tradition” and, as an evangelical catholic who holds to prima scriptura, I have a duty to answer this objection to novelty. Sure, in one sense, the very issue before us is novel. History continues. New challenges arise that had not been perceived before, like the rise of scientific world-view, the historical criticism of the Bible, and the progressive de-Christianization of Euro-America. Surely you don’t mean to deny this? Furthermore, I could show you a lot of evidence of how Luther in Christian freedom --and much to the scandal of contemporary sensibilities-- robustly included our sexual life, with all its problems and troubles, under the mercy of the creator God who planted this unquenchable desire in us in the first place (see my forthcoming, Luther and the Beloved Community, Eerdmans, 2010). I am trying to put these two observations together. Yes, such a synthesis would be “novel.” So be it. I don’t regard innovation which is faithful to be wrong, and I do regard failure to face the new issues of our day as disbelief in the providence of God and the Lordship of Christ over history.

But if we dig a little deeper, we would see that you take homosexual behavior simply, and I would have to say, simplistically as a sinful act. Yes, I do think there are many cases of sexual sin, including many homosexual acts. But even the revisionists agree with this. What we are talking about are the restricted set of cases in a Christian context, where after pastoral conversation it is clear that homosexual desire is incorrigible. I don’t see the biblical case for calling this condition with its consequences a sinful act, unless you are going to make Leviticus normative for us Gentiles of another day and age. I think biblically that such homosexual desire and its acts is more like a disease than a sinful act, a disorder not a crime. You want to say here, “Repent!” and I want to say, “Be healed.” So I raise the question of how to recognize those whose healing has not been granted, how these Christian are to bear their cross.

Finally, and I mean finally you come clean, when you declaim: “I don’t care about the unity of the ELCA, I care about false doctrine. I care about what you are proposing because I care about the conversation between the “conservatives” of the ELCA and Missourians. I believe we ought to be talking and fighting because we are all claiming the same Scriptures and Book of Concord.” Well, no wonder, as Pastor Nathan observes, we are talking past each other. I do care about the unity of the Church, even of the hapless, heterodox ELCA, though my love goes unrequited. I also care about a worthwhile conversation with Missourians, but I certainly don’t want to go down that evil road in which every little experiment in theological thought raises the specter of heresy and ecclesial warfare becomes a way of life. You say, “man up.” I say: “wise up.” Who died and made you pope? I do not fear one little bit to engage in disputation, but false words and uncharitable constructions derail disputation, in the process deluding those who think themselves to contend for true doctrine that they possess a superior insight which need not justify itself to the rest of us mere mortals. You yourself acknowledge numerous times in this post that you do know what I really intend, even though previously you ignored it and cast my words in the worst possible light. Thus you still owe me an apology – is that “sharp” enough for you? If it still isn’t clear what a contradiction you are involved in, recall your own words about telling the sinner to stop sinning. Yet here you justify sin: “Theologians play rough because they love the truth and they love souls, they love each other, and they know that this stuff is worth fighting over.” No, theologians play rough when for lack of argument they substitute bombast and ad hominems, and for lack of imagination they lash out in mean-spirited incomprehension.

I don’t see the biblical case for calling this condition with its consequences a sinful act, unless you are going to make Leviticus normative for us Gentiles of another day and age. I think biblically that such homosexual desire and its acts is more like a disease than a sinful act, a disorder not a crime. You want to say here, “Repent!” and I want to say, “Be healed.”

Your point is well taken Paul. We can find it echoed in many books of clinical psychologists that have suggested the addict of various forms are more victims. Attorneys follow it in prison cases to reduce sentence terms. No one is really responsible for their behavior. This is the medical professional model now being used to justify the position you take.

Reading the Gospels is a little more cut and dry however. There is another life beyond this one. The victim model does not work as well in this light, there are more important things - like forever. We are not looking for just a "get by with" proposition. There is a difference between justice in this life and justice in the afterlife. Could this possibly be the source of some confusion?

We were made for something bigger than this life. If it is about your rights now, I would see your position as being more normative. "Go and sin no more" was a sign of the greater life, more important reality shaping today, not the other way around.

Peace out.

Professor Hinlicky,

You wrote above, "“Recognition” on the other hand is not a scriptural term, but the concept is there, as in the aforementioned reference to Luther’s ‘joyful exchange:’ “I am yours and you are mine.” One would have to excommunicate homosexuals as such if such recognition were not evangelically possible. On the other hand, if it is possible, then such recognition in a Christian context takes us as we are, “just as I am without one plea but that thy blood was shed for me.” That acceptance will include homosexual persons in their unions, recognizing them but not blessing them (just as de facto we rightly recognize all sorts of us broken beings who live outside our heavenly Father’s will: the unscripturally divorced, unwed couples, those who have aborted or caused abortions, etc.)"

Professor, there was a man and woman who were considering joining our church, yet were encouraged to cease "living together" and actually be married prior to membership. My pastor worked patiently with them, over time, and with Scripture they came to see God's will, and did get married, and are current members at this congregation. They were recognized as people for whom Christ died for ("While we yet were sinners, Christ died for us"), yet were not welcomed into the membership until this was first made right--pastor did not condone living in sin, which puts two individuals in a difficult situatiom where it is way too easy to give into sexual temptations. They were not blessed for living together, but as in "Treat that man as an unbeliever", they were loved as we are to love unbelievers--to love them enough to share God's law but then also God's Gospel. They were loved to Jesus, and came to realize from the third use of the law, that we should desire to live lives pleasing to God.

If, in counseling, our pastor learns first-hand that a member of a couple is involved in an adulterous affair, he will convict him/her with the law, in a desire for him/her to repent, and turn from this sinful behavior. He will also explain that if he/she is not repentant, he will need to withhold Holy Communion from him/her. All this is done in Christian love and concern, hoping to win the man/woman back to God's desire for their lives. If one is excommunicated, it is not out of anger or hatred, but to point out to an individual after repeated refusals to repent, that they are unbelievers, not judgementally, but in full hope to win them back to the Christian faith. Should one be welcomed into a church if it becomes first-hand knowledge that they are members of freemasonry? First they should be confronted with the inconsistencies, that it's great to be thankful for the good things these groups do on behalf of children, etc., but their religious teachings--which in a sense make them a religious group--and their ceremonies are in contradiction to Christian faith and belief. We can recognize him/her as a soul for whom Christ Jesus died, and love them with God's love while hating their sin (and the sin which emerges in our own lives), but how can we tell them its okay to come on in without first first repenting and turning? A Satanist who is considering coming to God's side, having heard the Gospel, can be welcomed to persuing membership through a Bible information class/new member class, but we can hardly say "It's okay if you remain on the fence and meddle in Satanism and the Christian church simultaneously. We rejoice he has heard the Gospel, we listen to him and his life experiences, we teach him Christian truth, but we cannot remain indifferent on his current lifestyle as if it were indifferent to his new faith.

You wrote: “just as I am without one plea but that thy blood was shed for me.” Saint Paul wrote the believers in Ephesis "Now this I affirm and insist on in the Lord: you must no longer live as the Gentiles live, in the futility of their minds. They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of their ignorance and hardness of heart. They have lost all sensitivity and have abandoned themselves to licentiousness, greedy to practice every kind of impurity. That is not the way you learned Christ! For surely you have heard about himand were taught in him, as truth is in Jesus. You were taught to put away your former way of life, your old self, corrupt and deluded by its lusts, and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to clothe yourselves with the new self, created according to the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness." (Eph. 4:17-24 NRSV). How would you respond to this in light of those who consider themselves homosexuals--not merely in orientation (suspect to such temptation), but rather unwilling to remain celibate? Is the metanoia not to be a change on this side of eternity? If one has been the recipient of abuse (eg. incest, rape, etc.) he/she has been affected by a disorder which resulted from the fall of mankind. But if one is actively and willfully desirous and participating in a disorder, whether forced or not, this is not simply being affected (passive) from a disorder, but rather active in disobedience toward God, His will and command. He doesn't say, "in light of the cross, you are free to do anything you want or choose or feel compelled to do: my death and resurrection is the new default in your life and you have freedom to live however you like." That would be "cheap grace", as Bonhoeffer and others described it.

What really is homosexuality? It seems our society (and even the church) today is suspect of two men or two women who care for one another. Can they love one another with God's pure love, caring for their needs and lives without being tainted with sinful lusts and desires (including those of a sexual nature)? David and Jonathan cared about one another closely, yet Scripture does not teach that there was any sexual aspect to their relationship, or any impure thoughts, emotions, desires or actions. Can we not celebrate care, concern, friendship, brotherhood, sisterhood, without recognizing unnatural friendship (disordered, improper, inappropriate use of sexuality)? Or for those who do partake in such disordered relations (which God in His Word considers sinful), we can recognize them as souls for whom Christ died, in need of God's love, in need of metanoia (even as we are in need of change and conformity to Christ's image), whom we desire to hear, care for, speak unto them Gods Word of law and Gospel, teach, admonish (doing all things in love), and direct toward the welcoming community of God's family of believers (the Church). As changed by the Holy Spirit, they may fall into sin (I John 1:5-10), but may confess their sins (as does the church) and receive Christ's absolution. As believers they, like us, must die daily to their old Adam, and rise again, renewed in Christ. We should not condone their living together as soething we can condone, neither should we simply look the other way, as if it matters not to God--would this not also be "living in sin", subjecting themselves to a place wher they subject themselves to the difficulty of trying to not act on evil desires and temptations which are not from God? Let us recognize friendship, godly companionship, brotherly love (in a Christian understanding of this term), mutual care and respect, without in any way condoning that which God Himself condones. Asking fellow believers to refrain from impure, disordered relations (read: sexual) is not asking too much from a segment of society. My wife and I obstained from sexual relations prior to marriage, even though it was somewhat later in our lives, and we are certainly not alone in that. We encourage alcoholics to refrain from alcohol--not because we don't care about that segment of society, or want to put an unnecessary, heavy burden on them, but for their good, and the good of all.

Let us recognize friendship, godly companionship, brotherly love (in a Christian understanding of this term), mutual care and respect, without in any way condoning that which God Himself CONDEMNS / DOES NOT CONDONE...

Could you "love with God's pure love, caring for [your wife's] needs and lives without" sex? Sexual care is one aspect of people's needs, and abstinence doesn't fulfill it. That's half the point of AC23, regarding marriage of priests.

(Posted by Peter at December 06, 2009 13:55)
"Could you "love with God's pure love, caring for [your wife's] needs and lives without" sex? Sexual care is one aspect of people's needs, and abstinence doesn't fulfill it. That's half the point of AC23, regarding marriage of priests."

