A Call to Faithfulness . . . 
to Jesus!

William J. Cork

This article was originally published as an editorial in a Lutheran Forum special issue (Pentecost 1992, pp. 6 ff.) introducing the first "Call to Faithfulness" conference in Northfield, MN. I was a young ELCA pastor at the time--and the ELCA was itself only four years old. I was responding to Human Sexuality and the Christian Faith, a product of the first ELCA Task Force on Human Sexuality, published in 1991. The issues raised in it would be debated within the ELCA for years to come, but in August 2009 the ELCA Churchwide Assembly gave them formal approval.

I left the ministry of the ELCA in 1992, because of this. At that time I didn't think I could go back to the Seventh-day Adventist Church in which I was raised, and, following the logic of the arguments in the latter part of this article, I entered the Catholic Church.  I accepted the historical-critical method, though I had misgivings. Not able to trust Scripture, I reached out for another authority--Catholic tradition. But Sola scriptura must be the bedrock of Christian faith, with Scripture trusted as the inspired Word of God. If we give up that, I fear indeed we have few other options than liberalism or Catholicism. This is one of the factors that led me, in 2007, to return to the Seventh-day Adventist faith.

A Call to Faithfulness is, I think, an insufficient title for a conference. We cannot help being faithful to something. The question before us at this time in our history is, more specifically, "To what or to whom shall we be faithful?"

One possible answer to this question is offered by the ELCA's Task Force on Human Sexuality in the study document entitled Human Sexuality and the Christian Faith. The manner in which this issue is addressed illustrates the crisis of faithfulness facing the church. Contrary to the announcement in The Lutheran that the study merely "asks questions," careful reading of the document reveals that it does, in fact, take positions on a number of issues, some conservative, others radical. The document's conservative conclusions are unambiguous, and announced in italic type: "Infidelity is unacceptable" (47); "Promiscuity should be rejected as much today as in the past" (46). In these statements, and in its condemnation of sexual violence, the study demonstrates an ability to speak prophetically to the ills of contemporary society, confronting controversial issues head-on, unconcerned with whether it offends. And in taking these positions it demonstrates that it can be faithful to the teachings of Scripture and to the teachings of the Church through all ages.

The problem surfaces as the document moves to its most controversial subject, the place of sexually active homosexuals in the church. Here too, the claim that the document merely "asks questions" is inaccurate. The goal of its circuitous reasoning is unmistakable, and if the statement which the ELCA adopts at the 1993 Churchwide Assembly follows the same logic, the ELCA will no longer be able to oppose either the ordination or "marriage" of sexually active homosexuals. The document dismisses the relevant Biblical tests as based on faulty assumptions. It accepts as normative the notion that homosexuals are such by nature, and cannot change. If this is so, it suggests, we cannot consider homosexuality as such immoral; consequently, the only factor which can determine the morality of a given relationship is its quality. And since celibacy cannot justly be demanded of all, the church may need to provide for the blessing of homosexual unions (see especially pages 45-46).

There are many holes in this logic. The study acknowledges, for example, that the scientific and historical date it depends upon are questionable (42). We may also question the accuracy of the worldview ascribed to the Biblical authors. We may debate whether grace cancels out law as completely as the document supposes. These are important questions for the Task Force to consider as it prepares its final draft. Yet even these considerations fail to touch the document's greatest weakness.

The Church

The statement's fundamental problem, symptomatic of the ailment plaguing the ELCA, is its ecclesiology. It envisions the Church as a symbolic construct ever being created ex nihilo, as individual disciples of the radical Jesus interact with each other at the present moment. This is a Church that can have no history -- the present, insofar as it is faithful to the "radical imperative," is all that counts. This ecclesiology affects the document's use of Scripture, its view of the Christian tradition, and its ecumenical vision.

