THE LIMITS OF TOLERANCE
Homosexuality and the ELCA’s LPD (Liberal Protestant Drift)
Dr. Robert Benne, Roanoke College
- Posted with Author's Permission -
I. The Present Situation
“Not with a bang, but a whimper” describes how mainstream Protestantism seems to be ending. True, the various mainstream denominations still exist at the beginning of the 21st century, but I suspect there won’t be much left of them by mid-century. They may be gathered into one Protestant Church of America, but the mergers will take place out of weakness rather than strength. They simply don’t have enough clarity about, confidence in, and zeal for the Gospel—the full Trinitarian faith—to replenish their own membership from within or to gain enough converts from without.
The societal pressures on religious traditions to accommodate to a highly individualistic, postmodern culture will be enormous. As H. Richard Niebuhr warned many years ago in hisChrist and Culture, those traditions who once maintained a strong tension between the transcendent Christ and the immanent culture, will find themselves slowly moving toward the Christ of Culture camp. Only the strongest traditions will survive with their identity intact as our culture exerts pervasive pressure to accommodate to it. The others, such as the various liberal Protestant denominations, will decline and probably merge.
For a long time we Lutherans believed we were different from the Protestant mainstream. Quite a few non-Lutheran scholars and national commentators thought so too. After all, we had a strong confessional tradition, a robust heritage and practice of theological reflection, a liturgical tradition, and a strong sense of identity and loyalty, partly due to our ethnic character. Lutherans had a great affection for their churches. Throughout the postwar 40s, 50s, and 60s we grew in numbers and vitality.
But the scene is very different today. We no longer have the confidence that we are different, and therefore have a strong reason for continued existence. A number of our brightest lights have gone to other more stable traditions. Our confessional tradition is fairly irrelevant, our theological reflection has broken into a thousand voices, our sense of loyalty and identity is weak, and we are aging and declining. We congratulate ourselves in finally joining our social betters—the Episcopalians, Presbyterians, and the United Church of Christ—in their loss of clarity, confidence, and zeal for the Gospel. The combined Protestant Church in America looks like it is just around the corner.
How do we account for this merger into the mainstream? As I have suggested, a great deal of it is due to the enormous pressures for accommodation with culture. But we have given additional punch to those pressures by our own self-conscious actions. We have aided the deconstruction of the Lutheran tradition by adopting the ideas and practices of elite, liberal culture. Foremost, among them is our adoption of a left-wing scheme of representation that ensured “inclusivity” by quotas. “Inclusivity is the central theme of the ELCA. However, “inclusivity” is not catholicity, which would mean a concerted effort to evangelize many kinds and types of people, and invite them to work their way into the leadership of the church. Who would not be for such catholicity?
No, inclusivity means a scheme of representation that makes all committees, boards, councils, and faculties subject to the percentages of minorities and designated oppressed groups we would like to have in the church, not the ones we have in the church. It aims at equality of results, measured by those percentages. It is radically skeptical in that it assumes that racist, sexist Lutherans simply will not do the right thing in electing or appointing people, radically condescending in assuming that minorities cannot earn leadership positions on their own merits, and radically optimistic in the conviction that the people turned up by the quota system will be Lutherans who are deeply embedded in the vision and ethos of Lutheranism. The architects of this scheme wanted to diminish the authority of the white males who carried the theological DNA of Lutheranism and open it up for many other voices. Inclusivity and diversity were meant to invade theology as well as representation, and they have.
This virus has been deeply driven into the fabric of the ELCA. It has turned the church into a chaotic cacophony of voices, none of them particularly authoritative. We have become a model of interest group liberalism. Theologians are viewed as one interest group among many. The only theology honored is one that exalts a Gospel without Law. Since we have cut ourselves off from the authority of past churches, the theological and moral traditions we have held to be authoritative are now reduced to same level as the many voices we have invited into the conversation. There is little orthodoxy to overthrow.
However, the effect of “inclusivity” has not been neutral, ideologically speaking. Theological revisionism and social and political liberalism characterize the official organs of the ELCA, partly because only revisionists and liberals accept the idea of quotas and can therefore be selected, and partly because “inclusivity” has not yet been expanded to include theological traditionalists and social and political conservatives.