Short answer: yes, if necessary. In 2001 we were in a car accident, and it was just the two of us in the car. My wifewas hurt more than I. The good news: we both fully recovered, at least all is well with the occasional shiropractic treatment for ongoing maintenance. But suppose one of us was hurt much worse, which would preclude sexual relations. By simple definition, a marriage is between one man and one woman. We would then need to live without that one part which is normative and an expected and welcome part of marital relations. Would it be difficult? Sure, but with God we could endure such a difficulty. As it is, my wife and I were unable to have children. We are still able to live productive lives without children, although we would have preferred that blessing. But God knows best, and we trust His direction even when things don't seem to make sense.

Should "same sex couples" have to endure such difficulties? I don't believe the Bible presents us with the option of living together with a person of the same gender as a substitution for a husband - wife relationship. Sexual relations is not only not normative in such a situation, but deviant and completely out of place (as simple biology and human anatomy make clear). We dare not take what God expressly blesses, and then try to argue the same for the deviant, whether homosexuality, polygamy, incest, bestiality, etc. And even if a government should accept such practice as legal, alternative, or even praiseworthy, such never trumps God and His teaching.

Rik,

That qualified yes works out to be a no. The fact that sex is a "normative and an expected and welcome part of marital relations" means that you might be able to successfully avoid sex if it wasn't physically possible, but otherwise you wouldn't and shouldn't. Would any of you counsel a married couple to abstain from sex with each other for the rest of their lives? How about for childlessness? How well do you think counselling a barren couple that they should avoid sex for the rest of their lives go over? If you don't think that would go over well, you should reconsider saying it to a gay couple.

The reliance on one man/one woman as the definition of marriage is not Scriptural. We know that Genesis 1 is NOT normative for marriage because of the polygamy of the patriarchs later in the same book, mentioned without condemnation. This is even upheld in late parts of the NT like 1 Timothy, where the preference for bishops (not believers generally) is no more than 1 wife. The only other way to exclude homosexuals from marriage is to define it in regards to kids. However, would you consider your marriage any less of a marriage because there were no kids coming out of it?

When you speak of difficulties, we must consider what the Reformers thought of burdens as well. If we're the ones forcing them to bear such difficulties, that is the rule of men, not of God. The witness we have from our brothers and sisters in Christ is that they are called by God to care for their spouses of the same gender in EXACTLY the same way you are called to care for your wife and me for mine. That cannot be done by withholding sexual care from one's spouse. Just as our lives are more in order when we are sexually cared for, homosexuals' lives are as well. Acceptance of that sexual care encourages them to trust Christ's Promise of forgiveness and to tell others of that Promise. This clearly is not the case for incest or bestiality because those are not examples of sexual care. David Pross here, as well as others can tell you of the problems that result from incest. While I can't speak for him, I would be surprised if he could describe it as care without quotation marks. In the Gospels this is pointed out as well-- a bad tree cannot bear good fruit.

Peter has repeated this flawed argument on numerous occasions. The argument consists of two parts. First, Old Testament examples of polygamy undermine the claim of Genesis 1:26-28, which our Lord lifts up in Mark 10 and parallels, invoking God’s moral purpose in marriage to establish the life-long union of one man and one woman as God’s creative order. Second, the affliction of infertility calls into question the validity of such marriage, if procreative potential is one of its goods, according to the blessing of God, “be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it, and have dominion over it.” Both of Peter’s arguments are revealing non sequiturs.
First, as is well known to every pastor who has every taught Genesis to parishoneers, Old Testament narrative ‘tells it like it is,’ without moralistic embarrassment or embellishment – think of cowardly Abraham passing off his wife Sarah as his sister! This narrative realism includes the practice of polygamy by the patriarchs. If Peter were serious about what those narratives of the patriarchs and their polygamy were saying, however, he would actually look and surely see the tragic conflicts and sufferings resulting from polygamy, as in Sarah’s jealousy of Hagar and her eventual banishment into the wilderness with the rival heir Ishmael, or the disfavor the homely Leah suffers in comparison to the beautiful Rachel. But Peter doesn’t care what about what these stories really want to say, nor about the evidence they give of how Israel was trained by bitter experience to learn the will of the God of love, jealous for His spouse as His one and only love. What Peter evidently cares about is disqualifying the Church’s reading of Scripture as a canonical whole in order to normalize homosexuality.
Second, the same Old Testament narrative bears poignant witness to the experience of infertility as unnatural affliction, most famously in the story of Hannah, mother of Samuel, a story taken up by Luke the Evangelist to echo Elizabeth’s barrenness, who became the mother of John the Baptist. The right analogy to draw from this is that homosexuality is also an unnatural affliction, one that should be experienced with pain and longing for healing. But Peter repeats his cruel mis-analogy because evidently all Peter cares about is undermining the Church’s reading of Scripture as a canonical whole in order to normalize homosexuality.
The thesis lives on in the antithesis. One kind of fundamentalism replaces another. Peter's argumentation is the mirror-opposite of the "fundamentalism" which I have criticized in Pastor Ramirez's posts. A reductionistic "gospel" i.e. a gospel removed from the canonical whole, and so subject to the whims of its arbitrary contemporary interpreters, replaces the fundamentalist's question-begging appeal to the Bible as such. But it is the same instinct for a "knock-down" principle of argument which relieves us from the hard work of doing real theology, showing, sadly, that you can take the boy out of Missouri, but you can't take the Missouri out of the boy.

Dr Hinlicky,

The unifying theme between the "two parts" of my argument is the estate of marriage. As the Reformers taught, marriage is part of God's left-hand kingdom. God rules through malleable and changing human institutions with His left hand. That means what we bind on earth is bound in heaven and what we loose on earth is loosed in heaven and that God's Law of preservation and retribution is manifested in different cultures and societies in different ways. Government may be the easiest way to see how God's Law works differently in different times. Christ tells us to "Render unto Caesar" and Paul affirms Nero as the right and proper government in Romans. Does that mean our democracy (which has no explicit Scriptural foundations of which I'm aware) is not the right government?

Similarly, polygamy in the OT (and continued into NT times) was their practice of the estate of marriage. The problems between Sarai and Hagar are more clearly a result of failing to trust God's promise than from multiple sexual partners (and note that is concubinage, and not polygamy). Multiple wives are a footnote for Esau, and the problem there is not number, but the fact that he took a Canaanite. It's also not the polygamy itself in the case of Rachel and Leah that led to problems-- it was that Jacob did not want Leah. Despite that, he kept her as his wife and she bore his first 4 sons, including Judah, through whom Christ's lineage is traced.

I think the passages dealing with barren women hold words of hope for homosexuals. They depict marriages that "lack all the goods" and yet God provides for them. Similarly, even if you want to believe that homosexuality is a "disorder", those passages are announcements that God will create order where there is disorder. As the sexual order is marriage, it follows that homosexuals should express that homosexuality in marriage. What I care about is supporting the Church's reading of Scripture in the Spirit it was given to us, not just a reading of its letter. I don't think the gospel is removed from the whole of Scripture, but that it breathes new life into all of Scripture.

This is not what the Reformers taught, but it is very close to what Elert taught: that whatever happens is the will of the hidden God. That thinking led him and like-minded Lutherans right into the ranks of the liberal Protestants in Germany who welcomed Hitler as the new savior of the German people sent from God. No thank you, Peter. There is a moral purpose of God in marriage, according to Mark 10 and Genesis 1, which stands in judgment over all the sexual deformities and disorders of fallen humanity. As a result of this revelation in Scripture of God's moral purpose and the blessing which attends it, failing to trust God's promise manifests in behavior that refuses God's moral purpose, and refusing God's moral purpose is rooted in failure to trust God's promise. The hope that we can offer homosexuals and others who deviate from this is not the lie that their unions conform to God's moral purpose, but rather that in spite of the disorder, God mercifully accepts those who believe and overlooks the sin that persists in their lives, provided only that they are displeased with it.

What you are actually proposing is that within the estate of marriage, both man and woman are sinless in their behavior together. I would disagree. The estate of marriage was promulgated before the fall, yes, but since the fall sinners inhabit this estate. Therefore moral rightness/wrongness is not an issue since in God's eyes there are no righteous people..only sinners/immoral people. The estate of marriage controls, limits and regulates the sexual urge in that it is confined between one man and one woman, ideally. But both man and woman are sinners. Morality occurs before the neighbor only and though seemingly righteous according to norms (which are not recognized before God as making righteous)among the human arena. You misinterpret Elert esp. when he is so clear in his Das Christliche Ethos, that Kantian based morality or any moral system has no standing before God but only organizes humans toward ralative peace and security among themselves as sinners.

Unless a distinction can be made between how our humanly created systems of morality have no standing before God as measuring righteous/unrighteous (because before God there are only sinners). So to use Scripture as a basis for measuring morality among God's creatures sets up the arena as if creatures could discover rightness or wrongness which would have a standing before God. The only one who has met worth in this is Jesus of Nazareth.

Don't tell me what I am actually proposing, unless it comes from a careful reading and exegesis of my own words; this is Pastorm Ramirez's game of indicting me for a (faulty) inference he draws from my words that I do not intend. This kind of sweeping and imprecise accusation is the disease of the Misery Synod, uh, I meant Missouri Synod.

Danke, Herr Pfarrer.

Not all of us in Missouri are in misery.

"There is a moral purpose of God in marriage,..."

I am attempting to respond to words and what I "hear" from the posts. I am not responding to persons nor feelings.

In terms of Elert and his political leanings, his participation was within the more conservative branch of Bavarian/Erlangen Lutheran tradition. The so-called liberal branch were not the German Christians but those who sided with the Barthians at Barmen. Elert distanced himself politically from Hitler after 1938 as well as from the liberal Christians after Barmen. (I have studied and read Elert in the original language and find that many within this country completely misrepresent what he says. I find Elert to not only reflect the biblical tradition faithfully but also he reclarifies for modernity that our primary troubles of interpretation stem from how we express Christology in terms of how conscientious we are as to what the Formula of Concord has to say regarding Christology.) I appeal to the good senses of all seriously engaged Lutherans who are concerned about preserving confessionality here in America to study carefully FC articles, esp. 7 & 8.

As to the above lifted phrase having to do with the value placed on the moral and morality. I think a good idea is to open the discussion to what value morality has within Christian doctrine, if any. A good starting point is to discuss the issue of morality within the boundary of ethics. And since we are, I presume, talking about Christian ethics, the discussion needs to be discussed under the arena of God's law in which article one of the creed confines the discussion.
Issues of redemption via the second article of the creed are addressed to individual believers and are not to be generalized in terms of the natural orders.

Dr "Hinlicky",

The moral teaching in Mark 10 is specifically on divorce-- note well Christ's clarification that the problem is remarriage and the brokenness of the marriage relationship. Claiming that it must be male and female puts a contradiction in Christ's law that we love one another as our selves. The only way out is to define love as something that is not love. The other command in Mark 10:9: "Therefore what God has joined together, let man not separate." is also one that gets conveniently ignored in this context. It is God who joins homosexuals together in marriage just as He joins heterosexuals together in marriage. That's evident from the fruits of the marriage. By standing against recognizing homosexual marriages, we are standing against God.

