Thomas at Without Authority has a bit of a downer post about the future of the ELCA. We are, he says, divided into various factions (liberals, evangelical catholics, etc.) and he’s none too optimistic that any recognizably Lutheran center can hold.
Though I came to the ELCA only recently (within the last six years) I can’t really say that I disagree with his analysis. I’ve been a member of three different congregations in that time, and it’s difficult to say what the connecting “Lutheran” thread was. I certainly don’t recall any great emphasis on the distinctive Lutheran themes – justification by faith alone (maybe we hit that once a year on “Reformation Sunday”), human beings as simul justus et peccator, the theology of the cross, ethics in the context of our various callings, the two kingdoms, etc.
In my thinking about Lutheranism I was influenced by James Nuechterlein’s notion of “‘sectarian’ catholicity,” that is, of a church that is catholic in that it holds to the apostolic faith, but thinks that the Reformers got important things right:
We remain evangelical catholics because we have what we consider good reasons not to be Roman Catholics. (To most of us in the West, Orthodoxy is not, for cultural reasons, a live option.) We have no desire to reignite the passions of the sixteenth century, but we think that in the quarrels of the Reformation era the reformers were more right than Rome. Many of those quarrels have been resolved in recent years, but on certain critical issues-such as the relation between justification and sanctification or between Scripture and tradition-differences remain that, however subtle, are not insignificant.
There are, moreover, a number of post-Reformation issues that separate many evangelical catholics from Rome: papal infallibility, the Marian dogmas, ordination of women, contraception. Orthodox Catholics rightly complain of a cafeteria approach to church doctrine in which presumably loyal members of the church do indeed exercise private judgment as to which teachings they will or will not accept as binding on them. It would be a dishonorable act and a grave violation of conscience to seek communion in the Roman Catholic Church while harboring a host of mental reservations as to the Church’s dogma. As I regularly explain to those who ask about my own situation, better a good Lutheran than a bad Catholic.
This is a much more positive assessment of the legacy of the Reformation than one gets from at least some evangelical catholics. He distinguishes it from “sentimental Protestant evangelicalism and desiccated Protestant liberalism-as well as from a form of confessionalism that still engages the struggle for orthodox Christianity in sixteenth-century categories.” The question, though, is to what extent the ELCA is committed to this kind of vision, or, for that matter, any kind of vision.
A Thinking Reed 
Leave a comment