One only has to look at the drift of Augsburg Fortress Press, The Lutheran, Women of the ELCA, Lutheran Office of Governmental Affairs, the ELCA Church Council, Church in Society, Global Mission Events, many of our seminaries, campus ministry on secular campuses, and our Bishop’s recent statements to get an accurate picture of the liberal protestantizing of our church. The sacred topics of Protestant liberalism pervade our doings as much as, say, the Episcopalians. (To be fair, however, it is important to note that some attempts at re-centering several of these expressions of the church have been made, and we should encourage them.)
While this drift is irritating, if not alienating, it has been tolerated by most of us. After all, there are many great parishes and people within the ELCA. The Lutheran network provides a circle of Christian friends and institutions that are dear to me. We are still a Christian church. So we cope. So, I—like many others—have reluctantly tolerated the “LPD—Liberal Protestant Drift” of the ELCA.
But on these issues of sexuality we have come to the limits of toleration. (True tolerance, as I will argue later, does not mean limitless elasticity; it includes notions of endurance and forbearance. When certain limits are exceeded, tolerance cannot forbear or endure any longer.) I believe that the proposals to bless homosexual unions and ordain homosexuals in committed relationships strain the level of tolerance for orthodox Christians. Even the fact that the ELCA is taking those proposals seriously raises the level of our alienation from the ELCA. Can such settled Christian moral teachings really come under serious questioning? Can they actually be voted on in assemblies?
But were the ELCA to accept those proposals, their acceptance would do more than increase our alienation or strain our tolerance. Acceptance would raise the issue of status confessionis for many of us. Acceptance would constitute a frontal assault on the core meanings and values of the Christian faith. Acceptance would involve a denial of the basics of the Trinitarian faith, not just a difference of opinion. Acceptance would mean a rejection of the commandments of God. That cannot be tolerated.
There is a good deal of pessimism that the ELCA will accept those proposals, for all the reasons I have already enumerated. That pessimism is well founded. We have the memory of the ELCA’s first incredible effort at making a statement on sexuality. It was a perfect product of the forces I described above. After the fall-out from that debacle, I was miraculously appointed to an ELCA task force to deliberate about how the ELCA might deliberate about sexuality issues. I found that I was the only one on the task force of about a dozen willing to speak for the traditional teaching on these matters. The general assumption of the vocal majority was that all the issues had been settled in their minds and it was time to enlighten the minions of darkness in the ELCA.
The host of materials and actions of many ELCA organs that have followed have reinforced the perception that the mind of the ELCA is indeed made up, all that remains is the coup detat. The new task force that has been appointed is pretty well stacked according to the ELCA “LPD.” But we should not give up prematurely. A genuine theological dialogue in the task force and in the church in general may well emerge as we draw nearer to 2005. We need to make our own contributions to that dialogue in the time we have left.
II. The Argument for the Tradition
In the last several months I have been writing my revised chapter on marriage and family life for a second edition of Ordinary Saints at the same time I was writing this essay. The chapter on marriage and family is the second longest in the book. I spend twenty pages outlining the Lutheran teaching on marriage, which is pivotal for grappling with all related issues, including homosexuality. I deal with marriage as a social institution of the left hand kingdom as well as a holy estate instituted by God for Christians in the church. I differentiate sharply the Christian convictions about the scope, time frame, and substance of the holy covenant of marriage from the debased views emerging from the culture. I then take up related issues. One of them is the case for sexual abstinence before marriage and sexual fidelity within marriage. Other issues are abortion, pornography, and equality within marriage.
This section on homosexuality follows the main discussion of marriage.
Normative Issues
The Jewish and Christian traditions have been opposed to homosexual sexual relations, though not always in a punitive fashion. Their prohibitions follow from their belief that there is a divinely created structure to sexual life. Women and men are meant to complement each other. They "fit" together physically, emotionally, and spiritually. Male and female God created them, and they are meant to be as one within the bonds of marriage. In other words, there is form to the creation. Moral sexual relations are appropriate to form. This consideration rejects sexual activities between adults and children, between humans and animals, between family members, and between persons of the same sex. The Ten Commandments assume and order such a normative form.