"We know that Genesis 1 is NOT normative for marriage because of the polygamy of the patriarchs later in the same book, mentioned without condemnation."

Norms exist within sinful existence. What was established before Genesis 3 has nothing to do with norms since sin did not exist before history. Therefore what God has established as marriage between one man and one woman has to do with what God has established. What we sinners create following the Fall have to do with establishing norms for the purpose of relative survival of the species. But don't confuse God's clear directive prior to the Fall and what humans (always sinners) create within the orders.

Pr Ramirez,

What is your understanding of AC28, especially 65-78?

Paul, I am not sure you have connected with the real pain of the SSR community. I have heard it expressed by some of those members of their pain of being in that orientation and how they would give anything to be different. Are you in touch with that side?

For if you are, then you must accept the wider scope of the problem and be concerned about those who are children today but will be drawn into it, not by thier orientation, but by the picture being drawn that it is something, lo and behold, even now the church says is okay. Prime Time TV is being riddled with exposure with constant innuendos and suggestions from "I'm not but it's okay if you are." It has become the new public consitution that gays should hold political, educational rights and be counted as the next minority.

Jesus said of the children, woe to the one who causes them to stumble. What if the church had been openly using that policy to prevent this current cultural onslaught, thus reducing the pain of others in that lifestyle. Your stance makes these innocents more of a target than before. I am leary of your "Jesus concern" which makes further exploitation possible, and even......acceptable?

Doesn't the Church have an obligation by using God's Word to protect the innocents, those whom Christ calls as befiting the Kingdom? Your theology puts them at risk with misguided compassion.
Shame is an old word. It seems to fit here.

No, I am evidently not in touch with the pain of the SSR community, because I don't even know what the acronym stands for. Please inform.

In general, please recall that in my initial response to Pastor Ley, which began this long series of exchanges, I indicated by profound suspicion of the secular "Gay Liberation Movement," and some time ago I criticized the ELCA draft Social Statement for not even having the sleazy phenomenon of "recruitment" on its radar screen, just as theologically I have held that we dare not say God created me this way, i.e. gay, when it was Uncle Rapist who traumatized me for life. At the same time, a pastor can and must rigorously filter out all this political baggage and deal with the real people who come, in the context of Christian community, seeking help and support in bearing whatever cross God has laid upon them. That is what I am particularly concerned to see not lost in the cultural wars for which some use and abuse sacred theology.

On 12/1/09, Pastor Hinlicky ended his post witht the following paragraph:
What is the word of God’s gospel to those convicted by God’s Word that their same-sex attraction is disordered, particularly when in this life there appears to be no healing available, as I carefully laid out in my discussion of pastoral conversation with Pastor Ley? Repression is no word of deliverance, but casts struggling believers back upon their own resources, that is, back under the law. Therapy may help some, and the church that maintains the orthodox doctrine as a matter of integrity has to provide it. But it will not help all. What then?

MY QUERY OF PASTOR HINLICKY:
(attempting an analogy between the homosexual couple that you are attempting to provide pastoral care to, and the "woman at the well")

Are you implying that when Jesus told the woman at the well, "GO AND SIN NO MORE" that Jesus wasn't being pastoral enough?

No, what a stupid inference that would be.

Hinlicky- “But if we dig a little deeper, we would see that you take homosexual behavior simply, and I would have to say, simplistically as a sinful act. Yes, I do think there are many cases of sexual sin, including many homosexual acts. But even the revisionists agree with this. What we are talking about are the restricted set of cases in a Christian context, where after pastoral conversation it is clear that homosexual desire is incorrigible. I don’t see the biblical case for calling this condition with its consequences a sinful act, unless you are going to make Leviticus normative for us Gentiles of another day and age. I think biblically that such homosexual desire and its acts is more like a disease than a sinful act, a disorder not a crime. You want to say here, “Repent!” and I want to say, “Be healed.” So I raise the question of how to recognize those whose healing has not been granted, how these Christian are to bear their cross.”

We are getting somewhere. I believe this paragraph says it all. You’re absolutely right, I believe all homosexual acts are intrinsically sinful. They are fundamentally different than, let’s say, heterosexual acts. Of course, we even sin in sexual acts between married couples because of our fallen state, but these acts are not intrinsically sinful. The homosexual act is intrinsically sinful and perverse.

I use the word perverse to highlight the argument from natural law. Read Luther more carefully, he is clear that much of what is in Moses agrees with the natural law and the New Testament. Read Luther when he talks about homosexuality in the Genesis commentary, he knows that pagans know that it is wrong by nature. Again, I will repeat, we don’t need Leviticus, or the N.T. to tell us that homosexual acts are wrong. Much in Moses is affirming the natural moral law that is of course normative for us today. I personally think it is cheesy to quote the Lord of the Rings, but here it is so appropriate:

“[Éomer]: "How shall a man judge what to do in such times?"
"As he ever has judged," said Aragorn. "Good and ill have not changed since yesteryear; nor are they one thing among Elves and Dwarves, and another among Men. It is a man's part to discern them, as much in the Golden Wood as in his own house."

C.S. Lewis also often warned of the evils of chronological snobbery. Much can be abused by the cry of, “The times have changed!” Obviously we all understand that in some ways the times do change, that we must confess the faith every generation. But it is the same faith. Man and woman have not changed from yesteryear. Even though today’s modernist world revolts against God and His created order, man is man and woman is woman. Homosexual acts are NOT a new issue. The order of creation testifies against all homosexual acts, the Scriptures always condemn them in the most serious language, the church has always confessed that these acts are never to be tolerated, but clearly, for the sake of souls, condemned in the hope of repentance. Luther was no innovator, and neither was Augustine. To be an “evangelical catholic” means to actually have some catholic support, not vague principles concerning “freedom” from Luther, who obviously, by any fair reading of him, would roundly reject your innovation.

And how are homosexuals who have not been healed in this lifetime supposed to bear their cross?-In the daily dying and rising of baptized believers. The same way all we redeemed sinners live. I have not been totally healed of all my sinful desires, and neither have you or any other man on this earth. Unfortunately, you disagree with what the Bible says, and the church teaches, concerning repentance.

Hinlicky-“Our repentance, while real, is only partial and fragmentary.” Agreed
Hinlicky-“As the Lutheran fathers therefore taught against perfectionism, in repentance contrition suffices.” Agreed

However, it is impossible to preemptively repent of what you are planning on doing-that's no repentance! A man is not repenting who says, “I know its wrong, but I’ll just be in a monogamous, unblessable, disordered relationship that will continue for the rest of my life that is “recognized” by Paul Hinlicky.” You can’t say, “I’m going to repent of what I WILL do.” It is bad enough when someone says this before a singular act; how much more damaging to their soul is it if they were to embrace a preemptive “repentance” for an incredibly important facet of their life. You ask these people to drive out the Holy Spirit by asking them to seek to sin. You are asking them to harden their hearts to God’s Word, not to mention ruin the friendship they do have.

Persistent unrepentant sinning between two people (or any sin for that matter) logically harms a relationship. ie. If my wife and I lie to each other, it harms our relationship, especially if it is habitual, unrepentant, gross, and persistent lying. This applies to relationships where homosexual behavior is done. This is obvious to any who actually believes that homosexual acts are intrinsically sinful. Again, this gets back to your, Hinlicky's, inability, or unwillingness, to actually call a thing what it is. Your proposal does not help homosexuals in the least but rather softens the Law and discourages them from repentance.

This whole fight gets down to what you think about the Law of God. Whether you preach it, as Christ did, in all its severity, even unto excommunication. Whether you excommunicate people or not, when, and whether you understand, that excommunication (and the preaching of the Law) is an act of love for the sake of the person's soul. I preached on this very thing last Wed. Mary is so clear on this in the Magnificat. God's smashes the lofty...Why? Because He hates them...No, so that they too may become lowly. So they are stripped of their pride and loftiness. So they may repent and be forgiven. The homosexual who thinks its wrong what he does, but is told that him and Joe can continue on in their sin in a not as bad way, this person has not had the Law of God preached to them in the way the Scriptures speak, for he obvious doesn't get how much God hates sin. One does not excommunicate the Christian who struggles with homosexual temptation…but it does not follow that we need to recognize anything, least of all sin. Love them enough to tell them that the fire really is hot, that sin hurts, and that God is good and faithful to His children through His Word and Sacraments.

Situations of homosexual behavior are NOT morally ambiguous. The preacher of Law and Gospel, his task is clear before him. When we are confused about what we are to do, yes, we rely upon the only thing that we ever should rely upon, the sacrifice of Christ for our sins…and boldly go forward, knowing that even despite our sin we are redeemed. Somehow I doubt that Luther had anything in mind like your proposal of pointing men toward evil when he said sin boldly.

This all reminds me of Luther opinion on whether a man whose wife lost the ability to have sexual relations could thus divorce her or find some other way to relieve his sexual yearnings. Luther quite clearly says that if God gave him this burden, then surely God would not abandon him in his need. Now from a pastoral standpoint, this man may indeed fall into masturbation, whoring, or other sins, but you call him to repent, you definitely don't help him set up an arraignment with Sally the neighborhood prostitute and "recognize" it.

Trust in God's Word Prof. Hinlicky, pray, ask for strength. The pastor is called to bind and loose sins. This all goes back to trying to be more compassionate than God! The Jesus of the Scriptures indeed went to where the people “were at”. This Jesus cared for them, and loved them, and healed them. The Jesus of reality also called them to repentance. He did not temper the sharpness of the Law. He knew that true compassion comes from truth, the truth of our sin and perversion, and hatred of God, and the truth of God’s mercy in His only Son who died for this very sin. His Word leads men from darkness into light. And while we are not perfected in this life, Jesus did not hate those whom he loved and point them to evil as a substitute for good. You play a dangerous game, and one that leads to hatred of the living God. You don’t seem to trust the Word of God and its power. The Word of the Lord goes out, and does not come back empty.


I am honestly ready to be done with this squabble with you Prof. Hinlicky. You are unwilling to go along with the biblical, traditional response to homosexual behavior that Pastor Nathan, Kilcrease, I, and so many others (like the entire church catholic) have so clearly articulated. What you have argued, and most disappointingly how, is not congruent with any type of Lutheranism I recognize.

To be blunt, I thought you were an evangelical catholic, one with whom I would probably disagree on several issues, but one who actually respects our fathers in the faith. That is a necessary starting point for productive discussion between the conservatives in the ELCA and Missourians. I fear that much of your thinking is still captive to the unfortunate theology of the Seminex movement. I know, rather personally, how hard it is to escape this paradigm. But I pray that you rid yourself of its confusion of God’s Law and Gospel, its tendency towards relativism, its rejection of the created order, and most especially its seeking to impose its own standards of “compassion” and “love” upon the Lord who has died for us.

