In general, I agree with the neighbor-centered-ness of the new ELCA Sexuality Statement, and of ethics generally, away from pious self-centeredness. The introspective conscience of Lutherans can indeed be deadly. But the baby seems to have gone out with the bathwater. There seems to be almost no recognition that a society is in fact made up of individuals living together—and thus that individual, personal, private behavior has social consequences. The statement deliberately puts its attention on social structures, but to the point of depriving individuals (created in the image of God, called to a holy life, an honor no “society” as such has!) of all agency in their situations.

A false dichotomy lurks here. Concern for one’s own holiness of life is most decidedly not at odds with the concern for the flourishing of one’s neighbor, except in the most pathological of religious cases. Hardly a personal decision is made that does not directly affect the neighbor: the decision to react with forgiveness instead of rage; the decision to give instead of hoard; the decision to serve instead of harm. There is nothing negligent of the neighbor in the effort to become the kind of person God intends: forgiving, generous, and serving. Conversely, a lack of concern for one’s own patience, chastity, spending habits, and so forth will most certainly have adverse social consequences.

Perhaps Lutherans have simply become allergic to the notion of living a holy life, as if that cannot be anything other than works righteousness, but this is a grave departure from Luther—and St. Paul, and Jesus, to mention just a few!

The disconnect between us and other, and faith and works, is most apparent to me in this apparently inoccuous sentence in the Statement (148-9): “The love of God and neighbor, fulfilled by faith alone, are the two commandments by which Christ taught us to measure and interpret every other commandment in Scripture (Matthew 22:36–40).” The first verb, “measure,” is particularly misleading. It appears to grant Christians the right to use the great commandment as a hermeneutical judge over the actual content of the rest of Scripture’s commandments. With this approach, one could say in any given case: “This law no longer serves love, which is what God really wants, so we should dispense with it.”

That’s completely backward. The purpose of obeying all the other laws is so that love will be possible. All the other commandments are indeed to be obeyed—because their goal and direction is love for God and neighbor. Obedience without love is a grave misunderstanding of the law, such that obedience is no longer obedience; but love without obedience is equally mistaken, and in fact turns out not to be love at all. Taken as the Sexuality Statement proposes, not only are the commandments invalidated, but “love” in Mt. 22 is actually made void of all meaning.

Some concession is made to this point later in the document (204): “God has given the law not only to reveal sin and order society (1 Timothy 1:9), but also to point us to God’s intentions and promises for our lives.” But overall the document doesn’t bear out this approach.

In fact, a rather underhanded way to argue against the correlation between love and obedience to the law appears in a footnote describing the “orders of creation” doctrine of 19th-century Lutheranism. The “bad use” of this doctrine conceives the orders of creation as “fixed, one-time acts of God,” which incidentally, the Statement tells us, gave the Nazis fuel for their evil government. Do I detect a subtle suggestion that my loyalty to Genesis 1’s “fixed, one-time act of God” in the creation of a man and a woman for a faithful, sexual marriage makes me a secret Nazi?