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Will disobedience be successful?

Wednesday, September 7th, 2011

U.S. Catholic’s web site is running a story (thank you Eric for letting me know!) that trouble is brewing in the Catholic Church in Austria, where more than 400 priests are calling for disobedience if there are not massive reforms in the church.

Perhaps Martin Lutheran was nearly 500 years ahead of his time. Or not, since it is quite possible that official retaliation for disobedience will simply come down on the heads of at least some of these 400 priests. Remember who is Pope right now, after all.

But the issues, which all revolve around the church’s medieval attitudes on human sexuality and hierarchical authority, are worth reviewing: the celibacy rule, the treatment of lesbian and gay people, and divorced/remarried people.

From the British Tablet editorial on this disobedience, “point: “They are right that what Catholics hunger for, and not just in Austria, is a Church of integrity, without hypocrisy, doublespeak or pathological denial.”

The pastoral reality–the reality in the parishes and among faithful Catholics—and everybody else in the world of faith—is that official teachings are not only often at variance with how people need to live their lives, those teachings do not enhance the credibility of the core Christian message.

I am reminded of developments in the business world, where major corporations in the last several decades have spun off or sold off subsidiaries when times get tough. Often their official spokespersons tell us that the company will now focus more tightly on its “core business.”

Although the church is not a business, it does need to jettison what ever doesn’t serve its core message, and that message is the grace of the Gospel of Jesus, and the call to follow him in paths of generosity, mercy and compassion in this broken world. Upholding twisted or strained official rules of extreme moral strictness has become an impediment to telling the world about the love of God in Christ.

Yes, celibacy is an ancient Christian practice, but it never caught on universally until it was forced on the priesthood in the Dark Ages. Yes, the Scriptures frown on unchastity, divorce and remarriage, but the definitions of those terms has slipped over and over down through time, and Jesus never condemned the woman at the well who had apparently been married five times and was living with a man who was not her husband, nor did shame her for her difficult life. In other words, it was not a “deal breaker” for her hearing and receiving grace.

As for the treatment of gay/lesbian people (can we be more inclusive, with bisexual and transgender people, too?), history has ample evidence that the modern condemnations being read out of the Bible by conservatives and fundamentalists were not read that way for more than 1,000 years after Christ. I am still impressed with the scholarly work of Prof. Theodore Jennings, who authored The Man Jesus Loved, which lays open some of the covert gay stories of the Gospels.

We have struggled with the issues surrounding homosexuality in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America for several decades, and the conclusion of thousands of people is that we simply cannot summarily condemn gay and lesbian people because of two or three references in the Bible any more than we can forbid Christian women from serving in ordained ministry because of one or two citations. The grace, acceptance and reconciliation of God overshadows everything else. Period.

John Paul II commented officially years ago that women could not be priests because Jesus chose only male disciples. Well, Jesus only had Jewish disciples too, so that logic would have kept both John Paul II and Benedict XVI out of the priesthood. My point is that arguing over the trivial rules of the church is ultimately not successful—even if the conservative side insists it has a lock-tight argument—because its logic, authority, high-handedness and even cruelty to individual believers is increasingly rejected by 21st century people of faith.

One of the most appalling weapons used in the Catholic Church is to silence dissent with papal authority. Significant theologians have simply been banned form public teaching, speaking or publishing—not much different than burning dissidents at the stake as the Catholic Church did 500 years ago. I would not be surprised if the leaders of this “disobedience” move in the Austrian church will face similar silencing moves from the Vatican.

But how long will it take before all the thinking faithful are silent and faith itself will simply wither away because the content of what is left will only be faith in authority, not in the Gospel of God’s gracious reconciliation with humanity. Sooner or later, the church must also reconcile with the world as God has done, or it will continue to be working with futility against the will of God.

— Pastor Dan Hooper

Posted in Bible & Interpretation, Catholic matters, Doctrine, Ecumenical Issues, History | No Comments »

Not all are negative on same-sex marriage.

Wednesday, August 31st, 2011

Thanks to Elizabeth for this link. The Atlantic Wire (Atlantic Monthly Group) has a brief article on American attitudes on same-sex marriage ~ they call it “gay marriage” ~ that shows that not all religious people are of the same mind.

Well, duh! We knew that but it’s helpful when the general public is given information to help them separate the sheep from the goats on this issue.

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According to the chart, based on a study from the Public Religion Research Institute (based on data collected in July 2011), Catholics and “White Mainline” churches line up as slightly positive on the issue (52 and 51% in favor), and Black Protestant and White Evangelical church people decisively negative on the issue (60 and 76% opposed respectively).

Three years ago in the post mortem hand-wringing as to why Proposition 8 passed in California, you will remember, it was these two groups which helped to push Prop 8 to victory. the LGBT community in California was especially dismayed that we had not communicated our core message effectively to the Black churches. That reality appears to prevail today, even while general attitudes and even “White mainline” Christians have been moving steadily into our column.