God hates sin more than you. He doesn’t point people to it. He calls them to a life of repentance. And He loves more than you. He loves enough to die for them, strengthen men through this life, mercifully picking them up when they fall, but loves them too much for them to become complacent in harmful, gross, unrepentant sin. He loves them too much to “recognize” some innovation from the mind of man.

Cheesy or not, you know you are losing the argument when you go fishing for quotes from Tolkien or C. S. Lewis to rebut a serious theological argument. Since you are in fact losing this argument quite badly, I am not surprised to hear you confess that you are “honestly ready to be done with this squabble with Prof. Hinlicky.” But you don’t get off the hook so easy. You have never apologized to me for misrepresenting my case, which I have time and again patiently explained, and indeed you repeat the same sinful characterizations in this new post, when you know better, as in your concessions: “Hinlicky-“Our repentance, while real, is only partial and fragmentary.” Agreed. Hinlicky-“As the Lutheran fathers therefore taught against perfectionism, in repentance contrition suffices.” Agreed.” Otherwise, you are just repeating yourself with rant and bluster. Well, I am tired of arguing with you too, since you can’t stick to the issue as I have defined it and keep shifting ground to accuse me of things I have never said. Let this suffice: I don’t doubt for a moment that “God hates sin more than [I do].” Which is exactly why the mercy of Jesus and the free grace of God is what we all – straight and gay— have to rely on. Would that you would grasp that in a radical and principled way!

Fishing for quotes…well I must admit the truth is worse, I am rather enough of a nerd to know these things by heart. (But not as big of a nerd as Pr. Hans Fiene, see his new article in Higher Things Magazine about nerdy pastors like himself)

It is really simple...

I have never misrepresented your argument. It's rather clear what you propose. All I have ever tried to say is this...

Hinlicky knows blessing homosexual relationships is wrong. Good!

Hinlicky wants to "recognize" certain homosexual relationships. Bad!

Why?

1. Because homosexual actions are intrinsically sinful and harmful to the soul.

2. Because fudging a little bit on the Law always winds up taking away the sweetness of the Gospel.

3. Because there is no such thing as preemptive repentance.

4. Because Jesus says, "Go and sin no more." And even when we fall into sin, we are to flee from it, not get comfortable with lesser sin or some nonsense like that.

Side note: When I say that you want to recognize intrinsically sinful behavior, I'm not misrepresenting your argument. I know you don't think all homosexual actions are intrinsically sinful, but I'm not trying to say what you think your proposal does; you've said what you think it does plenty. I'm trying to say what I believe your proposal does. I believe that I am right in saying that homosexual actions are intrinsically sinful, and that your proposal condones them. Ok, enough of the CPE moment, anyway…

If it makes you feel better I'll say this: Paul Hinlicky doesn't believe that his proposal is condoning intrinsically sinful behavior. Of course, we all knew this before, and I've never said anything to the contrary.

But here’s the rub, I DO think your proposal "recognizes" intrinsically sinful behavior, and I’ve got the whole church catholic on my side. I do think it condones sin, even though I know you don’t want to do that. I fully recognize that I am not arguing the issue along the lines as you have defined it. But that’s because you have an inadequate definition of homosexual behavior, (and what repentance is for that matter) and this unfortunately seems to lead you to entertain the notion that the church could “recognize” homosexual relationships in certain cases.

Well, I’m going to stick with the natural law, which even the pagans acknowledge, which is affirmed in Leviticus, and is recognized by the church catholic—all homosexual behavior is intrinsically sinful. You want to “recognize” couples who are engaged in intrinsically sinful behavior. Whether you like it or not, when you "recognize" a relationship that is habitually engaging in intrinsically sinful behavior you are saying that the intrinsically sinful behavior isn't all that bad after all. You make an easier road for Christians who are tempted by homosexual desires to remain in relationships in which they will unrepentantly and habitually engage in sinful behavior that will harm them. I am saying that in this you fail to preach the Law of God.

One last time:

You say: "Because homosexual actions are intrinsically sinful and harmful to the soul." But I have argued, in the restricted set of cases of which I am speaking, homosexual desire is found to be a disorder, not an act; and there, where healing has not been granted, it is a cross to be born by those living under grace in faith. Under grace in faith, one lives and so inevitably also acts in and through the disorder, and may do so, because the remaining sin is not imputed.

You say: "Because fudging a little bit on the Law always winds up taking away the sweetness of the Gospel." But I have argued that it suffices short of the eschaton to acknowledge that homosexual desire is not as it ought to be, that it cannot be blessed with the blessing of God in Genesis 1. Recognizing this, the church can and may recognize such redeemed sinners in the unions with which they manage their lot as something less evil than the alternatives, as something bearing at least some goods analagous to marriage.

You say: "Because there is no such thing as preemptive repentance." But I have argued, tacitly, that if there is no such thing as pre-emptive repentence, there is no such thing as living under grace, inclusive of Romans 7.

You say: "Because Jesus says, "Go and sin no more." And even when we fall into sin, we are to flee from it, not get comfortable with lesser sin or some nonsense like that." Aside from continuing to beg the question in points 1, 2 and 3 above once again, I have argued that this utopianism/perfectionism of yours posing as catholic Christianity needs a good dose of Augustine and Luther. You are far too simplistic about what sinful acts are in a world entangled in rebellion against God, and this pharisaical straining of gnats blinds you to your own recklessness and cruelty.

Of course, as you have endlessly asserted in such pastorally reckless and theologically cruel ways, you think de facto my proposal approves intrinsically sinful behavior, imputing to me an implication of my position which I have denied. If you actually want to refute me, it doesn't help to keep asserting your conclusion, when what you have to do is show that the arguments I make, under the restricted set of conditions I specify, fail. Instead of doing this, you simply keep re-asserting your conclusion. In short, you don't do the hard work of theology because you already have an apodictic answer. That is fundamentalism masquerading as theology.

A final thought: it is actually the fellow "Peter" that you ought to be "squabbling" with, not me. I think you two are two peas in a pod. You deserve each other, being mirror images of each other. As I wrote to Peter recently, your style of argument is proof that you can take the boy out of Missouri but not the Missouri out of the boy.

And, brother, in this rebuke to you, I am preaching the Law of God, which commands us not to bear false witness or take God's name in vain. You need real repentance of your fanaticism, cruelty and recklessness, not to mention your persistent misrepresentation of my ideas.

For the discussion of forgiveness and redemption and eternal salvation I have no doubt that your analyses is correct, in regards to the individual practicing homosexual being forgiven (or rather can be forgiven), redeemed and a saved soul, I am just as sure as you that they can be and are forgiven the same as everyone else who is forgiven and redeemed by the Blood Christ for the sins that they do and know and don’t know.

However, our agreement ends there.

Jesus does not relax sexual mores, he increases personal expectations so that even fantasy and desire to sin in the flesh becomes actual sin.
~Matthew 5:28
“But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart.”

~Paul doesn’t relax sexual mores, he increases the personal expectations of the Christian behaviors and condemns the sexual bonding of anything outside of marital relations between one man and one wife and he says we are not freed from sin so that we can commit sins of the flesh.
Galatians 5:13
“For you were called to freedom, brothers. Only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another.”

~Peter doesn’t relax sexual mores, he tells us to avoid all the temptations of the flesh, warns us not to succumb to the desires of the flesh and reminds us that the flesh we live in is not for our passions but for God.
1 Peter 4:2
“so as to live for the rest of the time in the flesh no longer for human passions but for the will of God.”

Christians are not to comply with or conform to or submit to the sins of the flesh just because we are freed by Mercy and Grace, forbidden sexual attractions and acts (of any kind, heterosexual or homosexual) and regardless if it is a disease or a simple act of disobedient sin (as per your dispute with Pastor Ramirez), are uniformly rejected by NT scripture. The penalty for failing this directive is not my issue here, the penalty is not up to us anyway, but the fact we are directed not to do it is enough that the church should not, in fact cannot, disregard those directives or attempt to overrule those directives of Jesus, Paul and Peter and permit what has not been permitted. The church would become the very stumbling block itself, where it would be better for the Church to have the millstone hung around it’s neck than to cause through misguided leniency more of the flock to participate and partake of sin. Heaven forbid the church shepherd should be guilty of the greater wrong than the wayward sheep are.

Actually, Pr Ramirez and I more or less agree on what you say and the implications; it's just that he thinks that's bad and I think it's good. The criticism you've gotten from just about everyone is that your idea is the first step in properly recognizing homosexual marriage. My objections are the flaws in your argument that stop you from properly recognizing homosexual marriage. A lot of others object that your argument will eventually lead to either my position or a universalist one.

The problem is that your confessional stance is irreconcilable with your dogma that homosexuality must be viewed as a "disorder", which you generally treat as a sin, because you view both as 'bad'. That leads to your 'we can recognize their relationships as long as everyone, homosexuals included, knows their relationship is inherently bad.' This view that both "disorder" and "sin" are bad, but different kinds of bad is exactly the problem with your arguments. According to the Confessions, and Scripture, there's only one kind of bad, and that's rebellion against God. The just consequences God has handed down for previous bad things are good, seeing as they are justice. Maybe not 'good' in the 'our lives are made easier' sense, but good in the theological sense. Certainly good in the 'we need to trust God's judgement in this regard and accept our punishment'. So even if homosexuality is punishment handed down for idolatry, I can concede that for sake of argument. Homosexuals are expected to live with that "punishment" and given everything else in Scripture and the Confessions, the way in which they are to do so is in marriage. It doesn't require first saying 'God punished me for my idolatry by making me gay'. Do you ask that out of couples seeking interracial marriages, which Scripture also soundly condemns? And yet, you condemn homosexual relations as bad, in which you now mean sinful, even if you're still using the word 'disordered'.

You know where you want to go (homosexuality is bad), but your roadmap is taking you somewhere else. When just about everyone else (especially people with radically different theological foundations) thinks your directions are leading you to a different destination than you intend, you need to reexamine both directions and destination. Are you going to fix your destination (homosexuality as a sin) and use whatever methods you can bring to bear to find that destination, like Benne basically told you to do, or take direction from the Confessions and follow Christ to whatever destination He has in mind, even if that is not what you expect?

"You know where you want to go, but your roadmap is taking you somewhere else. When just about everyone else (especially people with radically different theological foundations)[ read: the Church Catholic] thinks your directions are leading you to a different destination than you intend, you need to reexamine both directions and destination. Are you going to fix your destination and use whatever methods you can bring to bear to find that destination?