This negative posture remains intact among the vast majority of Jewish and Christian traditions, despite strong attacks on it from some secular authorities in legal, medical, psychological, and social-scientific fields as well as challenges to it from a number of Christian scholars and Christian advocacy groups. Indeed, the challenges from within mainstream Christian denominations have been so sharp and relentless that they threaten to split them. The controversy is a very serious one, with both sides—the traditionalists and the revisionists—holding fiercely to their positions. A large group in the middle does not know what to think.
The gist of the revisionist argument contends that there really is no persisting, discernible sexual identity tied to the obvious differences in biological form. Traditional differences, they argue, are oppressive cultural definitions imposed by heterosexual males that have proven to be highly relative, both from culture to culture and from person to person within a culture. Thus, they counsel that love between persons be the sole criterion governing sexual relations. “All you need is love.” The "appropriate to form" qualification should be dropped, at least as it pertains to homosexual relations. Homosexual relations are not disordered or imperfect, only different. There is less interest in dropping the “appropriate to form” qualification with regard to incest, pedophilia, and bestiality though it is difficult to see why those barriers should not also fall, given their argument.
Nevertheless, those responsible for Christian moral tradition are not convinced. Neither is this writer. The biblical position seems fairly clear and straightforward in spite of the efforts to relativize it through historical-critical studies. At least two of the Ten Commandments assume the heterosexual nature of the marriage bond, as do the creation stories in Genesis. The whole structure of the Bible is heterosexual; the revisionists bear this out by calling it “heterosexist.” Church tradition is rather unequivocal. There is nothing in either the Bible or Christian teaching that can be retrieved to legitimate homosexual relations, as there were with the issues of slavery and women’s leadership in the church. The revisionists are now even admitting that one cannot make a case for legitimating homosexual unions on the basis of the Bible or the tradition.
Besides the Bible and Christian tradition, human experience seems to suggest that sexual identity has deep rootage in persisting biological form. The tendency of cultures to differentiate clearly between male and female sexual identities indicates a continuing bias toward complementary sexual identities and roles. They prize child-bearing and raising within stable unions of male and female.
There is scarcely any warrant, therefore, for abandoning the "appropriate to form" requirement, neither for Christians in general nor especially for the leadership of the church. Churches must confidently and clearly teach the normative Christian moral teaching on these matters that has been in place for thousands of years. Overturning the tradition’s moral presumption against homosexual relations would take far more evidence against it than we have now.
Pastoral Issues
This does not mean, however, that the church cannot have a nuanced and compassionate pastoral approach to homosexuals. Without relaxing its affirmation of heterosexual sex within the marriage covenant, the church can strongly insist that the gospel is addressed to all sinners. Homosexual activity is not some especially heinous sin that cuts one off from God's grace. Consistent with this, inclusion within the church and its pastoral care should be insisted on.
As with all sin, though, forgiveness follows repentance and leads to efforts to follow God's will insofar as it is discerned by the church. The church should continue to call those who are homosexual by orientation—derived from either biological or environmental factors—to a "heroic" response. That is, they should be called to practice sexual abstinence, sublimating their sexual energies into other pursuits. The church has long honored such "heroic" responses for homosexual and heterosexual singles alike, and should continue to do so. Indeed, such a response should be the only one allowed for ordained clergy, who have vowed to exemplify the ideals of the church.
It would be naïve to argue that this can be the church's only response for lay Christians. In our present culture, some lay Christians who are homosexual by orientation will engage in sexual relations with members of their own sex. Some will act promiscuously but others will seek more stable unions. Many homosexuals will remain “in the closet” and participate incognito in church life, but others will insist that the church formally recognize their sexual identity and bless their unions. Gays and lesbians of all sorts of persuasion are present in our churches, and there seems to be widespread confusion about the church’s proper pastoral response to this fact. Given the normative teaching outlined above, what pastoral strategy toward homosexuals should be adopted by churches and Christian individuals?