Read the article linked here, because the most important finding is not represented in the Atlantic chart:

” the main theme of the study was that younger people are supporting gay rights at much higher rates than their elders. It found “at least a 20-point generation gap” between 18 to 29 year olds and adults over 65 on every public policy issue concerning gay rights. And seven in 10 people in that younger age bracket say that religious groups that come out against homosexuality are alienating them.”

This last sentence confirms a finding from the Barna Group published four years ago. See Indwelling Spirit comments here, which was based on a September 2007 Barna news article.

Today, the most common perception is that present-day Christianity is “anti-homosexual.” Overall, 91% of young non-Christians and 80% of young churchgoers say this phrase describes Christianity. As the research probed this perception, non-Christians and Christians explained that beyond their recognition that Christians oppose homosexuality, they believe that Christians show excessive contempt and unloving attitudes towards gays and lesbians. One of the most frequent criticisms of young Christians was that they believe the church has made homosexuality a “bigger sin” than anything else. Moreover, they claim that the church has not helped them apply the biblical teaching on homosexuality to their friendships with gays and lesbians.

— Pastor Dan Hooper

Posted in Catholic matters, Ecumenical Issues, Lesbian/Gay Marriage, LGBT Christian, LGBT Rights, Public Affairs | No Comments »

Some thoughts about generalizing and particularizing.

Tuesday, August 31st, 2010

People tend to generalize. (That’s a generalization, of course, so forgive me in advance.) The human mind cannot contain and process every nuance on the thousands of bits of information that come at us, and the brain’s natural wiring is to look for and create patterns. Over time, patterns of thought are reinforced, not eroded, by additional evidence.

On the good side, we are able to get through the day without becoming paralyzed by every stimulus and input. On the bad side, we stereotype, we form prejudices, we cling to bigotry (which can highly individualized or as broad as a social and community or cultural prejudice that resists re-examination at all costs!). And we generalize about things somewhat indiscriminately. We take a particular bit of evidence—a news report, a bad experience, a friend passing on hearsay, and we turn it into a generality. For example:

  • One Bernie Madoff allows a new generation to blame and despise Jewish people for their greedy and crooked ways.
  • One Willie Horton allows a generation of people to fear and despise African-Americans as criminal and violent (and the electorate to assume that Michael Dukakis wasn’t fit to be President).
  • There are voices out there still saying, and influencing thousands of others to believe, that all homosexuals have AIDS. Even the CDC has published generalizations which are particularly damaging.
  • Sensational gossip about NAMBLA—a fringe group—allows a broad swath of people to think that all homosexuals are child molesters.
  • A few Republican lawmakers who are corrupt allows Democrats to say that all Republicans are evil. Depending on which party you belong to, if any, you may be highly susceptible to believing that.
  • A few Democratic lawmakers who are corrupt allows Republicans to say that all Democrats are evil. Depending on which party you belong to, if any, you may be highly susceptible to believing that.
  • A handful of high-profile Christian evangelists, or the Pope, doing something hypocritical leads a generation of people to reject the Christian faith because they generalize that ” Christians are hypocrites.”

It is really difficult to reverse this pattern because of another generality: that people are drawn toward bad news, selfish motivations, etc..

St. Paul certainly was given to generalities, and because of his enormous influence, his particular comments have had power over human thinking for centuries. For example, in his letter to the Romans, 3:23, he generalizes about the human race: “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” In Paul’s thinking, all human beings are deficient in God’s eyes. In other words, Paul’s God is given to generalities. What part of “all” don’t we understand?

Here’s what bothers me. I am most troubled that the faith I live by, and teach, is tainted, through the process of corporate generalization, with the stains that other Christian faith groups have left behind. Recently novelist Anne Rice left the Catholic Church. “Today I quit being a Christian,” she said, for the sake of Jesus. Yes, Rice was generalizing from her particular experiences and her perceptions of the church’s dark side. But other Catholics I know —who see and hear the same problems and issues such as the present Pope’s medieval clericalism and sexist, homophobic views, or priestly sexual abuse, etc., see those problems as specific problems and not as evidence that God does not exist or that all Christians are hypocrites or the Church has nothing to offer.

Also recently, the documentary film “8: The Mormon Proposition” detailed the role of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in covertly promoting and raising funds to ensure the passage of Proposition 8 in California. Along with other right-wing fundamentalist groups— and the Catholic Church— the Mormons generalized about what opening civil marriage to gay or lesbian couples might do to destroy marriage as an institution. “Save Marriage!” became the highly generalized battle cry. And on the side of tolerance, thousands more people who have seen the film will go away with another generalization fixed in their brains: Organized religion sucks!