While the Confessions are certainly a theological guide, they are NOT scripture. First principles are first principles. All of this discussion would be moot had it not been for the insistence of the revisionists to advance a secular political agenda and superimpose it on church polity.

We are all free to live our lives as we may, but it is folly to suggest that our every whim enjoys the blessings of God Almighty.

As a father, I will ever love my children, but I do not unconditionally approve of their every endeavor. Love and approval are two different things, despite the conflations of the secular world.

"Gregory",

The issue of homosexuality has never been a first principle. The first principle of marriage is that we are called by God to cleave unto another and love, care and support that person in every way possible for better and worse until death parts us. It provides a firm grounding for the care and rearing of children, raising them with faith and teaching them to live in the community. Nowhere in there are homosexuals unable or unwilling to participate. They need to be included in marriage as well.

To continue using your own family as a model for God and His children, do you want your kids to find love and marry the person they fall in love with and with whom they will be for the rest of their lives? Would you-- could you-- describe this love as whim? Could you look at the benefits your child enjoys from being in love and then tell them that they cannot marry that person, or that their love is a lie? And by benefits, I mean that your child comes home with a smile on his face after being with his love, he knows peace where previously there was strife, and his boyfriend helps him fulfill his obligations, takes care of him when he's sick, and encourages him in the Christian faith when times look bleak-- in short, the kind of relationship you would hope he had for the rest of his life, were it a person of the opposite gender.

I never asserted that homosexual behavior is a first principle.

The focus of my post was that you seem to have worked backward from your conclusion. This is how the human mind works -- we make decisions based on emotion and then find 'facts' to rationalize that decision.

"Gregory",

I've tried to show how my position follows from Scripture as guided by the Lutheran Confessions. The Confessions attempt to outline the approach we must use to interpret Scripture. That's what I've done. This isn't ad-hoc, homosexuality must be approved, let's see how we can twist Scripture and the Confessions to support that. Based on Benne's response, it sounds like that's going to be how CORE does things-- homosexuality must be wrong, and it is the job of the theologian to justify that stance to everyone else.

Luke 6:41: v.41 "Why do you look at the speck that is in your brother's eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye?

Name calling and finger pointing aren't going to help much. The movement to change policy and practice -- to turn our backs on the church Catholic -- certainly predates the creation of Lutheran CORE. We all bear the responsibility of having allowed post-modernist thought, with its inherent relativism, to replace good theology.

I keep wondering: Since the revisionists have won the day, why is it still necessary to demonise the loyal opposition? I hope and pray that this is not the reality of the 'bound conscience' doctrine.

"Gregory",

I apologize for coming off as calling names and finger-pointing. Such is not my intention. I'm not trying to demonize CORE. I am trying to raise very serious concerns about the methodology, theology and timing CORE has chosen. If forming a new denomination is being the loyal opposition, we've already got the LCMS as the loyal opposition. What CORE seems to be forgetting is that "loyal" part of loyal opposition.

Even apart from my disagreement with the destination of 'homosexuality must be a sin', I find Benne's response very worrying for the future of CORE's theology. I don't describe it as a destination-first theology in an attempt to smear it, but to describe what I see happening. If all dissent gets crushed as name-calling, finger-pointing and taking the other side or reduced to trivial issues like 'what are we going to call the new denom', you're going to have a very repressive denomination. Maybe that is what is desired, but I suspect not. It's one thing to say 'we're not going to be the anti-gay, anti-ELCA Lutheran denomination', but quite a different thing to take steps to ensure that actually happens. All I see from here is that CORE doesn't want to be labeled as the anti-gay, anti-ELCA group. Without any work to ensure that they really don't end up that way, it just means hypocrisy becomes another descriptive term.

I also find it a bit odd that those who are planning on leaving expect a call to close ranks to be effective. Everyone who is leaving is rejecting the authority under which they used to live. If they leave the ELCA over distrusting authority, you know they'll leave CORE the moment they seriously disagree with CORE, too. The mark of trusting authority is trusting it even when you don't like the decisions that authority is making. A lot of congregations are demonstrating that they do not trust ecclesial authority other than their own.

Peter writes: "Everyone who is leaving is rejecting the authority under which they used to live. If they leave the ELCA over distrusting authority, you know they'll leave CORE the moment they seriously disagree with CORE, too. "

As well they ought. As Martin Luther was finally forced to do.


Ecclesial authority? What ecclesial authority gives over doctrine and practice to 700 or so (poorly) educated lay people?

The loyal opposition is loyal to the word of God, not the ELCA.

Sola scriptura -- sola fide-- sola gratia.

Sadly, the reality of the situation is becoming clear. A vocal, politically astute minority has hijacked the ELCA. I believe it will prove to be a Pyrrhic victory. Since it is a minority, it can only survive as a church body with the acquiesence and continued financial support of the majority. As people vote with their feet and their wallets (as they have done in the ECUSA), it's probably good that the reformers pushed for alliances with other rapidly shrinking church bodies, as they will all need each other to cobble together some sort of North American Liberal Protestant thing in order to survive.

I find an appeal to ecclesial authority especially odd in that the CWA made it policy that such authority (if you can call it that) now resides on the congregational level.

In effect, it's now every man (congregation) for himself.

BTW, it was most gracious of you to apologize. I wasn't personally offended, but it was a nice gesture, nonetheless.

Yes, Peter, I know that you and Pastor Ramirez “more or less agree” in rejecting the middle way I have been attempting to think out between your two extremes; indeed, you two really deserve each other in my view, and would that you did battle with each other and leave me out of it! Otherwise, I take you opening remarks in this recent post as little more than a transparent attempt to triangulate: If not back to Missouri ‘s dogma that homosexuality is bad, if confessional in adopting Elertian theology, then on with gay marriage. Get over your scruples, Hinlicky!
Nice try, but it cuts no ice. The distinction between sinful acts and diseased conditions is Scriptural; there are perpetrators and there are victims, even though in the web of collective human idolatry, crime and punishment are not in this life fairly distributed, which is why we await an eschaton to let a better Judge than we to sort it all out. In the interim, coram hominibus the innocent suffer the consequences of the behavior of the wicked who prosper, even though coram deo both oppressor and oppressed are guilty of their own concrete forms of disbelief, pride and despair respectively.
In this light, I am glad to see you finally make the following, huge theological concession to me: “The just consequences God has handed down for previous bad things are good, seeing as they are justice. Maybe not 'good' in the 'our lives are made easier' sense, but good in the theological sense. Certainly good in the 'we need to trust God's judgment in this regard and accept our punishment'. So even if homosexuality is punishment handed down for idolatry, I can concede that for sake of argument.” Thank you very much! This is indeed Luther’s “good of the cross.” I wish you would take this line of thought a lot more seriously and apply it rigorously to the case in controversy.
Here is a little help. Where we really differ is on what follows from this “good of the cross.” You take its sense in existentialist, individualistic fashion, so that it would require some poor soul to be terrorized by the always-accusing law to confess 'God punished me for my idolatry by making me gay' before she or he could be accepted in the church. Here is where your brand of Lutheranism, following Melanchthon’s psychological interpretation of the Law and Gospel distinction, really ought to go back to the drawing board! You and Pastor Ramirez agree on this: Let the Law terrify so that the Gospel feels sweet. The difference between you is that for you the burden of saying this in the case of homosexuality is so psychologically destructive that you can’t believe there is any real sin involved; it cannot be. So for you what the Law actually requires is Gay marriage. This is the mirror opposite of Pastor Ramirez for whom the Law rightly uses terrifying words like “pervert” to do just that work of psychological destruction so that the gospel can now come in, like a deus ex machine, to pick up the pieces in new lives of repression. Yes, you two really deserve each other.
Recognize this, please: I think nothing of the sort, since I take sin and its consequences socially, not individualistically, in accord with the classical doctrine of original sin. Therefore I don’t believe in terrorizing anyone for any reason. I further take the holy Law of God as constructive to well-being of social creatures in this life; for just that reason it is always accusing those of sin who do not wish to suffer life together in the creation of God, preeminently in the one flesh union of a man and a woman, open to new life. That is why I am always careful to speak of the universal sin of idolatry which plays out in some lives as the disorder of homosexuality. Accordingly, I envision pastoral conversation of those who live under grace, exploring the victimization which has led innocent children to homosexual self-identification. Even if such disorder cannot fully be healed in this life, recognition of the trauma inflicted is deliverance enough to make some good out of the evil; contrition in this case recognizes that ever present possibility that in acting out homosexuality one perpetuates one’s victimization and so struggles against this inclination. In this struggle against sin, there are lesser evils to be found and indeed goods analogous to the one-flesh union of male and female to be enjoyed. This is the possibility that I have raised, and if you want to call it the first step on the way to gay marriage, go ahead. Name calling like this makes no difference to me. It is just silly and unworthy of serious theologians.

"...if confessional in adopting Elertian theology, then on with gay marriage.

To P. Hinkley:
Your arrogance causes you to draw conclusions upon theology of which you have no expertise. It's apparent. You are drawing conclusions based on what you have heard from others who have erroneously interpreted Elert. Unless you have read the primary sources in the original language, you are bearing false witness against someone whom even Jaroslav Pelikan praised as the most Lutheran of Lutherans.

But the name in Hin-lick-y. Say that two or three times and you won't type "Hinkley" again.
I would very happy to see the interpretation of Elert's theology by Peter and his co-horts refuted. Fire away.
But it is a fact of history that Elert with Althaus welcomed Adolph Hitler as the savior sent from God to deliver the German people, that these two refused to cooperate even with Sasse and Bonhoeffer in the Bethel Confession, blindly refused the Barmen Declaration out of pig-headed confessionalism, and did not wake up to their errors until far too late. I trace that blindness to Elert's Nietzschified notion of the deus absconditus fating all things -- the very thing I see Peter doing in saying that whatever is is right, since whatever is is the ordering of God. If you can show that Elert's theology does not support these moves, it would be a service to all of us, and I will happily eat humble pie. And, by the way, why don't you tell your real name and stop hiding behind "readselertoo"?

The deus absconditus unmasks our culpability within God's natural orders. You confuse the issue. Elert, contrary to your bias, shows the biblical notion of the full extent of our sin as sinners who inhabit the orders where God's righteousness does exist in all the shoulds and oughts demanded of us. Unless you have read Elert's Glaube, you have no stand nor place to argue on this, P. Hinlicky.

I admit that it has been 30 years since I read Elert, but being the student of Bertram and Schroeder, I could hardly avoid it. Suffice it to say that from that period I have appreciated Sasse and Bonhoeffer more, worrying already way back then about the antinomian implications Seminex students were drawing from what they were being taught. If you can correct that as a fundamental misreading of Elert, more power to you. But I would hardly want to peg my position today on the nuances of Elert interpretation.

"But I would hardly want to peg my position today on the nuances of Elert interpretation."

