The “core” of the faith: not about sex.

February 25, 2010 by Pastor Dan.

Associated Press had a feature story yesterday on the dissenters who are leaving the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America because of its increasingly liberal agenda. The story, which is even-handed if not totally sympathetic, highlights the experiences of several Lutheran churches—some small and some large— and pastors who have taken action to abandon their membership in the ELCA.

This kind of thing is not new. From time to time for decades thee have been individual congregations who get exercised over one or another issue and cannot countenance having organizational relations with people who do not agree with them on whatever pressing issue of the day is causing a stir.

You can read the full story here: Lutherans seeing fallout over gay clergy issue.

Statistically, the division is insignificant. Only a couple hundred congregations out of the ELCA’s 10,000+ have taken any steps to leave because the ELCA is now on a path to officially welcome lesbian/gay clergy in same-sex intimate relationships. Here in Southern California, we’ve seen a couple of these couple hundred, and most of them have been small congregations, and one or two very large parishes that are full of themselves and must feel a certain economic and egotistic independence.

The thrust of the AP story is that not all these conservative congregations are moving in the same direction. They are splitting off into several different little splinter groups which have formed in the last decade or so as receptacles for them.

The one that has any significance is called Lutheran CORE, headed by one Rev. Mark Chavez. CORE hopes to form a new denomination by August called North American Lutheran Church. By my count off their web screen, they have 135 congregations in the U.S. and 4 in Canada, plus some overseas. Hardly a counter-Reformation.

CORE posts some theological statements, among which stuff on traditional views of marriage and family figures prominently. But they also had this article that intrigued me, “The Diminution of God as Father (And his Holy Pronouns)” written by the Bishop Emeritus of the ELCA Virginia Synod. (Ahh, Virginia again: think Falwell, think 3/5 of a human being…) Turns out that author Rev. Richard Bansemer is exercised about contemporary prayer language that tires to diminish he, him, and his in referring to God the Creator. His 1,900 word essay (about the length of a typical Sunday sermon for me: a 12-minute listen) has a couple dozen quotes from the Bible, and nothing from any other Christian scholar ancient or modern. So it’s a light weight argument that implies that the ELCA is going under because we have diminished the God-our-Father language.

Will these men ever get it? A good place to start is the scholarly work by Gail Ramshaw, God Beyond Gender [Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995] and her chapter, “Pronouns and the Christian God.”

Bansemer and his ilk in CORE, I guess, wouldn’t be interested in Ramshaw’s finding that the brilliant ancient Cappadocian Fathers of the 4^th century (St. Basil the Great, Bishop of Caesarea in Cappadocia, St. Gregory, Bishop of Nazianzus and St. Gregory, Bishop of Nyssa) wrote and taught that God is not male in the way that human beings are male and female. These guys were as orthodox as you could get, and triumphed at the Council of Constantinople in a.d. 381 over Arianism. Ramshaw notes Gregory of Nazianzus “ridiculing those who would draw from the gender designation in language a notion of actual sexuality within God.”

That God is consistently referred to in the Bible with masculine is above all an effort to distinguish the Hebrew and Christian faith(s) from the pagan goddess worship in the ancient world, a religious paradigm which was very obsessed with fertility and therefore with sexuality.

Why bring all this trivia up? Much of CORE’s theological statement seems obsessed not only with gender but with the same relentless masculine privilege that has plagued the Christian faith almost since the day they crucified our first feminist: Jesus Christ. CORE’s Advisory Council, for example, is made up of 17 men and 2 women.

Counter reformation: you can have the CORE.

But worse, CORE looks like an effort to keep beating a drum which is small and bent: the idea that there are deep and fundamental theological issues over which no compromise with the ELCA is possible, and those fundamental issues are all about gender and human sexuality. Somebody should tap the CORE people on the shoulder and point out to them that there is not much in the ancient creeds and confessions about gender and not a word about human sexuality. The faith of the church—the ancient church, the modern church, the ELCA, is our faith in God and in Jesus Christ, not our faith in marriage, family, gender, sexuality, homosexuality, gender role models or the proper way to bring up children in a home with one mom and one dad. In short, CORE has staked out its uniqueness in the same sand trap used by most other contemporary indignational movements that represent the right wing of the so-called Culture Wars.  As for me and my house, we will keep the faith.

—Pastor Dan Hooper

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