A Thinking Reed

Category: Lutheranism

  • For Reformation Sunday: “Private judgment” as guardian of consciences

    Readers may know that Lutherans and some other Protestants commemorate October 31 as “Reformation Day,” since it’s the date of Martin Luther’s posting of his 95 theses in Wittenberg. As has happened with a lot of other church feasts and commemorations, this tends to get moved to the nearest Sunday, which falls this year on the Sunday coming up.

    One of the most controverted aspects of the Reformation heritage, historically and today, has been the notion of “private judgment.” The idea -stemming from increased access to the Bible due to more vernacular translations, greater literacy, and the printing press – is that each person has the right and duty to interpret the Bible for herself. Luther set the template for later Protestantism in delcaring that his conscience was captive to the Word of God and that he wouldn’t back down from his positions unless their falsity could be demonstrated by biblical exegesis or by reason.

    Understandably, Catholics have balked at this notion, seeing it as arrogantly elevating the individual above the witness and wisdom of the Church. It’s also been blamed for the splintering of Protestantism into countless churches, not a few of them claiming to be the “one true church” and anathematizing all others.

    What’s perhaps more surprising is that in recent times some Protestant theologians have turned on the idea of private judgment. Stanley Hauerwas, with his characteristic hyperbole, even suggested taking the Bible out the laity’s hands. The worry here is often that Protestantism has bred individualism in opposition to the communal judgment of the church. This is sometimes seen as resulting in captivity to foreign ideologies: without the witness of the church to guide interpretation and doctrine, we’re more likely to tailor our theology to the prevailing cultural or political winds as the “German Christians” did under Hitler and as conservative evangelicals in the U.S. are accused of doing today.

    This critique of private judgment seems also to be the outworking of a particular view of rationality and selfhood. Recent philosophy is much more likely than its Enligtenment predecessor to view the self as the product of social, linguistic and cultural influences and not as a rational agent capable of attaining a “god’s eye view” in order to make judgments of truth and falsehood. Theologians have run with this idea in order to situate biblical interpretation and theology firmly within the church community and its judgments.

    However, without denying that the Enlightenment view of a universal, context-free rationality is problematic or getting into inter-communion polemics, I think there are still good reasons for upholding something like the traditional Protestant view in the face of objections from neo-traditionalist detractors. I think this is most helpfully seen if we look at the notion of private judgment as a means of protecting the conscience of the individual.

    The principle of private judgment depends crucially on two bedrock Reformation assumptions: the sufficiency of scripture and the fallibility of the church. Scripture is sufficient, for the Reformers, in that it “containeth all things necessary to salvation: so that whatsoever is not read therein, nor may be proved thereby, is not to be required of any man, that it should be believed as an article of the Faith, or be thought requisite or necessary to salvation” (Article VI of the Anglican Articles of Religion). Likewise the church, according to the Reformers, has erred in certain respects, which rules out any form of infallibility.

    Taken together, these two principles forbid requiring anyone to believe something merely on the church’s say-so and without demonstrating it from Scripture. What this does is to create a “zone of protection” around the individual’s conscience. The Reformers were convinced that even simple laypeople could discern the main thrust of the gospel from reading Scripture and from the preaching and worship of the church, and that nothing beyond the gospel was necessary for salvation.

    In his theological defense of political liberalism, Christopher Insole argues that, far from presupposing atomistic self-created individuals, liberalism rightly understood takes full cognizance of the fragility of human selves. This is because it protects individuals from the excessive certainties of others. The Protestant conception of private judgment does something analogous in the ecclesiastical sphere: for the sake of conscience judgments on what is inherently uncertain shouldn’t be enforced. Though in practice Protestants often violated this principle, it’s pretty much built in to their understanding of faith. Faith in Christ alone is sufficient for being a Christian.

    None of this means that Protestants have to forego the accumulated wisdom of the church. The Reformers were happy to appeal to the Fathers especially, and the magisterial Reformers accepted the ecumenical creeds as summaries of the gospel. Nor does it mean an individual believer has a “private religion”: in many (even most) cases the traditional understanding of the mysteries of the faith are vastly superior to anything he could come up with on his own. And there is a built in limit to the fissiparousness of Protestantism in that the witness to God revealed in Jesus as recounted in the NT provides the touchstone for its religious life. To step outside of that is to cease to be Protestant (or Christian) in any meaningful sense.