Why not? The first part of Elert's Glaube as well as his prologue to methodology in the Ethos would clarify many issues regarding our (ELCA's) confusions. Esp. his discussion on how Kantian morality is a failure and yet we live according to its premises. Unless we as people come to terms with bondage of the will in that as we exonerate ourselves with our moral systems we wrest God's property as judge from Him. This is an act of the highest rebellion against God. We impose upon the Creator our conditions of right and wrong and expect God to bless them.

Instead what we do is measure what we consider to be what is right and wrong and try to convince others that our cleverly devised morality is judged by God as right. This again goes back to the issue of justification by means of our reason rather than standing under God's judgment in terms of his method of justification.

Elert tends to flatly reject utopian progress in all its forms. Whether it is progress in terms of cultural trends which would include the machinations of politics even politics within the so-called church. Elert's reactions go back to the premise that what the 16th century Reformation did was replace human need for security (religio) based on appeals to humanly created systems (ie. the medieval church's penitential system) with setting individual's directly before God's face and there each has responsibility for his/her total life before God's judgment.
This replacement actually was more faithful to the intent of biblical history (than what was previously the case in the medieval church) in that original sin was taken seriously as a problem for the individual and that accountability cannot be shifted to a churchly authority but must be faced as each individual must answer for his/her own life before God's face. The "shoulds/shouldn'ts of life are direct encounters with God's wrath in judgment. Humanly devised systems of morality (read Kant) have attempted to reduce the severity of the demand for personal accountability by shifting away from the God/individaul encounter to a value system by which we measure and build society into our own image. Since the 19th century's trust in progress in all things, we have come to ascribe divine value to our moral management systems rather than to undergo direct subjection to God within his court of law. Currently in some biblical exegesis once again we attempt to relativize the severity of our irresponsibility before God by critically examining the Scriptures for the direct purpose of changing their meaning so that we are exonerated. Rather than subjecting ourselves to God's management system under Christ's cross.

Incidentally, the Crossings conference near St. Louis, MO this coming January will engage specifically in some of these issues during the pre-conference matter.

The problem is that as far as the church is concerned,
"diseased conditions" really aren't its primary concern. The church's primary concern is sin, man's judgement before God and God's final Word on both of those problems. The other problem comes in how we try to decide what "diseased conditions" are. Even a few generations back, we might have said that being born black is a diseased condition and upon the eschaton, they will be healed into being white. Even today, we might say that people born deaf are "disordered" because they cannot hear. Can a deaf person live a satisfying life without ever knowing sound? Does the church look forward to the eschaton when the black person will be remade white? These are the different traits that God has given us, which makes them good, no matter how undesirable we may view them. If anything, viewing them as undesirable is opposition to God. That is something the church should be concerned about. The next question is how Christ empowers us to use those gifts. The two important words here being "Christ" and "use". Celibacy is a denial that sexuality is God's gift.

We probably do disagree on the "good of the cross". I don't think you accept just how good that good is. You seem to want the homosexual to acknowledge that he was abused at some point in his childhood (and please, repeat after me: correlation is NOT the same as causation) or somehow made gay and use this knowledge to fight against what he has become so that he can be closer to what God intended. I think the good of the cross is far more radical than that, literally transforming what once was loss into good. Regardless of any evil that may or may not have directly or indirectly occurred in a homosexual's past, the Christ-truster looks to the future, and one lived in and with Christ. That includes their homosexuality. Here, the pastoral conversation is not about evils, but about goods. How does their homosexuality help in the care and redemption of all that God has made? Here, homosexual marriage carries the same goods as heterosexual marriage, and is no more a lesser evil than any other marriage.

Part of this disagreement may come because of your view of the Law. I think it forgets "lex semper accusat". The Law terrifies of its own accord because it points out our failings and our shortcomings, and that these are symptomatic of our rebellion against God. The Law is useful for ordering society, but that's also not the church's problem. The church is needed where the Law condemns. Even Christ tells the Pharisees in Mark 2:17 "It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners." If people are all right in their relationship with God, they don't need either Christ or the church. At this point, it almost sounds like you're suggesting that church is just about us figuring out what God's law is (or more simply, which laws are right). Were that the case, the Unitarian Universalists probably have the right approach.

"...suggesting that church is just about us figuring out what God's law is..."

There is some truth in the above statement. Although it is not the church's main responsibility to clarify what God's law is and does (lex semper accusat). But unless the church comes to terms as to what depth the lex kills, the Gospel is emptied of its power,ie. the benefits of Christ are not magnified, as Melanchthon places it in the Apology. To discover how much Kantian morality and its structures have reduced the severity of the lex, simply look at how the church as well as society use the 3rd use of the law to smooth out the severity of God's judgment by positing sinners as able to come to some resolution to their sinful life outside or beyond that of Christ's reconciliation. Sanctification is not somehow a step after justification of the sinner as if there is a place for the completely redeemed person to now formulate a program of good works (self-created good works)
which build upon one's so-designed new status as redeemed. This is the Calvinist method (as well as RC method) in dealing with a so-called new life outside/beyond that of Christ's relationship with sinners. The Lutheran understanding of sanctification has more to do with magnifying what Christ's cross does for sinners in that as sinners grow into a more exposed life in which their own lives are unveiled to themselves and to God, that sinners rely more on Christ's cross for their redemption. Sinners rely more on the fact that the Living Savior's actual life in and among them is to serve them with what he has won for them from his cross. Incidently, good works are ventured works in that sinners do not know whether their activity is righteous in God's sight or not. That is where faith comes in.

Currently, the ELCA with its stress on social statements and public opinion in formulating political engagement as an institution errs in that it is becoming more of a political action committee (one among many) which sees its sole purpose as serving the needs of a certain segment of society rather than focusing on its primary task in mission to the Gospel.

Having said the above, I stay within the ELCA because I think it welcomes more critical engagement with the above issues than any other Lutheran entity in America.

God's blessings.

readselerttoo,

I generally agree, though I think there is a very strong tendancy among what people call traditional and conservative Christianity to make the focus of the church God's Law. When it's the focus, it, rather than the Gospel, becomes the method of salvation. That isn't to say the church should completely ignore the Law, but that the Law is not the primary focus. I do think that church needs to accept the Law in all of its severity (though this seems to be where Dr Hinlicky disagrees... and that may be due to his emphasis on the law to counteract what he sees as antinomian tendancies, which leads him directly into Pharisaism, complete with worrying about disorders vs sin and all).

I agree that the ELCA is becoming a social action committee, and that this is undesirable. The big question is how we help the ELCA remember its primary focus.

Pr. Ramirez, you might want to check with Kilcrease and/or Nathan to see if they go along with your black and white...I recognize the angst (as pastorally Lutheran) Hinlicky is working through on this one even though I am not where he is. No, I am not a pastor - have my M.Div. and have counseled with and presided at the funeral of a gay friend.

"...but these acts are not intrinsically sinful"

Sinners inhabit the estate of marriage. There is no room for making a distinction in terms of intrinsically sinful vs. extrinsically sinful. St. Augustine: Non posse non peccare..It is not possible not to sin. The estate of marriage is only for one man and one woman. God has established the estate of marriage to control and limit the sexual urge between those who live within this estate. This is both a protection for those who inhabit the estate as well as protection for those within society since marriage is a public estate. The limiting and controlling of the sexual urge through the estate of marriage manifests itself only within the realm of God's law. Redemption before God is mutually exclusive from this arena. ie. issues of soteriology have no validity for the estate itself only for those individuals who inhabit the estate. (See Melanchthon's Apology and the discussion under his commentary of the marriage of priests first publicly offered for a hearing via the Aughsburg Confession. sThere is no such thing as an estate of marriage for same=sex couples. So therefore the comparisons being made are between apples and oranges. ie. no such arrangement for measurement of comparability is possible.

"readselerttoo",

How do you define an estate? Can you justify democracy and monarchy in the estate of government by the same principles that exclude homosexuality? Or for labor, can you locate Communists and socialists there?

An "estate" is a configuration of existence in which people cannot trade places with another. In other words, for example, I am the first born son of my father and mother. In this case there is not another person who can take that place. Same goes for my younger brother. We cannot switch birth order, actually and factually. (I suppose I could dream up all sorts of ways to make a change with the court of record, but that would not change the actual situation that I and no other could take the place of my situation as first born son of unique parents or older brother of my own younger brother.) The same issue in terms of marriage. One designated man and one designated woman enter into a configuration of existence where neither individual can switch with another or take the place of the other. The estate places us as unique people in all sorts of relationships but according to the (God created and blessed) natural orders, ie. family, marriage, race, etc.

There is no such thing, factually/actually (it is not qualitatively proscriptive) as an estate of marriage for same-sex unions in God's eye, ie. God's law.

How all the above applies to your question is for you to determine.

On what grounds do you think there is no such thing as marriage between homosexuals? Because it must be one man/one woman? That's not how that estate was configured in ancient times. Jacob held two wives and nowhere does it condemn him for taking a second wife. His condemnation is rather that he doesn't love his first wife enough. I think it fits your definition as an estate, because they had to be married in the order they were and there were no others. Similarly, with homosexual marriage there cannot be another in place of either partner. The configuration of their sexuality is homosexual; most cannot alter or change that any more than either of us could change being first-born.

NT scripture proved it already and you ignore it there so what would the point be of having someone else telling you again here? But other people read these forums and may be influenced by your misdirection.

Marriage, as ordained by God and reaffirmed by Christ, is the life giving relationship that comes only between a Man and a Woman, or Christ and the Church. Homosexual marriage recognition would represent a non-Christian union, brought on only through a self idolizing or self aggrandizement focus, which is condemned by NT scripture, instead of a focus on Christ as marriage is commanded to be. In the same way that Christ can not be homosexually inclined, or the church would be lost, and the church can not be homosexually inclined or Christ is forsaken, Christian marriage can not be defined in any way other than what is clearly described and defined and commanded in the NT scriptures, one man and one woman.

Pretending that Paul didn't condemn homosexual acts so that you can distort his marriage directives and marriage commands for other purposes is either purposely ignorant or naively dishonest. Pretending that Paul and Luther

A homosexual marriage is like a church that is attracted to itself instead of being attracted to Christ. Homosexual marriage advocacy is like the rich young man that asked what he needed to do to be saved, and when Christ told him he had to leave it all behind and follow him, he left Christ dejected. He wasn't rejected by Christ but he couldn't leave the desires of the flesh (either money and worldly wealth or sexual desires of the worldly flesh in this situation), he was not willing to give up the things of this earth for the sake of following Christ.

