The ELCA-WHO DAT?

By Dr. George H Muedeking

Many moons ago I arrived at 5th Ave & 5th St, Minneapolis, as the new editor of the Lutheran Standard, the official publication of the American Lutheran Church. The building also housed the national offices of the ALC.
Quickly enough I had a major task thrown my way. Letters to the editor berated the ALC - principally for its secret Communist connections through the World Council of Churches; but also for its misdirected gospel that equated social justice with the good news about Jesus Christ. And always, for its substitution of a new liturgy and formalism for the vibrant relationship with the Deity we claimed to worship. This supine giant, the ALC, was as close to death as it could be. Would the Lutheran Standard either help perform the last rites, or inject the dying body with enough spirit to give it at least a Hezekiah-jolt (II Kings 20)?

I set about finding this "American Lutheran Church," so that I might respond to the letters. I looked high and low in that building. Would you believe it - I could find no American Lutheran Church. It wasn't there!
It wasn't anywhere. All I found was Dr. Fredrik Axel Schiotz behind the door labeled President. And Drs. Larson, Vice President; Schultz, Ex. Sec. Bd. of Trustees; Lechleitner, Ex. Sec. Div. of American Missions; Fricke, Ex. Sec. Div. of World Missions; and, and, and. But NO American Lutheran Church.

It wasn't anywhere. All I found was Dr. Fredrik Axel Schiotz behind the door labeled President. And Drs. Larson, Vice President; Schultz, Ex. Sec. Bd. ofTrustees; Lechleitner, Ex. Sec. Div. of American Missions; Fricke, ExSec. Div. of World Missions; and, and, and. But NO American Lutheran Church.

This Schiotz man? He was high in the councils of the WCC, president of the Lutheran World Federation, and preeminent church leader. Single-handedly he was bringing into unity the merging components of the ALC. In sharp contrast to his Scandinavian heritage, every emotion he ever had was written large on his face. This transparent leader was no communist or fellow-traveler, obviously. The same was true of all the other national office dwellers. Their integrity and their intense desire to keep the ALC at its business of sharing the good news of Christ was clear.

So where was this renegade ALC my correspondents were haranguing about? Where was the ALC itself, which the Lutheran Standard officially represented? The answer had to be: the only American Lutheran Church that existed was Dr. Schiotz, each elected and directing official, and each individual in the two and a half million members gathered in congregations across the world. The ALC was essentially just a name for a COLLECTIVE; it was not a THING.
This recognition changed the burden of editing the Lutheran Standard. From now on, I would not have to denounce "the ALC" for its lifelessness. There was no such THING, no live or dead ALC. There was only each individual pastor, perhaps lazying off his precious days; only each individual member allowing himself to be distracted from the single job Christ assigned his people, that is, to share the good news about the death and resurrection of the Savior. There was no ALC perverting the "whole counsel of God" in favor of only yelping for more social justice for everybody. There was only this writer, that program spewed out by an executive, or some religion professor regurgitating the theological cliches of the day.

The ALC wasn't soft on abortion.
It wasn't violating the Biblical directives on feminine church leadership, or hobnobbing dangerously with the Catholics, or spoiling our worship with cognitive dissonances and emotive turmoil from its forced revisions of the Lord's
Prayer, the Creeds and the unsingable hymns of the new green hymnal.

No, not the American Lutheran Church. It was rather, the individual members of the Church Council, each one individually and separately, who had voted in these aberrations, along with the individual church officials who had talked the convention delegates into adopting them plus those individual delegates who had allowed themselves to be persuaded, and the raft of pastors who had so meekly accepted these new directions. That was theALC. Nothing else.

It should not have been so difficult for an editor with his graduate degree in Philosophy to have caught on to the fact that the ALC is no THING, or that the Republican Party or the United States or the Church are not things. They are but names for a conglomerate of individual existences having similar identified characteristics. They are collectives.

This distinction was uncovered a thousand years ago by the Schoolmen of the medieval universities. They remembered that Plato taught that IDEAS have an existence of their own in some eternal realm, and are real in their own right. Aristotle, however, insisted that individuals were identified by their similarities of quality and structure. He became the first scientist, grouping similarities and asking why. The School men reached down to Luther's day, and were called Universalists or Realists (Plato's IDEAS) and Nominalists (where a "name" is given to similarly qualified existences Aristotle's and Luther's position).

