One of the more fascinating aspects of the two recent sexuality documents is their struggle to be Lutheran. In many and various ways, they succeed. There was a genuine attempt to live in and out of our theological heritage and give it expression in a world very much changed from the one where our confessional documents were formulated. The problem seems to be that our Lutheran heritage demands things that are no longer popular or desirable. Then the documents can’t help but part ways with Lutheranism. A plum of an example is what I deem the “Enthusiasm Clause.”

Said clause is embedded in the boringly jargony list of resolutions that would accompany step 4 in the Report and Recommendation on Ministry Policies. It reads:

“WHEREAS, the Church of Christ sometimes has been surprised by the actions of the Spirit, as is reported in the book of Acts when the inclusion of Gentiles was affirmed…” (608-609)

Certainly, the Church is regularly surprised by the Spirit: for instance when faith is created in a sinner, or a sinner freely repents, or the ordinary bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ, or when the crucified Jesus was raised from the dead. But this is not the surprise suggested by the Enthusiasm Clause. The clear analogy is supposed to be between the “inclusion of the Gentiles” in the church itself, and the inclusion of homosexuals in the ministerial office. Here, sadly, our Lutheran heritage has unravelled, and Anabaptist enthusiasm has taken its place.

Surprise, of course, is a key theme of the theology of the cross. What appears good to the fallen mind and heart turns out to be bad; what appears repulsive turns out to be good. But—here’s the crucial Lutheran critique—the theology of the cross is not a general principle to be applied willy-nilly to reality. It is not a philosophical rule that simply reverses things de facto. The surprise, or reversal, in the theology of the cross is premised on the false, idolatrous knowledge of the unrepentant sinner. The truth is a surprise to this sinner—but not to the new creation in Christ. If the only content of the theology of the cross were reversal, and not the actual divine standard of goodness, then there would be no anchoring point for our reversals, resulting in genuinely abominable claims. (“Vomit is actually good to eat.” “Torturers are actually apostles sent by God.” See the problem?) Reversal for reversal’s sake turns into the theology of glory; but a theologian of the cross “calls a thing what it is.”

Even more to the point here, Lutherans have insisted from the get-go that whatever “surprises” the Spirit delivers are not ever other than what has been revealed in the Scriptures. If such things surprise, it is because we are poor students of Scripture, not because the Scripture has been overturned. Thus: the inclusion of the Gentiles, surprising to the Jews, turned out to be found all over the Old Testament. To give three examples among many: Genesis declares God creator of all people. The book of Ruth reports on how a Moabite became an ancestor of David. Isaiah 2, speaking of the mountain of the Lord, predicts “all the nations shall flow to it, and many peoples shall come, and say: ‘Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob, that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths.’”

And likewise, with the case of slavery, there was the entire Exodus tradition to be reckoned with, and Paul’s epistle to Philemon, and Galatians 3:28, at a minimum. With the status of women, there was Genesis 1:27, Deborah, Huldah, Mary the mother of God, Mary Magdalene and the other female followers, Priscilla, Phoebe, Nympha, Junia, Lois, and Galatians 3:28, among others.

So what is the purpose of the Enthusiasm Clause? It is an admission that there is no adequate biblical case to be made for the recommendations presented here, and a shoddy attempt to invoke divine backup for something that cannot be argued from the Scriptures. Normally this is called “ideology” or “idolatry.” One way or another, it is another step away from being an identifiably Lutheran church.