Against all reason you argue as if the homosexually inclined person can only have physical contact with a person with the same genital appendages that they have. But the assumption is self-idolization and idol worship of the creature, the physical body is not damaged by following the directives of the NT scripture. A marriage between a man and woman is more than able to satisfy all the physical requirements and needs of the flesh, it is the sexual fantasy and desires of the individual that leads people away from Christ approved marriage and faithfulness. It is dishonest to claim that this is a choice between allowing homosexual marriage or promiscuity. This is not a question of celibacy in the pulpit, its a red herring argument to suggest otherwise.

James,

If the early Christian communities put the same emphasis on Mark 10 that some do, why does 1 Timothy recommend no polygamy specifically for bishops? And given the practical concern showed there (the bishop should be married because managing the church requires the same skills as managing a household), we can't even say that the recommendation against polygamy is simply on the grounds that the bishop wouldn't have enough time to simultaneously properly love/care/attend to all his wives and manage the church?

While I contest that arsenokoites and malakoi are properly translated 'homosexual' (note well that Luther did not translate them as such), I don't contest that Paul sees homosexuality as a problem in Romans 1. However, Paul's understanding of homosexuality is entirely a result of his 1st century culture-- the Zeitgeist of that age. Even then, Paul takes homosexuality only as a symptom of deeper idolatry.

There is also a lot of danger in assuming that Christ and Church model specifically requires one man and one woman. Women were treated much, much differently back when Ephesians was written, and it is those roles that Ephesians specifically venerates. That complete subservience of one gender role (the woman) to another (the man) is even more important to that analogy than the genders of the people fitting into those gender roles. There are heterosexual marriages where the woman fits more of the roles traditionally assigned to men while the man fits more of the roles traditionally assigned to women. These marriages are no less marriages because the gender roles are reversed-- both are fulfilled. Likewise, there are marriages where some of the only some of the roles are reversed-- maybe the woman takes out the trash and the man cooks. Do you believe that it is an abuse of marriage if the woman is the primary breadwinner? How would that hold to the analogy of man=Christ and woman=church, if the woman is the one supporting the family?

And yet, even though our gender roles have changed since the 1st century, that doesn't mean marriage can be any less focused on Christ. Ephesians 5 can still speak to us, and I would wager there are a lot of married homosexuals who see direct relevance of Ephesians 5 to their marriages. On the subject of Ephesians, though, I think 2:11-22 is relevant to the ELCA as a whole today, especially if you substitute "homosexual" for "Gentile" and people of Israel for everyone else.

How many homosexuals have you met and talked to about their relationships? Your last paragraph suggests that this is largely theoretical to you, especially when you write "as if the homosexually inclined person can only have physical contact with a person with the same genital appendages that they have." The relationships homosexuals enter into are just like the ones we do and for the exact same reasons. They fall in love with other people, just like we do. The only difference is that the person they fall in love with is the same gender as they are. The depth of love, desire for physical, emotional and spiritual intimacy and everything else are the same. Trying to tell a married homosexual that he has the wrong spouse is the exact contradiction of Mark 10-- "what God has joined together, let no man separate." For homosexuals, partnering with someone of the opposite gender does not "satisfy all the physical requirements and needs of the flesh". This isn't just a sexual fantasy for homosexuals... it's as much a part of them as the sexual desire in either of us for women. Sexual fantasies are not sufficient to support 35 or 50 years of marriage, and yet there are plenty of homosexuals who have been married to their partner for that long.

Peter, again you erroneously equate direct experience with homosexuals with a basis for building doctrine. The homosexuals you know may well be very nice people. Though I haven't seen him in a long time, I know an MSW (may be DSW by now) psychotherapist who is homosexual. He is very competent at what he does and quite genial.

However, that does not provide a cogent basis for changing Biblical doctrine regarding homosexual behaviour.

I could list my own direct experiences with homosexual individuals, case studies, clinical reports, etc., until it would clog ALPB's bandwidth, but that still would not provide justification for your interpretation of Mark 10.

Just because they love each other does not provide Biblical sanction.

David,

Actually, here I don't think I'm arguing that experience replaces everything else. My point here is that many of James' contentions in his last paragraph are inaccurate and I think direct experience with the people in question and especially in how they treat their relationships would rectify that.

I also disagree on your statement about loving each other. Christ tells us that love of God and neighbor sums up the entirety of the Law and the prophets. Christ even goes one step further and demonstrates that love to us through His life and death on the cross. When two homosexuals speak of love for one another, they refer to that example exactly as much as two heterosexuals do.

You assume that because Jacob and the patriarchs were unwise in their ethical choices that somehow they are exonerated from God's law. The patriarchs were chosen by God not because of any intrinsic ethical behavior along the lines of God's law but because God chose them to be faithful to according to his promise.
That doesn't mean that God's estates within the natural order can be manipulated by human reason and then apply the ascription that God accepts those changes and blesses them. The patriarchs ethical behaviors were more than reprehensible. But God chose these people to be faithful to not according to how they behaved, but according to his promise of faithfulness. But God's natural orders in which we sinners are placed are not exempt from retributive justice, either.

No, I think the OT (and NT) polygamy is evidence that marriage is not required to be one man/one woman. Where does it say that Jacob made a poor ethical decision in marrying Rachel? His condemnation is for not loving Leah enough rather than for loving Rachel, too. Similarly, Esau is condemned not for taking multiple spouses, but for adding a Canaanite woman to his harem.

I think you're also incorrect about the malleability of estates within the natural order. Government is the best example of this. Representative democracy is not a Biblical concept, yet that doesn't mean the estate of government does not apply to the current US government.

Peter: what you say confuses estates with power which is operative within the estates. Orders/estates are not malleable. But how humans(ie. sinners) operate within these estates, that is
the powers operative there, are malleable. To use your example, representative democracy is how governmental power is exhibited. Democracy, technically is not an order but a ways and means toward organizing people, a power which operates within God's
left hand realm, the civil ORDER.

Thank you for clarifying the difference estates and the power operative within them. However, I think marriage as an estate is more about organizing family than it is about specifically being one man/one woman. One man/one woman is a means towards organizing people in regards to a family. However, two men can function as well as a one man/one woman towards organizing a family, too.

Part of the thing is that I keep coming back to Elert's description of estate as "where I stand" and Luther's "Schoepfer-ordnungen" (not "Schoepfungs-ordnungen")-- the difference being translated as "Creator's ordainings" instead of "Orders of creation". Both imply that our understanding of estates is based on our (sinful) observations, and that the concept of estates must describe us to be of any use at all. If the estate of marriage relies on one man/one woman, it fails to describe both polygamy and homosexual marriage. Yet with polygamy, we know that family was affirmed in that manner. Even understanding the word "polygamy" requires understanding marriage.

Never thought I would be siding with Paul Hinlicky on a Social Ethical matter. Along with good pastoral care, it is a social ethical question he addresses in his openness to recognizing gay civil unions – a recognition of God’s governance in the Kingdom on the Left. But no surprise that a left-wing Democrat like me would have a friendly disagreement with Robert Benne on this range of issues. It is even less of a surprise, though, that these two colleagues exploring schism with the ELCA in accord with the CORE agenda would come to disagreement. That is the history of “true-believing” splinter groups which secede from “impure bodies.” Having demonized the opposition, the “reformers” begin to insist on absolute purity from all their members, purging the impure again and again and finally after enough schisms fading into obscurity. Ever hear of the movements of Carl McIntire and Knut Lunkeberg? If not, it’s because of the pure-believers only syndrome of their “reform” movements. So be careful, Paul, of the implicit threats in Prof. Benne’s comments. Everyone with a liberal socio-political bent needs to be careful that the free-market agenda of the Right will not ultimately be calling the shots in CORE. I’ve already had one of its other admirers warn me of the evils of quotas. Of course it all fits together when you violate the Two-Kingdom Ethic as many CORE proponents have, bracketing appeals to science and the natural law to adjudicate social policies regarding homosexuality and instead in the traditions of American Puritan/Reformed theology righteously quote Scripture to authorize your social ethic. That’s the way the Right engages public policy issues.

Now before readers brand me as one of those Post-Modern pro-ELCA policy sympathizers, read my latest contributions to the Forum and elsewhere. Note the lumps I’ve taken from the Chicago hierarchy for my perceived critiques. Actually I wasn’t criticizing ELCA staff with whom I had dialogue at all; I was just engaging in quests for truth from a Kingdom on the Left perspective. That’s the spirit of the questions that follow.

Speaking of quest for truth, the occasion of the Benne-Hinlicky dialogue raises two brief questions which I am addressing to both of these colleagues, all the respndents to thsi debate, and to all our CORE-related friends: I just don’t get the continued appeals of CORE officials to Scripture in order to make the case against the ordination of practicing homosexuals. I am still looking for a hermeneutic which explains why be insistent on the authority of texts like Romans 1:26-27 and other pericopies referring to homosexuality, and not be as outraged about all those women preaching (I Timothy 2:10-11), having bare heads (I Cor.11:10-13), all those uppity heirs of slaves (Col. 3:22; Titus 2:9), and the fact that we have actually had divorced Bishops serve in our predecessor bodies (I Timothy 3:1-2). Do we Confessional Lutherans really believe that all that is in Scripture is the Word of God for us?

My second question in view of their disagreement would be to ask both Profs. Hinlicky and Benne and any other CORE members to react (I’m still waiting for a response from Word Alone staff) to Luther’s views on this matter. Surely all the Luther-Scholars associated with the movement have grappled with this text:

My rule is this: One must deal prudently with the laws of Moses for his rule in marriage matters is of a completely different character than ours...

This is why Moses’ law cannot be valid simply and completely in all respects with us. We have to take into consideration the character and ways of our land when we want to make or apply laws and rules, because our rules and laws are based on the character of our land and its ways and not on those of the land of Moses… (On Marriage Matters, LW 46:291)

In view of the preceding data, is what to make of gay relationships really all as cut-and-dried on theological grounds as both sides in our debate say it is? Can somebody help us sort this out by going beyond ideology and internal disputes, by really grappling with the preceding theological and hermeneutical issues along while taking into account scientific findings pertaining to homosexuality, as the Two-Kingdom Ethic mandates us to do? Grappling with those matters might just lead to a kinder, less schismatic, more Confessional Lutheran discourse and outcome.

Thanks for chipping in, Mark. I will take any support I can get, but don't let appearances deceive you. The fact that I am getting pounced on from the left and from the right on this blog is because I, like you, reject the Protestant-Puritan theology in which they (yes, even the LCMS perfectionists) frame the debate. But also I reject, as I think you do too, the existentialist, gospel reductionist ignorance of the "social sense of all the basic Christian concepts" (Bonhoeffer, Sanctorum Communio) masquearding as genuine confessional Lutheranism. Bob Benne, whose arguments are not biblicistic and sub-evangelical (as no less an opponent than Chris Scharen has stated), also rejects both existentialism and biblicism alike. He was in grouchy mood when he wrote that piece criticizing me, but I cut him plenty of slack. He, like I, has a long list of grievances against the ever-more liberal Protestant ELCA, with this summer's democratically staged coup merely being the straw that breaks the camel's back. I will let others answer your questions for themselves and enjoying watching some of them squirm with the hypocrisy of drawing the line on the necks of a vulnerable sexual minority while ignoring the LOG in their own heterosexual eye (sorry for mixing metaphors like that). Only one little quibble with what you wrote: it is not the protesters and resisters who are schismatic and mean-spirited in this debacle. It is Goodsoil and their likes which have brought this ecclesiastical shipwreck about. Don't blame the victims who are now being asked to shut up, pray and pay.I am with them politically. I will neither shut up nor pay, and I hope to make them pray.

