Category: Uncategorized

This kind of thing brings out all my black-helicopter-watching-new-world-order paranoia. I’m with the Left Behinders on this one – no Mark of the Beast for me!

From Scott Adams (of Dilbert fame):

When it comes to anything complicated, I’m too ignorant to have a useful opinion. For example:

Some Guy: Scott, do you think we should return to the gold standard?

Scott: Um…

Some Guy: Should the U.S. stay in Iraq and be bled to death or leave now and let the bad guys get a foothold from which they can better try to destroy us?

Scott: Um…

Frankly, I’m suspicious of anyone who has a strong opinion on a complicated issue.

A couple of the more traditionalist Anglican blogs have linked to the website of Ebenezer Lutheran Church in San Francisco indicating that it’s a kind of logical endpoint of liberal Protestantism (or maybe just Protestantism period?). No doubt this is one kooky congregation, dedicated as it is to “re-imag[ing] the divine by claiming her feminine persona in thealogy [?], liturgy, church structure, art, language, practices, leadership, and acts of justice” and touting such practices as a “goddess rosary.” But are they at all representative of the ELCA, much less Protestantism as a whole? For one thing, this is San Francisco, folks. And secondly, if you look at the congregational stats you’ll see that their membership has dropped by about 90% since 1998.

The ELCA certainly has its problems, but we haven’t become a church full of neo-pagan goddess worshippers quite yet.

A couple of weeks ago I posted on whether Protestants might find benefit from praying the Rosary. Here I see a Lutheran layman has devised a “Lutheran Rosary” (PDF), the main differences being that he recommends replacing the Hail Mary with either the pre-Trent Hail Mary (omitting the phrase “Holy Mary Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death”) or with the Jesus Prayer (“Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy upon me, a sinner”) as well as replacing the “Hail Holy Queen” (Salve Regina) with a more appropriate (for Protestants) prayer such as the Magnificat.

The ELCA website has its own version of a Lutheran Rosary here.

Observing it has become more common among evangelicals and other low-church Protestants according to this article. As far as I know Lent is de rigueur among Lutherans, but maybe that’s a relatively recent development too (as is, for instance, weekly communion apparently).

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.

For some reason the whole “crunchy con” thing is generating a lot of interesting thinking out there in blog-land (well, at least among the blogs I read). See, to wit, Russell Arben Fox (again), Kim at Crossroads, Eve Tushnet, and Three Hierarchies.

I’d like to draw some larger lesson here about the bankruptcy of the current liberal-conservative divide and the dawning of new political paradigms, but a handful of blog entries hardly seems like it could sustain such grand generalizations.

William F. Buckley says “One can’t doubt that the American objective in Iraq has failed.” Now, I appreciate the willingness of the elder statesmen of conservatism – Buckley, George Will, etc. – to voice their skepticism on the Bush administration’s Iraq policy rather than just toeing the party line. But where were these guys before the war? Did they think then that installing liberal democracy in Iraq would work? If not, why didn’t they say something when it might possibly have made a difference?

Ever find yourself wondering “Just what is the difference between thrash metal and speed metal?” Turns out it’s mainly in the punk-influenced sound of the former. Good to know.