The Reformation Continues
by George W. Forell, Ph.D.*
Readers will be moved to share this article with any acquaintance who wants to know what the Lutheran Church really stands for. Together with Dr. D. James Kennedy's superb sermon on Luther's Quest for God, available on videotape from the Coral Ridge Hour, we have two of the most lucid and helpful presentations of our unique Lutheran faith that your editor has knowledge of.
Occasionally newspapers report the tragic story of a person found wandering aimlessly around the city streets who apparently does not know who he or she is. Such people suffer from amnesia and do not know their identity because they have lost their memory.
Because it is important to know one's past in order to manage one's present, people attempt to uncover their history, "to find their roots." This search not only aifects individuals, it applies also to groups and associations. Young communities like the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America have a special need to understand where they come from. If we do not know where we came from, we shall not know who we are, or where we are supposed to go.
The Festival of the Reformation helps orient Evangelical Lutherans. As a cure to the institutional amnesia which threatens the Lutheran Church – as it threatens so many other contemporary institutions – this festival tells us where we came from and who we are. Our roots are in Martin Luther's rediscovery of the Gospel in the 16th century, an event which points us to the very center of the Christian faith. Evangelical Lutheran Christians are men and women who know they are sinners saved by grace through faith in Jesus Christ
Sinners? What does this strange list of words mean? The first irritant is the word "sinners." This term could win a contest for the most offensive word in the English language. Just mention it and people turn away, unwilling to talk with you. We all want to hear that we are wonderful, beautiful, kind, generous and admirable.
We "feel good about ourselves." At least that is what we tell everybody, and thus we are irritated when we hear a negative term like "sin." Popular religious cults like those described as "New Age" tell us that we are divine, in fact that we are all "gods." This is fashionable at the very time when we are suffocating under the results our greed and selfishness have produced. Air, soil, and water are polluted. Ships sail around the world loaded with garbage, carrying death and destruction, unable to find a harbor, like the legendary "Flying Dutchman." Hunger and disease stalk the weakest of our sisters and brothers over the world and the percentage of poor children is steadily increasing even in our own country. Millions are killed before They are even bornùbut we "feel good about ourselves" and claim to be "gods."
The Reformation reminds us that we are sinners. In Luther's language, we are people who are turned into ourselves and use everybody, including God and the neighbor, to support our own ambitions.
This analysis of the human predicament is not the result of Luther's medieval pessimism; it is an accurate description of the situation confronting us every day on the TV news and in the newspaper. Even if we abolish the word "sin," its results are all about us. Into the euphoric fog of self-congratulation created by politicians, advertisers and the narcissistic cults of our time comes the Reformation with its message that we are sinners.
Saved Sinners?
But this is by no means the last word. Luther tells baptized Christians that they are SAVED sinners. He does not say, "If you listen to me, or if you stop smoking and drinking, or become active in politics, if you give to the Hunger Appeal, tithe or whatever your good works may happen to be, then you will be saved." Without any qualifications he says: "You are saved!"
How is that possible? The answer is very simple and those members of the Lutheran Church who have memorized their Small Catechism should be able to recall what Luther teaches us there: "I believe that Jesus Christ, true God, begotten of the Father from eternity, and also true man, born of the virgin Mary, is my Lord, who has redeemed me a lost and condemned creature, delivered and freed me from all sins, from death and from the power of the devil, not with silver and gold but with his innocent sufferings and death, in order that I may be his, live under him in his kingdom, and serve him in everlasting righteousness, innocence and blessedness, even as he is risen from the dead and lives and reigns to all eternity."
Note that this statement is not merely Luther's personal opinion; it is also part of the ELCA constitution which says: "This church accepts...the Small Catechism, [and] the Large Catechism...as further valid interpretations of the faith of the Church."
Luther's words help us to overcome our amnesia by reminding us where we in the ELCA came from.
Grace-saved sinners?
With Luther our church insists that salvation is not a human achievement; it is a free gift of God. This is what the word "grace" means, and for that reason it is almost as hard to take as the word "sin." From early childhood, we would rather do things ourselves. We don't want to be dependent on anybody, not even God. We all want to be self-made women and men. Thus Luther teaches us an even harder lesson when he insists that we are saved by grace alone, harder than when he tells us that we are sinners.