“I just don’t get the continued appeals of CORE officials to Scripture in order to make the case…
Do we Confessional Lutherans really believe that all that is in Scripture is the Word of God for us?”

Confessional Lutherans are not supposed to make appeals to scripture for discerning rules for their church? I wonder what Martin Luther would say about that?

I think a part of the Reformation just died. Or it died previously and I was sitting with a dead body in the room.

Jim,

I agree with your concern about taking advice from Luther and the Reformers. We should be informed by our Lutheran heritage in how Scripture bears on the debate. Read again the quote I cite from LW 46:291 and grapple with that. Of course, these words are just Luther's private opinion. But consider what the Two-Kingdom Ethic has to say about using Scripture in making social ethical judments. (Will be glad to give you other refernces for that if you're interested in doing the research.) But then read the other Bilbical texts on women and slavery that I cite. Help us develop a hermeneutic that allows us to read those texts in a way consistent with the manner in which you and CORE sympathizers want to apply Romans 1:26-27, I Timothy 1:10, and the like. Look forward to further dialogue with you and others on this hard theological data. matters.

Try as you might to move the question away from where it belongs, which is, present to us affirmative passages in support of the non-heterosexual marriage covenant as an ordained by, or even in some measure an indifferent question, for scripture? But instead of finding affirming passages to support your position (since there are none) you are left needing to discredit the passages and sources of the opposition. And first you try to discredit the rule of Moses and Moses’ version of marriage and rules of sexual conduct.

It is clear that the OT passages of Law have been completed and partially left behind, but we also know that Jesus has reestablished some and added to others, every time we find Jesus saying, “But I say to you” he adds new directives for how we are to follow them and him, and on several occasions he reaffirms the commandments as rules he expects people to follow, heterosexual marriage being one of them. No one can rightly describe that the laws of Moses and Leviticus are for a different generation entirely or are somehow obsolete, regardless of what time we live in, not in our time or any time for mankind… If it was not so, then you would call into question all of it and none of us want that, Such as;

Leviticus 19:18
”You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against the sons of your own people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the LORD.”

And Jesus reaffirmed what it says and Paul and Luther both unquestionably endorsed it… Mark 12:31
“The second is this: 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.' There is no other commandment greater than these."

Regardless of that issue though, I’m not one that was defending Christian marriage with the Laws of Moses, there is no need. The NT scripture with Jesus, Paul and Peter are more than sufficient to explain Christ’s expectations for us and our sexual morality and our heterosexual marriage covenants in his name.

Jesus reaffirms the heterosexual and monogamous marriage covenant as designed by the Father from the beginning, predating Moses and the Law and stretching that ideal up to his new covenant for us. In the same manner that Jesus does not attempt to overthrow all of the expectations of individuals behaviors, and especially sexual behavior expectations from Moses Law, Paul goes further to define for us what is and what is not acceptable marriage covenants and behaviors for the Christian so there is no question left unanswered if only we accept the scriptural testimony and apply it to ourselves. We keep our freedom in Christ but we keep our flesh for God, not for ourselves.

As to your allusion regarding the issue of oppression of slaves and women, your implication is misplaced because the NT scripture is abundantly full of further enlightenment on those issues and show the true meanings elucidated.

Galatians 3:28
There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.

In regards to women and slaves, there is no Christian constraint to oppress anyone, as to how that regards the slave to homosexual actions, they are free in Christ too but their flesh is bound to the slavery of itself, not oppressed by us. They are free to choose any options that Christ grants them through the NT scriptures, but they are not free to choose sexual immorality, our freedom was not granted for that.

1 Peter 4:2
“so as to live for the rest of the time in the flesh no longer for human passions but for the will of God.”

"Regardless of that issue though, I’m not one that was defending Christian marriage with the Laws of Moses, there is no need. The NT scripture with Jesus, Paul and Peter are more than sufficient to explain Christ’s expectations for us and our sexual morality and our heterosexual marriage covenants in his name.

Jesus reaffirms the heterosexual and monogamous marriage covenant as designed by the Father from the beginning, predating Moses and the Law and stretching that ideal up to his new covenant for us."


Thank you for bringing this into the open. Yes, for us to build standing ground
on the issue of the estate of marriage one needn't appeal to Mosaic law but simply to pre-history ala Genesis 2. Then by agreeing with that presupposition it would be important to bring in the issue that the estate of marriage continues to be valid after the fall. The estate is now inhabited by sinners rather than those who inhabit it before the fall.

The problem with both the prehistory Genesis account and the case of divorce in Mark 10 is that of sample size and emphasis. In Genesis, there are two created beings, and what we have of marriage there is that marriage is intended to be between the two individuals God has created for that task. If this is to be a general statement, what matters is that it is the individuals chosen by God for the task, not whether they are male, female, black or white, named "Adam" and "Eve" or what. This is what is specifically affirmed in the case of divorce before Christ in Mark 10, as well: "What God has joined together, let no man put asunder". The emphasis is on what God has done, not the doctrine we set forth. That both cases deal with man/woman are specific to the situations-- with exactly 1 male/female in existance, it's hard to consider what other ways are possible for marriage (or even government, labor, etc). With Christ, it is a specific divorce case before him. That it is man and woman again is a specific of the situation. However, what is universal for all marriage is the command: "What God has joined together, let no one separate". That is truly universal, as it directly speaks to all forms of marriage.

If the names of the people seeking divorce in the case before Jesus were a man named "Adam" and a woman named "Eve", would that mean that marriage existed only for men named "Adam" marrying women named "Eve"?

Jim,

Am I correct in understanding that you reject Luther's advice to us on what to make of Old Testment texts pertaining to marriage and sexuality? If not, how do you relate your comments to Luther's? And if your point is that New Testament texts apparently condemning homosexuality are the heart of your argument, you still have not addressed my friendly challenge about whether or why you do not literally subscribe to I Timothy 2:10-11,
I Cor.11:10-13, and I Timothy 3:1-2. Here's another Lutheran idea to try out: Why not see this matter in dispute with Higgins Road hierarchy as a disagreement about the created order and so mount our arguments against ordiaining practicing homosexuals and sanctioning gay marriage (I don't read Dr. Hinlichy as suporting "marriage of gay Christians) based on reason and science? Before responding, let's get clear on the Two-Kingdom Ethic and determine together why or why it is not a more relevant, Lutheran Confessional orientation for addressing these challenges than quoting your favorite Bible passage in a Fundamentalistic manner. Alas, that's the way you and some CORE sympathizers sound to me.

Given the persistant existance of homosexuality, I believe the State (the "Prince")may reasonably carve out a place to accomodiate homosexuals to assure their membership in the civil order and extend to them legal protections. But what the "Prince" must do for the sake of public peace is not the same challenge charged to the Church. The just and wise Prince does not aim for a "perfect" society. He must seek a humane one. The Church's aim to to proclaim the Word of God--more to the point--Christ and Him crucified.

The question might be: does the Mr Hinlicky's suggested "recognition" by the Church in reality seek to do what is properly the Prince's job?"

As a layman in reading all the above, I have a distinct sense that our writers are dealing in shared theological catagories I am not aware of. I have not attended one class or set foot in a Lutheran seminary, but I have studied and read an assortment of Lutheran theology books for almost forty years. Perhaps unusual, but definitely undisciplined. Perhaps I am a little more theologically informed than the average Lutheran sitting in the pew; yet I suspect my reading and study is not nearly as wide and comprohensive as it should be.

My point in bringing up all the above is that in spite of my willingness to be instructed, I have no idea what "recogition" means or what it would look like. I am clueless as to how “recognition" differs from "blessing”. Note, I am not saying that there is no difference. I am just saying that I don't understand.

I am not arguing as much from ignorance as much as I am giving a caution that while you may arrive to a common mind on "recognitions" your average layman won't "get it". Ultimately, it is to them that you must "sell" this idea. If it doesn't make sense to them, all this is just a waste of time.

As a grasping layman, I believe you grasp well. I agree with your statements above. Specifically I believe that trying to make a distinction between "blessing" and "recognition" is simply a twist of words to make what God says into what humans say. In the old medieval way of doing theology, it was called nominalism. By twisting words and the use of nonscriptural categories, theologians were able to convince the Chruch that sin wasn't so bad after all.
Humans are very crafty in their sinfulness. I know this because I am a crafty sinner willing to justify myself and my behavior as well as my neighbor's. For the Christian justification is by faith in what Jesus has done for sinners. In our craftily conceived ways that we justify issues we make God's justification a sham. Thanks for your insightful words.

I'm more than disappointed by Pr. Hinlicky's approach. Shocked. Mortified. Horrified. Disgusted. Dismayed. Those words sum up my reactions.

If it is possible to cut through the nuanced and layered verbiage of Hinlicky's position, and one must, it simply comes down to this.

The church can only "recognize" sin as sin, not in any way bless, sanction, tolerate, condone or otherwise pat it on its head and send it on its way.

Sadly, what we see in Hinlicky's approach is the same antinomianism that was one of the chief errors of the Seminex movement, which movement was a major factor in the formation of the ELCA, the bitter fruits have fully ripened and we find this fruit rotten at its very core.

Let's consider applying Hinlicky's theories on "recognition" to other chronic and ongoing sinful situations. Take adultery.

Following Hinlicky's "logic" we would have to say that, "Of course the Gospel has the last word therefore we must recognize that those who struggle with adultery will continue to do so. Blah. Blah. Blah."

The church "recognizes" homosexual relationships for what they are: an ongoing sinful rebellion against God's created order. The Gospel in these situation is not condoning this ongoing abomination, but in announcing forgiveness to those who repent and strive manfully against temptation to indulge in homosexual inclination. As do all sinners, struggling against those things that continue, particularly, to tempt them to sin.

Hinlicky's approach is only adding further tragedy to tragedy.

Arguing by analogy is always problematic, but since you brought up adultery as if it was a death blow to Hinlicky's argument I want you to consider your analogy more fully. Instead of "blah blah blah," fill out what a pastoral response should be. Adultery has occurred. Say it destroys a marriage. Now say that the adulterers want to marry each other. Now say that they both approach you at the altar rail for communion. Now say they want to remain active members of your church.