  • Anglicanism, protestantism and “denominational families”

    Interesting piece by Alister McGrath in the (Anglican) Church of Ireland Gazzette. He argues that Anglicanism is, historically and theologically, Protestant and that the concept of “denominational families” – the kind of loose federations that characterize world Lutheranism and Methodism, for example – could provide a fruitful model for the future of the Anglican Communion. And he sounds surprisingly upbeat about the prospect.

    (via Thinking Anglicans)

  • A theological argument for women’s ordination

    I’ve never really taken much interest in debates about women’s ordination – it’s always seemed to me to be a bit of a non-issue. I realize there are ecumenical matters at stake, but in sheer theological terms it’s not something I’ve ever particularly wrestled with. I’ve been a member of churches with women pastors and it never once occurred to me that the sacraments were “invalid” when dispensed from their hands.

    However, critics of women’s ordination sometimes argue that it is a “foreign” importation from feminism or liberal rights theory and not properly grounded in theology. Now, leaving aside whether it might sometimes be proper for secular knowledge to impact theology, I think there are specifically theological reasons that can also be adduced.

    From a specifically Protestant (and Lutheran) point of view, I think one argument might proceed like this: the Gospel (which includes Word and Sacrament) is God’s unconditional gift and depends for its efficacy entirely upon God’s grace and promise. To say that God’s gifts can be “held hostage” to human conditions, such as the “matter” of the priest, would be to infringe upon God’s gracious sovereignty. But the Gospel can only depend on God’s promise and thus its proclamation can’t be limited to a particular class of people.

    I think this goes to the heart of the Reformation protest against medieval Catholicism. The problem, which was vividly illustrated by the indulgences controversy, was that God’s grace was seen to be beholden to a set of conditions that must be met before it could be “dispensed.” Reform thus can be seen as the process of making sure that the church doesn’t act to obstruct the proclamation of God’s free grace in Word and Sacrament.

    I’m not sure if the argument for women’s ordination has been set out in just these terms, but it strikes me as consonant with the key Reformation insights. Of course, our Catholic friends will take issue with some of the premises, but I don’t think it depends on any illegitimate “secular” imports.

  • Natural law, homosexuality and the ELCA

    Carl Braaten has published a spirited defense of natural law ethics at the Journal of Lutheran Ethics with which I’m in substantial agreement. I think that if natural law ethics didn’t exist we’d have to invent it, and that people who claim to be deriving their ethics solely from uniquely Christian principles have usually smuggled covert premises in from other sources. So, best to be above board about the whole thing.

    However, toward the end of his article Braaten goes on what can only be characterized as a tirade about homosexuality, and this makes me think that he’s working with a defective notion of natural law. Now, Carl Braaten has undoubtedly forgotten more about theology than I’ll ever know, so I enter here with trepidation, but his account of the ethical issue here strikes me as tendentious and inaccurate.

    Braaten writes:

    We know by reason what the natural law tells us — the sexual organs are designed for certain functions. God made two kinds of humans, “male and female created he them.” (Gen. 1: 27) By the light of reason human beings the world over, since the dawn of hu­man civilization and across all cultures, have known that the male and female organs are made for different functions. Humans know what they are; they are free to act in accordance with them or to act in opposition to them. The organs match. What is so difficult to understand about that? Humans learn these things by reason and nature; no books on anatomy, psychology, or sociology are needed.

    Nor do people first learn what the sexual organs are for from the Bible. Scholars say there are seven explicit passages in the Bible that condemn homosexual acts as con­trary to the will of God. This is supposed to settle the matter for a church that claims its teachings are derived from Scripture. But for many Christians this does not settle the matter. Why not? The answer is that they don’t believe what the natural law, transpar­ent to reason, tells us about human sexuality. In my view the biblical strictures against homosexual acts are true not because they are in the Bible; they are in the Bible be­cause they are true. They truly recapitulate God’s creative design of human bodies. The law of creation written into the nature of things is the antecedent bedrock of the natural moral law, knowable by human reason and conscience.