The daily media reveal the reality of sin. It is inescapable and everywhere around us. Consequently, many people who never go to church still believe firmly in the total depravity of human beings. But these same people cannot fathom the reality of grace.
Grace is God's sovereign and incomprehensible decision for us. First of all God created us. That fact alone is hard to believe, and we will go to implausible lengths to convince ourselves that God had nothing to do with creation. But here we are, in a vast universe far beyond our ability to comprehend. We human beings, and our living and beautiful earth, appear to exist against all odds – indeed, against the very principles of probability, as physicists point out. But this creation grace is not all.
"Grace" means that God cares about us personally, loves us, identifies with us and our problems. The choice of Abraham and Sarah is grace and so is the election of the people Israel. Christmas and Easter and Pentecost are grace.
Grace, through faith, saved sinners!
How can this grace become ours? According to Luther and the Lutheran Confessions, it happens through faith alone. When Luther talks about faith he uses the image from the Epistle to the Ephesians, the image of a bridegroom and bride. He sees Christ as the bridegroom and the people of God as the bride (Eph. 5). As in marriage, Christ and the soul become one flesh. Luther writes, "It follows that everything they have they hold in common, the good as well as the evil. Accordingly the believing soul can boast of and glory in whatever Christ has, as though it were its own; and what ever the soul has, Christ claims as his own...Christ is full of grace, life and salvation. The soul is full of sins, death, and damnation. Now let faith come between them, and sins, death, and damnation will be Christ's, while grace, life and salvation will be the soul's." (Luther's Works, American Edition, Vol.31, P.351).
Luther's description of faith as the means of exchange between Christ and the Christian shows a very different use of the word from its function in ordinary language. For many people the word "faith" describes an attitude which is quite independent from the object of that faith. We can have faith in almost everything, from earthly possessions like money and real-estate to faith in human beings like family and friends.
Or one may have faith in institutions like one's country, or education, or the free enterprise system, or the bank. Some even have faith in rabbits' feet, crystals, or garlic. Certain theologians promote faith in faith. They seem to suggest that it doesn't matter what you believe; it is the believing attitude which is good for you.
Grace, through faith in Christ alone, saved sinners
For Luther only faith in Christ can properly be called faith. Belief in all the other things, be they ever so worthwhile, he calls idolatry. He insists that all human beings believe in something, as he explains in the Large Catechism: "A god is that which we look to and in which we find refuge in every time of need. To have a god is nothing else than to trust and believe him with our whole heart.
As I have often said, the trust and faith of the heart alone makes both God and an idol. If your faith and trust are right, then your God is the true God. On the other hand, if your trust is false and wrong, then you have not the true God. For these two belong together, faith and God. That to which your heart clings and entrusts itself is, I say, really your God."
Reformation, for Church Survival
For the future, indeed, for the survival of the Church, it is essential that the teachings of Luther move from the ELCA constitution into the daily life of all people. If isn't enough that we have good times together when we meet on Sunday or during the week. People can and do have good times together at all kinds of meetings. Fraternal organizations, clubs, and even the local bar may provide such entertainment. We do not need the Church if that is all it accomplishes.
Nor is it enough that we do all kinds of good works together. That is certainly important and praiseworthy, but all sorts of organizations feed the hungry, advocate racial justice, plead for prisonersandsupporteverykindofgood work. We have UNICEF and Good Will Industries, Amnesty International, CARE and Habitat for Humanity, to mention only a few.
And if we are only a group of people meeting regularly to rememberthe good old days, there are "Daughters of This" and "Sons of That" who do this remembering to perfection. Many organizations do all these tasks as well or better than we do them. We don't need the Church for a nostalgia trip.
But there is one thing that will not be done and cannot be done if the people that have been reached by the Gospel do not do it. They must proclaim that all people, though sinners, are called to be saved by grace through faith in Jesus Christ. Once we make this task the very center of our life, all the other important by-products will follow.