While claiming to be "faithful to Scripture" (1), the document, in actual practice, has no sense of Scripture as a unified tradition. It is able to operate only on the level of such hypothetical sources as J, E, D, and P. It can place each of these in its proper context, and extrapolate the factors which influenced each author, but it can do no more. It fails to see Scripture as the product of an ongoing community of faith seeking to be faithful to its calling. And by so separating the Biblical documents from their canonical and communal setting, and appraising them only at the earliest phase of their conjectured history, the Task Force reduces them to mere archaeological curiosities which testify solely to assumptions which modern science has disproved. They are dry bones, with no animating Spirit. There is no sense of revelation, nor of inspiration -- and certainly no real authority. The document's Scripture consists merely of scattered grains of sand, gathered together or cast aside according to the "radical" assumptions and agenda of the study's authors.

A similar criticism can be made of the document's appraisal of the Christian tradition. Its fundamental assumption here is shared by all sects. In order to justify its departure from tradition, it must claim that the tradition itself is a departure from the teachings of Jesus. The Church "fell" from purity, and it took the Reformation (and modern science) to recover Jesus' message. But the present document goes further than any sectarian since Marcion, and places the "Fall of Babylon" within the New Testament! "Under pressure from the patriarchal climate of the Roman Empire, the communities addressed by Colossians and 1 Peter were urged to adopt the domestic patterns of the surrounding culture," effectively compromising the "radical imperatives" in Jesus' teaching. By the time of the Pastoral Epistles, Babylon's fall is complete, as she prostitutes herself by uncritically accepting "hierarchical values" (25).

Having thus absolved itself of any responsibility of faithfulness to the Christian tradition, the document nevertheless seeks to justify its support for homosexual "marriage" by appealing to (of all things) the Church's history. Following the purported discoveries of John Boswell (a well-known historical apologist for homosexuality), the document claims that from the fifth to the fourteenth centuries "some same-sex relationships may have been blessed." Boswell's alleged conclusion (the cited book is not yet published, and hence cannot be evaluated) enables the committee to urge the Church to "re-examine its position on this matter today" (p. 46). This methodology is again that of sectarians of all ages, who, casting aside the Catholic tradition as "Babylon," are nevertheless compelled to seek "forerunners" of their positions to defend themselves against the charge of innovation.

This sectarian methodology has tremendous ecumenical implications. Having ignored the Church's tradition, the study is consistent in ignoring the rest of contemporary Christianity. It seems not to have considered what impact such conclusions would have on our various dialogues -- especially with the Orthodox and Romans.

But even if we ignore these ecumenical ramifications, we must still consider what the study portends for the very denomination which produced it. The proposal of similar statements by other liberal Protestant bodies in 1991 resulted in ugly fights broadcast to the world over CNN. For the ELCA, still struggling to determine its identity, this could be ecclesiastical suicide.

The Question of Faithfulness to Lutheranism

The question of the document's faithfulness must be pursued one step further. We must ask whether this document is also an aberration from the Lutheran tradition, or the logical conclusion of Lutheran principles, as the study claims. Regrettably, I think a case can be made for the latter.

Martin Luther was trained in the philosophical school of nominalism. Against the realistic philosophy of Aquinas, nominalism held that universal concepts are simply a product of abstract thought, and have no reality apart from specific individuals. With a little imagination, much of the Lutheran theological tradition can be seen as an extension of this principle. One could argue, for instance, that Lutheran ecclesiology is simply a denial that the universal concept, "Church," has an independent reality apart from individual churches and that this is behind the definition of the Church in AC VII. Such a nominalistic understanding of the Church provides, I think, the only philosophical justification for the perpetual schism of the Church. In its most extreme form in leads to congregationalism and individualism. It justifies as well the extreme Protestant understanding of the "priesthood of all believers," placing the locus of authority in the individual's quest to interpret the Bible in his/her unique situation.

Nominalism opens up as well the possibility of extreme forms of Biblical criticism, as it leads away from "Scripture" to the individual sub-traditions within the Biblical books. It finds meaning not in the whole, but in the original intent of the primary sources. It is only by ferreting out these original building blocks that we can then inquire as to the current application (if any) of the text.