    The problem with this passage is that both the argument from reason and the argument from Scripture elide crucial factors. Let’s start with the argument from reason. It’s undoubtedly true that human sexual organs have particular functions. But does it follow straight away (pardon the pun) that human beings must always use their sexual organs in those particular ways, or that it’s never permissible for them to be used in any other way? Anyone who thinks that it’s morally ok to have sex for non-procreative reasons is conceding that it’s permissible to use one’s sex organs in a way that doesn’t constitute their primary function.

    But this doesn’t get at the deeper issue. What gives natural law ethics its traction isn’t that it asks what the purpose of bodily organs are. It functions as an ethic because it asks: what is good for human beings (and the rest of creation)? To ask what the functions of sexual organs are is only part of the broader question of what is good for human beings. To say that organs function in a certain way and so must (only) be used in this way is actually to revert to a rather crude version of divine command ethics – God created them that way, so that’s the way you have to use them, and don’t bother asking why.

    If we do ask why, however, we see that human sexuality functions to further the good of human beings, individually and as members of a series of ever-widening communities. But then any particular sex act is necessarily subordinate, in terms of moral evaluation, to this broader notion of what is good. And determining what this broader good is requires the use of our reason and powers of observation to understand what kind of life is good for human persons. Non-procreative sex was long held by the Christian tradition to be immoral, but seen in the broader perspective of what’s good for individuals, communities, societies, and creation as a whole, we can see reasons why it can be moral.

    Braaten assumes that because sexual organs are made to function a certain way that they can therefore only be used that way, morally speaking. But if we can simply read our ethics off of nature in this way, what do we do with the fact that there are people who find themselves exclusively attracted to members of the same sex? They’re just as much a part of “nature” as the particular configuration of human sexual organs, at least in the sense of being something naturally occurring (if not statistically “normal”). If what is given is the standard for what is right, how do we decide between two seemingly incompatible natural givens?

    What a more “holistic” natural law ethics needs to ask, it seems to me, is this: Given that gay people exist, what is good for them (and the communities of which they are a part) and how should their sexuality be ordered toward those distinctively human goods that we are all called to realize? The fundamental question then, is not: what are sexual organs for, but what are people for? As Keith Ward puts it “[t]he physical and biological structures of the natural world must always be subordinated, in morality, to the realization of those universal goods which all free agents have good reason to want” (“Christian Ethics” in Keeping the Faith: Essays to Mark the Centenary of Lux Mundi, Geoffrey Wainwright, ed., p. 232). The kinds of goods that free personal beings are naturally oriented toward realizing take moral precedence over the biological processes that constitute the substratum of those persons.

    Again, this is something that can only be answered by reason and experience. Some conservatives have contended that gay sex is intrinsically ordered toward narcissism or other anti-social tendencies, which is at least the right kind of argument, since it claims that homosexuality is inherently opposed to human flourishing. But it simply doesn’t measure up to empirical reality. Gay people’s sexuality is capable of contributing to the building up of relationships that exhibit all the virtues that straight ones do and in my view the onus is on those who would deny this fact.

    Regarding the argument from Scripture, Braaten surely knows that there is widespread disagreement not so much about whether the Bible condemns certain same-sex acts, but whether the kinds of monogamous faithful relationships exhibited by many gay people fall under that condemnation. Again, the question can’t be settled simply be saying that the Bible forbids x until we ask further why does it condemn x? What underlying reason is there for a given prohibition and does it apply to this particular case?

    Natural law ethics is animated by the idea that creation is rational and that it mirrors, if imperfectly, the mind of God. A corollary of this is that God’s commands aren’t inscrutable demands, but are intended to guide us toward our ultimate good and are, in principle, transparent to our understanding. To understand what that good is requires the exercise of our own reason, which partakes, at least in some small way, of the Divine Reason. This doesn’t mean that our reason is perfect or that it doesn’t require additional illumination from God, but there is an underlying rationality to the moral principles that arise out of the fact that we have been created in a particular way.