We will have good times together at potluck suppers and congregational meetings. We will fight hunger and racism, homelessness and poverty as well as crueltyand injustice, shoulderto shoulder with other men and women of good will who may do it for different reasons, but do it nevertheless. And even an occasional nostalgia trip may be in order. We may dress up in the costumes of our ancestors and sing old songs, and remember each other's past together with open and eager minds.
But if the center is missing, that is, the Gospel of Christ, we cannot do any of these things for very long. We shall and should fade away. Luther and the Reformation, by telling us where we came from, also tell us who we are. They remind us that the future of the ELCA will depend on the way it proclaims the same old Gospel of the justification of sinners by a gracious God. f
* Dr. George Forell is Carver Distinguished Professor Emeritus of the School of Religion, University of Iowa: He gave this lecture in October at the three Northern and Southern California Reformation Rallies, sponsored by FOCL for the ELCA churches of the areas. His lecture is available on videotape from FOCL. See accompanying side-bar for details.
Fear The Lord: The Beginning of Wisdom
by George H. Muedeking*
"Fear God!." It is among the most persistent and repeated themes of the Bible. One of its more consequential expressions is, "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom" (Ps.111:10) Despite its importance in Scripture, our generation has almost forcibly pushed that promise out of our religious sensibility. Our"palsy-walsy" God, who can be found just by looking inside ourselves, who is at our beck and call at any moment that we condescend to nod in His direction – which of us would "fear" that kind of Divine Being?
In my early pastor-years, I gave a catechism to a Mormon prospect and told him that preceding his membership we would use the book for instruction in the faith. When I next visited his home, he held up the book with no little consternation and disappointment. "I don't know if I want to join this church or not," he said. "Here with every Commandment it says that 'We are to fear and love God, so that we do this or don't do that." What does that mean, 'FEAR' God? I'm not afraid of any damn fellow!" Of course I weaseled out of the challenge. ! needed more members in that infant home mission church. I did just what some of our modern (politically correct) Bible translations do. I said, "O, that doesn't mean 'fear'. // means reverence or awe. You know, just the way you feel when you stand at the edge of the Grand Canyon and are overwhelmed by the sight. So in the catechism Luther says we should think of God with reverence and awe."
My limping explanation was good enough for him. But not fair to him, for it certainly wasn't good enough for the Bible or for its use of that contentious term. Almost invariably the first word spoken in a biblical narrative when any human is confronted by the Divine Presence is, "Fear not!" The naked face-to-face meeting with the Ail-holy is anything but casual. Every time.
Fear in the Presence
We will come closer to comprehending the feeling those encounters generated, if we accept the suggestion of Henry Guntrip, in his Psychotherapy and Religion (1957). Along with Leslie Weatherhead, he was the pioneer English bridge-builder between psychotherapy and pastoral counseling. He said that the closest we come to the experience which Bible characters have had when the angel of the Lord stands astride their path, is our feeling as we awaken from a nightmare.
The sheer terror, the virtual horror in which we try to scramble backtoward reality-consciousness, mimics the "fear of the Lord" which Bible people felt. No small part of this feeling is the wonder with which we try to retrace the dream images and marvel how little they should have been able to induce such fright.
Guntrip argues that this terror is itself the intrusion of the Supernatural into our world. We do, in those frightful and awe-full moments, become immediate with the Other-world. It has broken in upon us. The Scriptures are of a piece here. He dwells in "light unapproachable." He is one "Whom no man has ever seen or can see." "Our God is a consuming fire." To stand in the Divine Presence is no small matter.
The (W) Holy Other
World War I blasted out of existence the anticipated world of eternal progress, shaming it for the theological fantasy it was. Among those who experienced the col lapse, theologians Karl Barthand Rudolph Otto began to talk about God not only as the "Holy Other," but as the "Wholly Other." Barth insisted that only the "Word" could reveal this "Other" to us.
In his classic, The Idea of the Holy, Otto named this experience of the holiness, of the "Otherness" of God, "numinous." He pointed out that the feeling of the holy is unlike anything in our world of phenomena. It is numenal. It is the actual occurrence of the otherwise unknowable Numen, which was Immanuel Kant's postulated origin of our world of scientific phenomenal knowledge.