Extending this to the area of morality, one may argue that if there is no common human nature or experience uniting all individuals, there can be no universally applicable standards of morality. each moral dilemma must then be seen through the varied filters of race, gender, class and "sexual preference." Hence the committee's conclusion that "Morality is never a settled package of what is considered right or wrong. It is continually changing, especially in response to the challenge of new issues and the conflicts that often emerge around them" (32).

One can arrive at the same antinomian conclusion through theological argument and again claim that the result is pure Lutheranism. Consider the history of the key Lutheran concept of "the proper distinction between law and gospel." This has been Lutheranism's Achilles' heel, for it exposes Luther to the charge of being but a sixteenth century Marcion. Like Marcion, Luther used this principle to reject those portions of the Bible that didn't fit into his framework. And like Marcion, Luther used it to question the applicability of the law to the Christian life. Lutheranism has typically defended itself from the Marcionite charge by maintaining the necessity of a continual tension between law and gospel. Thus Lutheran Orthodoxy warned of the dangers of both legalism and antinomianism. The current study document on human sexuality, however, tends toward the latter by declaring that the sole message of the Church is "grace." The only purpose of law is to expose the prevalence of sin in a very general and universal fashion, thus negating finger-pointing at any particular individual.

Is There Another Way?

Clearly, then, this is more than a debate about what one is free to do with one's genitalia. The issues raised by Human Sexuality and the Christian Faith reveal the depth of the crisis confronting Lutheranism, and a simple rejection of the study's arguments on homosexuality will by no means solve the problem. The question is "To what (or to whom) shall we be faithful?" Both the study's authors and their opponents answer, "The Lutheran tradition!" And one can see how the Task Force could defend such a claim. They merely need to define Lutheranism nominalistically, and center its message on a "radical imperative" of unfettered grace. But this leads to the necessary adoption of Marcionism and sectarianism. They must abandon the Old Testament, all the paranetic sections of the New, and everything about the earthly Jesus not covered under the bumper-sticker slogan of the "radical imperative." They must divorce themselves from the Christian Church as it actually existed from the apostolic era to the present (with an honorific bow in the direction of the sixteenth-century formula of "justification by faith alone"). This is certainly a variety of "faithfulness" -- but not that faithfulness to which we are called.

A genuine "Call to Faithfulness" is a call to be faithful to Jesus, the incarnate Son of God, revealed in the fullness of Scripture and confessed by the Church. We evangelical catholics have stressed the Trinitarian and sacramental implications of this faithfulness against the claims of the gnosticizing elements in the ELCA. We now need to consider more carefully the ecclesiological implications. The Church cannot be so easily separated from the Gospel as some might think. The Scriptures are the product, not of individuals, but of a community. It was the community which gathered them and canonized them. This community Paul called the "Body of Christ" -- and he did so before the fragmentation of the Church suggested a nominalist or metaphorical interpretation of that image. An orthodox understanding of the Incarnation and the sacraments requires a realist understanding of the Church -- a real community, transcending temporal and spatial particularities, against which Jesus promised "The gates of hell shall not prevail." And true to that promise, in spite of the turmoils of history and the weakness of the flesh, the Church has stood.

Unlike other "Reformers," Luther did not deny the Church's historical continuity; nor did he seek to return to some hypothetical pristine state of New Testament purity. This must be our starting point as we consider the future. A "Lutheranism" which does not accept the basic assumption of catholicity (as both a reality and a goal) is but another variation of sectarianism despite its good works and high liturgy. Conversely, a Lutheranism which affirms a catholic self-understanding and which accepts the call to faithfulness to Jesus Christ and to his Church, can never be content to remain on the sidelines with the sectarians. Its mission is clear: to extend the call to faithfulness to "the whole Christian Church on earth."

Newman's rejection of the Anglican compromise was correct. There is no via media posed in precise balance between catholicity and sectarianism, nor can there be. While a nominalist Lutheran may boast of his/her belief in invisible unity (and thus in the perpetual fragmentation of the Church), the promise of Christ is true. For the Holy Spirit "calls, gathers, enlightens, and sanctifies the whole Christian church on earth and preserves it in union with Jesus Christ in the one true faith" -- really and truly, here and now, as we heed the call to faithfulness to Jesus.