The Nominalists would have said for instance, a business corporation can be a legal THING, that is, a legal fiction, a "body" or corpus created in law to assess responsibility and accountability. But it is not a thing in itself. Though it can be sued legally, as if it were a person, one can walk the earth and not find a General Motors, but only dealers and mechanics and salesmen and owned artifacts like Buicks on the display room floor.

When St Paul talks about the Church as Christ's body, one can search the world and never find it. Instead, one will discover this member and that member functioning for the welfare of the other members, an eye helping the ear. (I Cor.12: 14ff). That is what "Church" is - an association of people named Christians. So Church exists as associations of two or three gathered in his name, on to millions confessing, "Christ is Lord." But the Church is not a THING, an invisible something superexisting beyond our perception.

As editor, I found this distinction helpful between a Church which the theologians and the Realists were always talking about, and the Church the Nominalists knew about. The ALC was best understood as a collective name for individuals who tagged themselves with that name because they supported certain mission, education, and social activist programs. And that was all it was. It truly was: Dr. Schiotz, ecclesiastics of many stripes, and members scattered abroad.
To think like the medieval Realists is much more convenient, of course. "Pastor, who in the world moved that baptismal font into the back of the church, instead of staying up front center to remind us that Baptism is our entry gate into the heaven lies?" "Well, at our last Council meeting, the Council decided to do that." ("And I hope they don't tell you I was the one who talked them into it.")

Contrastingly, when a Nominalist berates the "Evangelical Lutheran Church in America" for some deviation, extravagance or stupidity, he recognizes he is talking about nobody and nothing. The ELCA is a nothing. Use a contemporary example. As Nominalists we would say, "H. George Anderson is our presiding bishop. He and his cohorts at 8765 Higgins Road, Chicago, have pushed 5 million people who name themselves 'ELCA,' into swallowing an 'historic Episcopate' as' the unconditional requirement for full fellowship with the 2 and 1/2 million people in the U.S. who use the name, Episcopal Church USA."
As medieval Realists, the Higgins Road dwellers, however, pass off the responsibility for this act onto the ELGA. At its "Ghurchwide Assembly it punched a voter card. "It" resolved in Denver in 1999 to adopt the CCM with the Episcopalians.
Even their own machinations, however, testify against this attempted sleight of hand. Remember how the vote got passed? They protested over and over again to the members of the Denver Assembly that the voters had no responsibility to the people who had paid their fare to Denver. They insisted the Assembly members in no way represented the ELCA. Rather, the voting members were repeatedly assured by these leaders that they, as voters, were the ELCA itself. They were to consider themselves to be the only ELCA in existence at that moment, and so were free to pass this doctrinal heresy of the compulsory "hE." They owed nothing to those who paid their way to Denver, that is, to those 22 synod assemblies which had by motion flatly rejected the terms of agreement (the CCM) with the Episcopalians. All unknowing, those leaders therefore reinforced the truth that the "ELCA" is but a name for a gathering of responsible voters, not a THING in itself.

Getting straight on the difference between a thing and a name, has implications for our FOCL-POINT readers. We should quit pummeling, beating up on, even flaying the ELCA for its unbiblical, unconfessional, politically correct and self-centered behavior over against the precious Reformation truth, "Word alone, Faith Alone, Grace Alone." Don't waste your time targeting the ELCA. It's as vain as trying to nail a square of senior-club potluck jello to a tree. There is no such THING as "the ELCA," except as a legal fiction for assigning responsibilities and account-abilities.

There is only a given church official who has misled the faithful, a given assembly voting member who got manipulated from the platform, a given seminary professor who denies the reliability of Scripture, a given pastor who has forsaken the allsufficient Christ and His salvation in exchange for the mess of pottage that all humanity will be saved regardless.
Testify against that misleading by that particular person. For the nothing called the ELCA didn't do it. The ELCA is a no THING, it is NO-thing. It is nothing. Speak the name and testify instead against the true perpetrator, whoever he or she may be, of these ills that have befallen the people who call themselves the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. And pray earnestly that more ELCAers will recover biblical, evangelical and confessional faithfulness to our Christian heritage.