This experience of the holiness of God – to say nothing of its consequential sensibility as fear – is alien to our present religious culture. Were our pastors to talk seriously about "such a worm as I" as did the old hymns of the Church, they would be looking for another pastorate before the sun set on their morning sermon. We simply will not countenance any diminution of "self-esteem." Our religious establishments accept no more premier responsibility for their mission than engendering "self-esteem."
Feeling good about myself is now the standardized test for religious achievement. Feeling good about an experience in itself defines that experience as good and true. We have available in our culture no other criterion for moral integrity. In our relativistic age every absolutivity is denounced (except the one absolute requirement that a belief in absolutes is not be tolerated because it makes one a fanatic.) So if it makes me feel good, that is all I need to depend on for truth or right. No further critique is fitting, since feelings cannot be judged. They just are.
As always, we pay a price for thus ignoring the Reality of our human condition. Our price is to become slave to the secular expression of utter finiteness, slave to a pervasive and unending sense of anxiety. The famous psychotherapist Rollo May called ours, "The Age of Anxiety." For fear of God we have substituted "ontological anxiety," to use Tillich's descriptive term.
Feeling Good in the Church
Since the '60s and the Flower Children, church people have moved noticeably and uncritically into the frame of reference that if it makes me feel good, that is all we need to depend on for truth or right.
Example: I was recently approached by a retired pastorwho had just attended a funeral at his church. The keepsake obituary bulletin used atthe funeral read:
"Do not stand at my grave and weep. I am not there, I do not sleep, lam a thousand winds that blow; I am the diamond's gift of snow, I am the sunlight on ripened grain; I am the autumn's gentle rain. When you awaken in the morning's hush, I am the swift uplifting rush Of quiet birds in circled flight. I am the soft stars that shine at night. Do not stand at my grave and cry; I am not there; I did not die."
That pastor was distressed because the mortician passed off this pantheistic drivel on the unsuspecting Christians in his church. With great generosity I optimistically volunteered to write the mortician and invite him to replace that message with some message like Psalm 23, or the Resurrection passages from St. John's Gospel, whenever he expected that Christian mourners would predominate.
I faxed the letter, and within five minutes of its arrival atthe mortuary, my modem was churning out his reply. It agitatedly chastised me for placing the blame on the wrong person. The Christian family mourners were the ones who had looked overall possible poetry he had submitted for that keepsake, and they had chosen this one! Further, this was one of the most frequent choices made at his mortuary, he said, so that quite obviously, I didn't know what was Christian or non-Christian any better than he did.
With the plague of New Age Religion theologies that ooze from our media day after day, we can be sure that not only that family could not distinguish Christian truth, but that a good share of the mainline Christians of ourtime would probably also see nothing amiss. If it makes us feel good, it must be true.
Test the Spirits
St. John reminds us, however, that it is our responsibility to "test the spirits to see whether they be of God." How do we know the false prophets from the Spiritof God? Answer, "Every spiritwhich confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is of God, and every spirit which does not confess Jesus is not of God." (I Jn4: 1-3).
This passage is theological to its core. The Word, Jesus Christ, took flesh and lived among us. He entered this disordered sin-driven world to rescue us from that sinful state. If any behavior or idea violates the fact that it is our sin which is being reckoned with and dealt with by the incarnation, passion and death of an incomprehensibly gracious Savior – then that behavior or idea cannot have originated with God. It is false prophesy, the extrusions of the anti-Christ, as St. John goes on to say.
Does any given behavior or idea exalt or repudiate the enfleshed Son of God as the only Savior? That John insists, is the test for doctrinal falsehood. Does "testing" the behavior/idea expose the sinfulness of the human agent and the total need for overcoming that condition? Does it at the same time convey the assurance that God Himself has acted to "reconcile the world unto Himself" by Jesus' coming to "tent among us," (John 1: 14)? If it does, we are moving within the framework of the Holy Spirit's enlightenment.
We are indebted to Martin Luther for encapsulating this process of individual testing, to see if the spirits that drive or inform the Christian are falseùor are from God. In the first of the 95 Theses that brought on the Reformation, Luther told us that Jesus Christ willed that the entire life of a Christian be "a life of repentance."