    Braaten seems angry that the ELCA should even take up this issue, since the right answer is so obvious (to him). But it’s only obvious (if at all) if one adopts the biological reductionism that he (erroneously in my view) identifies with natural law ethics. A more holistic view sees biology in service to the realization of distinctly human goods and, as such, doesn’t give it the last word in determining what is right. Straight people who think of themselves as safely “in” the charmed circle of being approved by God might consider what it would mean to adopt this biologistic ethic in all its rigor.

  • Three approaches to faith and works

    In continuing the tradition of outsourcing quality theological reflection to my betters, allow me to link to this weighty post from Christopher on justification, sanctification and the various kinds of legalisms and antinomianisms that afflict the left and right.

    The way I’ve learned to think about faith and works was that we are saved – i.e. restored to a right relationship with God – sheely by grace on account of Christ received through faith. This is the Reformation view shared by Lutherans, Calvinists, and many Anglicans.

    But there’s a divergence about what role sanctification, or growth in the Christian life, means. Lutherans tend to say (at least when they’re being good Lutherans) that being continually rooted and re-rooted in faith will “naturally” produce good works (cf. Luther’s Freedom of a Christian). However, Luther, being the realist that he was, also recognized that our sinful impulses aren’t going to disappear until the consummation of all things, so in the interim we have the law to act as a check on them. I think this is properly described as the “civil” or first use of the law, not the much controverted third use.

    Calvinists, by contrast, tend to have a more positive view of the law as a guide to Christian living and see sanctification as on ongoing process of being empowered by grace to obey God’s law. Naturally as a Lutheran I think the danger here is legalism and instrospectiveness; Calvinists would no doubt say that Lutheranism courts antinomianism.

    An interesting third view, suggested as a distinctively Anglican one, is offered by Louis Weil in an essay called “The Gospel in Anglicanism,” found in an anthology The Study of Anglicanism, edited by Stephen Sykes and John Booty (1st ed.). Weil contends that Anglicanism, as it’s expressed in the prayer book and Articles of Religion, agrees with the Reformers on justification, but has a more sacramental understanding of sanctification:

    While clearly within the Reformation tradition in its understanding of justification, Anglicanism distanced itself from both Calvin and Luther in ways which have been presented here. It is particularly with regard to the role of the sacraments as instruments of grace that Anglicanism maintained its own middle way: as Hooker wrote, ‘Sacraments serve as the instruments of God.’ They are thus God’s actions toward mankind, occasions in which through participation in the outward forms, men and women are involved in an active response to the grace of God. (p. 71)

    In Weil’s view, the Anglican ethos sees sacramental and liturgical worship as the means by which God’s sanctifying grace is communicated to us. Through worship we participate in the mysteries of the faith and are linked to God’s purposes for the world. It is the primary means by which we are incorporated into the Body of Christ. Sanctification, then, has its roots in this incorporation; it is a key part of acquiring the “mind of Christ” from which good works flow. If good works are the fruit of faith, perhaps we can see this as “watering the plant.” This is one of the aspects of Anglicanism that I came to appreciate and cherish during last year’s sojourn among the Anglo-Catholics in Boston.

    In theory Lutherans (I can’t speak for our Calvinist/Reformed brethren) ought to have a similar sacramental piety. After all, Lutheranism was the “conservative” branch of the Reformation that maintained much of the Catholic practice that the more radical elements of the Reformation rejected outright. However, my sense among ELCA Lutherans at any rate is that this sense of participating sacramentally in the reality of the paschal mystery is not very common.

    My heart’s with the Lutherans in insisting that we can never merit our relationship with God. Our righteousness is always a gift that comes from outside (extra nos) and there’s nothing we can or need do to add to it. However, I also like the Anglican emphasis on being incorporated into Christ through participation in sacramental worship. Or, to put it more simply, learning to love Jesus by spending time with him. It seems to me that this offers the promise of helping to give a shape to the Christian life that sometimes seems to be lacking in Lutheranism, but without reducing it to sheer moralism.

  • September reading notes

    Well, okay, the month isn’t over yet, but it sure is flying.

    Earlier I mentioned I was still working on Monbiot’s Heat. Well, I still am. Just haven’t been in the mood to read it. ‘Nuff said.