I would propose a strategy of gracious tolerance. By “gracious” I mean that the church—both clergy and lay—should greet all persons coming into the fellowship of the church with a warm welcome. After all, we are a company of forgiven sinners. Many homosexuals who prefer to keep their sexual identity private will accept this welcome and participate fully in the life of the church. Many who are in partnered relationships may also wish to keep the sexual nature of their friendships hidden or unclear. As long as such persons do not openly violate or flaunt the normative teachings of the church, they should also be greeted and accepted graciously. The church can even affirm the rich elements of friendship in their ongoing relationship, though not its sexual elements. The latter need not be revealed or probed. The church does not probe others who do not live up to the moral ideals of the church. Kindliness, inclusion, and support would be the order of the day in these cases, as it is for all the church’s members. Repentance, forgiveness, and amendment of life should be left for homosexuals to work out privately, as is the case for other persons who struggle with the moral demands of the Christian life.
For those who are struggling with sexual identity in their lives, “graciousness” would mean first of all an effort to help them sort out who they are and who they wish to become. Though some homosexuals seem irretrievably caught in their same-sex desires, many young people are simply confused about their sexual identities. It is gracious to the latter to help them move toward heterosexual desires so that they can grow in that direction in their prospective sexual relationships. For those persons who have inclinations toward same-sex desires but who want to move toward a heterosexual identity, various therapies may be helpful. For both these kinds of persons, it is particularly important that the public teaching of the church affirm heterosexual norms.
For those who seem “fixed” in their orientation, it is consistent with our argument above to counsel abstinence. Like other singles, homosexuals are called to refrain from sexual relations. In cases in which abstinence is not being observed, it is gracious privately and tentatively to encourage sexual fidelity within committed friendships. Such an arrangement is far better than the dangerous promiscuity practiced by a significant portion of the homosexual subculture. From a Christian point of view, it is the lesser of evils. But their sexual relations are still disordered and imperfect, even though other elements in their friendship are admirable. It is important continually to hold up the Christian ideal before such homosexual pairs. Perhaps in time they can work toward celibate friendships. Perhaps some may wish to engage in reparative therapy. This gradual process assumes a strong pastoral commitment to such pairs. Without that the pastoral counsel will sound simply as judgmental hectoring.
It would be disastrously wrong publicly to bless such arrangements. It would send too many wrong messages to the church. To those who regard homosexual relations as sinful, it would signal that the church blesses sin. To those who are struggling with their own sexual identity, it would put an imprimatur on desires and activities they need to resist. Opposition to public blessing reminds us that there are limits to the church’s graciousness. Those limits have to do with tolerance, the second word in our phrase, “gracious tolerance.”
Tolerance does not mean that anything goes, as our permissive culture tends to view it. Tolerance, while it suggests a liberal and open-minded attitude toward persons whose beliefs and actions are different from one’s own, also denotes forbearance and endurance. Tolerance, therefore, has its limits. (A bridge, for example, tolerates a certain tonnage but no more.) We tolerate—that is, we forebear and endure—beliefs and actions that diverge from our own. However, if certain beliefs and actions violate our core convictions, we do not tolerate them. We oppose them and act against them. And properly so; personal integrity and courage are at stake. On the other hand, our level of tolerance is more elastic with regards to beliefs and actions that go counter to our less central or peripheral values, such as our preferences, tastes, or opinions.
The church, like individuals, can tolerate all sorts of opinions and practices that involve peripheral matters. It can allow a great deal of latitude on how Christians should apply Christian moral teachings to issues of public policy. It can tolerate a number of forms of worship and preaching. It can tolerate sharp disagreements about practical matters that, while important, are not essential to the core teaching and practices of the church. It can even tolerate many persons whose behavior is out of line with its teaching. Indeed, it can—and must—tolerate all of us sinners who fall short of what the commandments of God demand. In a sense we are all tolerated by the church.
However, the church is the Body of Christ, responsible for maintaining its apostolic witness. It is entrusted by its Lord with the gospel—the full-blown Trinitarian faith, as well as with the central practices that follow from it. Certainly the commandments are included in its moral core. Therefore, direct, public challenges in word and deed to its core convictions and practices simply cannot be tolerated. Challenges to the tradition’s teaching on homosexuality are directed at that core.