There we have it: the Christ enfleshed Himself so that the alienation we earned by our sinful choices can be recognized for what it is and does, namely, severs our relation to God. The Christ came so that our orientation should swingconstantlyawayfrom those choices toward the sacrifice Christ made in our behalf. The entire Christian life is a life of constant "attitude change," reorientation, or repentanceùall because Christ Jesus was manifested in the flesh.
Testing the Spirits in the Church
One of the more recent "testings" that has challenged the Church is last May's letter of the ELCA Conference of Bishops to the homosexual community, in it homosexualists are advised that they are unconditionally welcomed as members of ELCA congregations. A troubling number of ELCA congregations have followed the signal, and have declared themselves "Reconciled in Christ" congregations (RIC). They publicly announce that homosexuals are unconditionally accepted as unquestioned and unquestionable members of their congregations.
Intending both to be generous and to blunt the persistent complaint that ELCA churches are hostile to the homosexual life-style, the bishops and the RIC congregations have instead done immeasurable harm to the minority they aim to please. For they are in fact practicing rank discrimination against homosexuals. Apparently this fact is lost to the bishops and the RIC congregations.
The bishops and these congregations are identifying homosexual persons en masse as a minority who are completely different from the rest of us. As the bishops and the RIC congregations see it, practicing homosexualsù unlike all the rest of humanityùneed no repentance for activities which the Scriptures unreservedly and invariably characterize as a violation of God's pattern for human behavior.
Like the priest and the Levite in the Good Samaritan story, the bishops and the RIC group want us to pass by these morally wounded on the other side-unworthy of the healing attention of the Savior of sinners. It is almost as though every sexually active homosexual is beneath the attention of the Church and its witness to God's warning concern for his/her eternal welfare.
This is prejudice of the highest order directed against people for whom the Christ was manifested in the flesh. The Bishops' have given the Church a letter of dis-information. To live a life of repentance, that is, to live as if one believes that Christ Jesus was manifested in the flesh for our salvation, is to recognize that no one is ever free or unconditionally qualified to be welcomed into the Christian Church by virtue of any genetic nature or initiated actions.
Christ Jesus was manifested in the flesh to redeem us from our sins. If the bishops think that despite the Scriptures' completely clear and undeviatingly uniform assertions on the subject, homosexual behavior is sin-free (because "they were born that way"ùor whatever), then the bishops are exempting that behavior from the life of repentance that otherwise, according to Luther, is totally descriptive of the Christian life. So they are not only discriminating against the homosexual community as such, but they are themselves in danger of denying that "Christ Jesus was manifested in the flesh."
Jesus came to save sinners. To be blind to the recognition that no human action is stain-free, as the bishops' letter indicates is their assessment of the homosexual life-style when it is a "committed relationship," is to deny the very purpose and accomplishment of the incarnation of the Son of God.
Repentance/the Fear of the Lord
How shall we disabuse our Church of the heresy that if it feels good it must be right, if it feels loving, it must be loving? How shall we help the ELCA to test the spirits so that it understands the trap of idolatry that looms ahead for a church that thinks the Bible statement, "God is Love," and the media-induced culture belief that "Love is God" are the same thing? Yahweh, not Venus, is God. To excuse behavior because the feeling of "love" accompanies it, is to return to the ancient idolatries of the fertility cults from which the only Real God delivered us through His dependable Word.
It could well be that the way back to the Church's biblical foundation will be found only through a new appreciation of the Otherness, the Holiness, of the Living God. That appreciation is shown by the "life of repentance," which testifies that we are never worthy to stand in the Divine Presence.