    Finished Jame’s Alison’s Raising Abel. I stand by my earlier claim that, while Alison has some absolutely brilliant insights, I don’t think his Girardian analysis does justice to the entirety of the biblical witness. I also feel like he has an allergy to metaphysics and is forced to account for everything Christ does for us in sheerly psychological terms, which seems reductionistic to me.

    Picked up a copy of Gerhard Forde’s Justification by Faith – A Matter of Death and Life for a quarter at a church yard sale. This is vintage Forde – pithy, direct and committed above all to the Reformation insight of justification by faith. Forde stresses the language of death and resurrection as a necessary complement to the more forensic “legal” language we often use to talk about justification. I also read Carl Braaten’s Justification: The Article by Which the Church Stands or Falls wherein Braaten makes a surprisingly (to me, anyway) robust defense of justification by faith alone. I say surprisingly because of what appeared to me to be his move to a more “catholic” position in recent years. Taken together these two books provide a good picture of what commitment to the principles of the Reformation can look like in the contemporary theological and ecumenical scene.

    Right now I’m working on Reza Aslan’s No god but God, which is both a history of Islam and an argument for a more pluralistic understanding of Islam. Extremely informative and well-written, though at times one does get the feeling that Aslan is whitewashing a bit. He essentially shrugs off Muhammad’s military conquests with “that’s the way things were done then” and gives a rather idyllic picture of Christian and Jewish minorities under Islamic rule. Still, a very interesting book and I’m looking forward to seeing where he goes with his argument for why Islamic militants have Islam wrong.

  • God and the taxman

    The September “issue” of the Jounal of Lutheran Ethics is now up, with a special focus on taxes, wealth, and poverty

  • Lutheran Forum online

    Pastor Clint Schnekloth of Lutheran Confessions alerts us to the new website of Lutheran Forum, “an independent theological quarterly for clergy and laity” with authors “belong[ing] to the ELCA and LCMS, as well as Lutheran church bodies across the world.”

    I thought this article by Philip H. Pfatteicher on the new ELCA and LCMS worship books was interesting. Alas, Evangelical Lutheran Worship, which I’ve yet to experience, sounds distinctly inferior to the perfectly good Lutheran Book of Worship. In fact, the LBW isn’t even that old – was a new book really necessary?

    UPDATE: Christopher offers the first of a series of comparisons of ELW and LBW here.

    On a personal note, as we’ve not yet settled on a church home here in DC we’ve attended a Lutheran Church the past two weekends. I have a hunch they are using texts from ELW in the service though there are no books in the pews since some of the language is unfamiliar to me (the liturgy is printed in a bulletin). I don’t have too many complaints so far except there seems to be an excessive allergy to masculine terms for God and a certain flattening of the language of some of the prayers (e.g. referring to God at the Eucharistic prayer as “Source and Goal” – is this kind of abstraction really preferable to the rich, personal language of the Bible? Reminds me of C. S. Lewis’ remark that some of the abstract language about God that came from modern theologians led him to think of God as a vast amorphous force, something like tapioca pudding).

    Another Update: Chris (a.k.a. The Lutheran Zephyr) has some thoughts on ELW and takes issue with Pfatteicher’s criticisms.

  • Questions for Lutherans (and others)

    Thomas at Without Authority posted recently on the raison d’etre of Protestant denominations. He raised the idea, favored by Lutheran theologians like Jenson and Braaten that Lutheranism is, in essence, a reforming movement within the church catholic.

    My question, especially to Lutheran readers, is this: Do you still regard the gospel of justification by faith as the “article by which the church stands or falls”? If so, how do you understand that? And do you see this being lived out in your church (or the church at large)?

    I ask because if the purpose of Lutheranism, as a reforming movement, is to share this insight with the rest of the church, I am by no means convinced that this is what most Lutheran churches are doing, or see themselves doing. And if they’re not, what is the justification (pardon the pun) for their existence? (I should note that I’m speaking here mostly about ELCA churches because those are the ones I’m familiar with, but I’d also be interested in hearing the observations of LCMS or other Lutheran readers.)

  • All dogs go to heaven

    Well, Luther thought so.