This does not mean that those core convictions and practices cannot be discussed and debated. There must be a zone of freedom where persons can carry on spirited conversation on central issues that are puzzling or even offensive to them. The youth of the church must be allowed to ask questions about those key issues. Such a zone should be provided in the educational program of the church. At regional and national levels of the church there is room for such discussion. But the proliferation of opinions at that level should not confuse or qualify the normative teaching of the church in its preaching or catechesis. At the level of normative, official teaching and preaching, the church has a tradition to convey clearly and confidently. Official representatives of the church are obligated to preserve and convey that tradition until it is officially changed, and on core issues, that change can only come after decades of reflection, discussion, and prayer.
With regard to these sexuality issues, the church cannot tolerate significant “cultures of dissent” that publicly impugn the teaching of the church by contrary teaching and behavior. Permissiveness toward such dissenters makes the church appear hypocritical, ineffectual, or unwilling to hold dissenters accountable to its moral teachings. In recent years it has led to crises of sexual misconduct in both Protestantism and Catholicism. ** Likewise, if it is to be one church, it cannot tolerate public repudiation of its teachings by individual congregations or synods. Nor can it tolerate a compromise in which both the traditional and the revisionist perspectives officially co-exist, for that means that the teaching of church has indeed changed; there is no normative perspective on these matters. The one church must maintain its unified, normative tradition in a disciplined fashion until it is changed.
** Well-informed confidants tell me that this “culture of dissent” is already established in at least two seminaries. These confidants allege: one seminary has two pairs of faculty living in same-sex unions. Only a small minority of faculty object to this, and then not publicly. Homosexuals constitute at least one third of the student body at another. There is eager exploration of different sexual identities and partners, much to the shock of the heterosexual students, especially the married couples. Activist Christian homosexual organizations on campus are torn by conflict between a faction that wants to be held accountable to heterosexual standards of sexual fidelity and a faction that does not want to be bound by them. The irregularly ordained gay pastor of a nearby ELCA congregation confides that many Christian male homosexuals simply will not observe sexual fidelity in their unions. Should such dissent continue it is not hard to envision a situation in the ELCA similar to that in the American Catholic church, where both the vows of chastity and prohibitions against homosexual relations were flaunted with impunity by many priests. If the venerable institution of the celibate Catholic priesthood can be thus subverted, why not the institution of Christian marriage with its confining notions of sexual fidelity?
Finally, the church cannot tolerate relentless and unceasing challenges to its normative teaching on sexuality. Such is the route to depletion and decrease. There has to be an agreement that its settled convictions cannot be challenged indefinitely. Once a church has re-affirmed its teaching, there has to be a decent interval of surcease from continued challenges.
III. Conclusion
Such, I believe are the normative and pastoral principles that should hold sway in the ELCA. Much has happened in recent decades to sensitize us to the plight of our Christian homosexual brothers and sisters. Those brothers and sisters have made us aware of the toll that harsh rejection in church and society has taken on them. Most Christians have come to the realization that we cannot treat them as modern day lepers whose whole being is denied. These brothers and sisters are persons who need grace and renewal like we are. They need Christian friendship. I hope that they can find some measure of graciousness in the approach I have outlined.
However, I simply cannot swallow hard and accept the revisionist claim that the church can publicly bless homosexual unions and allow homosexuals in partnered relationships to be pastors in the ELCA. The Bible, the Lutheran tradition, and the great Catholic and Orthodox traditions clearly come to quite different conclusions. The laity of the churches do too. In a recent survey by Barna Research, lay persons by a 2 to 1 ratio believe that homosexual relations are proscribed by the Bible. But about one fifth of them are now uncertain; they have been confused by the current debate. The ELCA clergy are another matter; I would guess that they tip in the revisionist direction.
Our success in preventing the ELCA from continuing on its disastrous “LPD” depends upon our capacity to awaken the laity and get them to project their voices. Thus, it is crucially important that the statement that comes out of this conference be made widely available to laity and clergy alike. That awakening, plus demonstrating clearly that our arguments coincide with the Bible and the Lutheran tradition, can summon the church to continued fidelity to its historic teaching. For this we hope and pray.