To sense the utter need for an uninterrupted life of repentance in our lives, we may have to go back to instructing ourselves that the fear of the Lord is the pathway to wisdom. For to fear the Lord is to confess emotionally as well as rationally, that our sins have separated us from our holy God. He is different; He is totally Other. When this truth comes to rest in our hearts, we call it a life of repentance. f
Red Faced
As happens with all mortal endeavors, the computer hard disk with its FOCL addresses gave up. So our Summer issue was delayed. Perhaps some of our loyal supporters mislaid their letter from FOCL President Dr. Herbert Schaefer because it suffered the same fate. If so, please use the tax-deductible gift form at the bottom of Page 7. We have no other resource for "encouraging biblical, evangelical and confessional faithfulness to our Christian heritage" than the volunteer unpaid services of the FOCL board and the prayerful gifts of those who want God's uncompromised Word offered across the Church.
Deliver us from Evil
by Haddon W Robinson, based on text: 11 Tim4:6-18. From Our Daily Bread, Nov 29, 1993. Published by Radio Bible Class, Grand Rapids, Ml.
At 7 p.m. on October 20,1968, a few thousand spectators remained in the Mexico City Olympic Stadium. It was almost dark. The last of the marathon runners were stumbling across the finish line.
Finally, the spectators heard the wail of sirens on police cars. As eyes turned to the gate, a lone runner wearing the colors of Tanzania staggered into the stadium. His name was John Stephen Akhwari. He was the last contestant to finish the 26 mile 385 yard contest. His leg had been injured in a fall and was bloodied and crudely bandaged. He hobbled the final lap around the track.
The spectators rose and applauded him as though he were the winner. After he had crossed the finish line, someone asked him why he had not quit. He replied simply, "My country did not send me 7,000 miles to start the race. They sent me 7,000 miles to finish it."
Not all heroes receive medals. Yet those who faithfully live for Christ, as the apostle Paul did, know that someday they will receive a crown of righteousness (2 Tim. 4:8). The Lord, the righteous Judge, will reward all those who long for Christ's return, who are faithful in spite of difficulties, and who finish the race
The Myth Factor
Bill Clinton's veto of the Partial-Birth Abortion Bill produced a fury of responses from the Pro-life community around the world. The majority of Congress and an even greater majority of the American people understand that a "medical" procedure that partially delivers a living baby and then kills him or her by puncturing the skull andsuctioning out the brains is barbaric.
An effort to calm this storm generated myths about the bill, widely disseminated by the media. Here are a few noted from Lifedate, Summer '96). accompanied by the truth.
MYTH #1
This bill is called "Partial-birth" in order to invoke sympathy
THE TRUTH
Congress itself defined it for purposes of the U.S. Criminal Code: "This Act may be cited as the"Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 1995" (Sect.l, Short Title).
MYTH #2
Partial-Birth abortions are extremely rare, "probably only 500 to 1000 a year. "(New York Times)
THE TRUTH
Written and recorded interviews with Dr. Martin Haskell, who developed the procedure, indicate Factory James McMahon, were responsible for more than 3,000 such abortions. A New York City doctor in a letter to Congress stated that he has performed them routinely since 1979.
Remember, these are only those who have chosen to write or give interviews on the subject.
MYTH #3
The technique is not as cruel as it is portrayed, since the fetus dies from the anesthesia given to the mother. This myth was reported as fact in the New York Daily News, in USA Today, and the St. Louis Dispatch
THE TRUTH
From American Medical News 1/1/96: "Anesthesia does not kill an infant if you don't kill the mother." – So egregious was professional anesthesiologists, and pediatric and obstetrics societies have outrageously protested lest their pregnant patients refuse otherwise necessary anesthetics on the basis of this lie.
MYTH #4
This procedure is done "only in cases when the mother's life is in danger or in cases of extreme fetal abnormality." (Planned Parenthood News Release, 11/1/ 95).
THE TRUTH
Abortionist Haskell in his recorded statement to American Medical News, says that he "routinely performs this procedure on all patients 20 through 24 weeks" and that 80% of these are "purely elective."
(Editor's Note: Can we assume that among those electing this horror-filled act, a certain number of ECLA Medical Plan clergy beneficiaries will be found, to whom the ELCA Church Council, against the express conditions stated in the Church's Statement on Abortion, recently gave approval for unrestricted access to medical insurance for all abortion procedures ? Remember, friends, it's your ELCA Synod and Churchwide benevolence that's being used for this purpose.)
that he, along with the late Dr. this deliberate falsehood that
Higgins Road and The Yale Professor
Not absent from the current discussing about the ELCA's "full communion" proposals with the Episcopal and Reformed churches is an assumption regarding Jesus' prayer that "all may be one...so that the world may know Thou hast sent me" (John 17). It is the presumption that the world's eye will be caught more easily simply because bigger is better. The media will pay more attention, and so the Gospel will have increased notice; But a price must be paid for being conspicuous. As Lao-tze reminded, "The tallest tree in the forest is the first to be cut down. " Already the ELCA is big enough to catch the attention of force, at least, knew its conclusions before it started. Other members, in an agony of open-mindedness, consented to addition of a conservative Yale Law Professor, Stephen L. Carter, in his widely read book, The Culture of Disbelief. " [M]embers [of] the Task Force on Human Sexuality of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America...worried in 1989 that adding a 'conservative' member might 'derail' the 'purpose of the taskforce' – implying that this task one.'" {p.73). Can ELCA members expect the 1997 Church-wide Assembly to act on the ecumenical proposals, free from having the national staff at Higgins Road load the dice again? Or will Professor Carter have ELCA material for another book?
Perspectives
THE GUFFAWS OF THE LORD (Ps. 2:4): You can hear them too, can't you? A nation run amuck with sexual license to the point that cohabitation before heterosexual marriage is almost modal and homosexual marriage is actually endorsed in some church circles – yet nailing little six-year old Jonathan Prevette of Lexington, N.C.. to the wall on the charge of "sexual harassment" for planting an invited kiss on a classmate's cheek! "To us, O Lord, belongs confusion, because we have sinned against thee" (Jer. 9: 8).
BUT NO LAUGHING MATTER is the plight of Brian Peterson Jr. and Amy Grossberg for whom the Delaware district attorney threatened the death penalty for the motel-room murder of their just-born baby. If they had only acted 5 minutes earlier!! Had they but exercised their "prochoice" rights by manipulating a breech-birth, they could have stuck a scissors in the baby's skull and called it a "partial-birth abortion." Every legal hurdle would then have been satisfied.
ELCA's "FULL COMMUNION" PROPOSALS with the Episcopal, Presbyterian, Reformed Church in America and United Church of Christ, will be looked at in the next FOCL-POINT. Meanwhile, consult the precise analysis of the problems involved for the ELCA in the proposed Episcopal ELCA "Concordat of Agreement" in the Nov-Dec issue of Lutheran Commentator.
Order a copy for your pastor and churchcouncil from P.O. Box 103, Maple Plain, MN 55359-0103. Also, a fully documented study of the double proposal can be had from the President of FOCL, Dr. Herbert Schaeier. Send a dollar to 3099 Island Dr., Redding, CA 96001 for your copy.
JOIN YOUR EDITOR IN PITY for his former employee, James Solheim, now head of the Episcopal News Service.
In the immediate past he has had to relay three major scandals to the media: the absconding of over $2 million by that Church's treasurer, a failed heresy trial brought against one bishop forordaining homosexual-practicing priests (charges rejected because the church-court decided the Episcopal Church does not claim to make Scripture the center of its teaching), and now the shame of a ring of homosexually active priests in the Long Island diocese, whose nude performances before a church altar and the homosexual marriage of two of them by a third in priestly vestments, made the pages of Penthouse, one oi America's notorious pornographic magazines.
Protests by 33 other bishops to the diocesan bishop Walker and to the Church's Presiding Bishop Browning eventuated in the forced resignation both of that Brooklyn priest as well as of one national office staff priest. At last count, 40 Episcopal bishops have already ordained 140 homosexuals to the priesthood.
THE AMERICAN CENTER FOR LAW AND JUSTICE is defending Alabama Judge Roy Moore from the ACLU challenge that he be disqualified from presiding over a case brought by a lesbian who left her husband for another woman and wants to retain the children's custody (Borden v. Borden), "because of his [Christian] religious convictions." Reminds you of the pastoral dare thrown out to pew-sitters, "If you were charged by the government's secret police with being a Christian – as were the early martyrs of the faith – would there be evidence enough to convict you?"