We have joked in our local congregation that we’re okay because we’re not that organized. But the truth is, Christ’s message is damaged by Christians who are hypocritical, unethical, abusive, manipulative, and prejudiced. It is harder to put the positive message out there that we, and thousands of other local churches, are doing good things in the name of God, when those good things usually are that new or news-worthy, when a few things which grab the news headlines show that some bad things are also being done in the name of God.

This is where particularizing comes in. Most human beings can’t do much about bad generalizations (although Benedict XVI could go a long way by moving his own thinking into the 21st century). But we can particularize the grace of God, one life at a time. We can clean up our own acts. We can show kindness and compassion to one other individual. And we can even save the institution of marriage by attending to the quality of our own marriage rather than blaming it on generalizations about society.

—Pastor Dan Hooper

Posted in Bible & Interpretation, Catholic matters, Fundamentalism, HIV and AIDS, Homophobia, Lesbian/Gay Marriage, LGBT Christian, Public Affairs | 1 Comment »

Is DOMA doomed?

Monday, July 19th, 2010

Another thing I’m slow to assess is the decision of the U.S. District Court judge in Boston to declare the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) unconstitutional. According to Boston.com On July 8, Judge Joseph Tauro “struck down” the law which passed the Republican-controlled Congress in 1996—and to which Bill Clinton put his signature.

The Boston court is clearly the right venue to talk back to Congress on one of the two major issues which Tauro’s decision apparently addresses: that DOMA violates the rights of the individual states to control their own marriage laws. Massachusetts, afer all, legalized same-gender marriage in 2004.

One of the murkiest swamps in our national legal history are these periodic fights between the federal government and the states over who has jurisdiction on something. The present fight between Arizona and the Obama administration over immigration law is the current issue. The states and the feds have been doing this almost since the founding of the nation, and perhaps it will never all get settled, partly because every few years the control of Congress and the state houses flips back and forth between two political parties that seem to despise each other passionately.

Tauro drew on history in his ruling, writing that the states have set their own marriage since before the American Revolution and that marriage laws were considered “such an essential element of state power” that the subject was even broached at the time of the framing of the Constitution. Tauro noted that laws barring interracial marriage were once at least as contentious as the current battle over gay marriage.But in Loving vs. Virginia (1967), the federal Supreme Court that said its opinion trumps the states’ rights to regulate marriage, and so opened the doors to interracial marriages in a single stroke.John Corvino has an interesting reflection on the Tauro decision, in contrast to some poor assumptions on the part of Roman Catholic Archbishop Joseph E. Kurtz, who chairs the U.S. Bishop’s “Ad Hoc Committee for the Defense of Marriage“. (I stand by my remarks about “protecting marriage.” I told a reporter in June 2008 that “if you want to protect marriage protect your marriage. Buy your wife flowers, and listen to her when she talks to you.”)Marriage can no more be “defended” by keeping gay and lesbian couples away from it than a house can be defended from termites with a concrete block wall around it.Anyway, Corvino’s comments include three reasons why Archbishop Kurtz is wrong: ” . . . Third, and perhaps most interesting, there is an emerging social institution of marriage that includes gays. It’s time for the law to catch up to that.Last month I participated in a same-sex wedding for some dear friends. The Presbyterian church hosting the ceremony called it a ‘holy union,’ but just about everyone else called it a wedding—including the grooms’ families. There were tuxedos and champagne and cake and presents and all the other usual markers, including teary-eyed families witnessing solemn vows.The state where this event occurred (Michigan) forbids legal marriage for gays and lesbians. But each groom’s parents have begun referring to their son’s partner as their ‘son-in-law, and everyone around them understands why they do so.It’s not a legal reality. But it is a personal and social one.”Given the rejection of same-sex marriage by the Presbyterian assembly on July 9, I found Corvino’s personal observation of the Presbyterian “holy union” to be very compelling. Neither church delegates nor a partisan, sharply-divided Congress, can hold back the tides of change.But of course, Tauro’s decision could itself wind up before The Supremes, who have been pretty good at slowing the tides.

—Pastor Dan Hooper

Posted in Catholic matters, History, Lesbian/Gay Marriage, LGBT Rights, Public Affairs | No Comments »

New victories, more recycled prejudice.

Friday, July 16th, 2010

Yesterday was a pretty big day on my news radar, with the District of Columbia Court of Appeals turning back the homophobic forcers that wanted a fall ballot measure to get rid of same sex marriage.

You gotta feel for those “forcers” (it was a typo but I kinda like it!). They are trying to expunge us and our movement for justice and equality before the law by force because they see it and us as something like a dangerous infection to their values. Gert out the disinfectant, spray, clean and wipe, meaning: get rid of any evidence that gay tolerance and acceptance is “breaking out”. Forcefully overpower it with squeaky-clean-strict morality, and with money and law and lobbyists and anything else they can to intimidate it. Force shame upon us with righteous indignation, and push us back into our miserable closets.

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Thank God it isn’t exactly working, even if Proposition 8 is still on the books in California (its Day will come in court—either Judge Walker’s court or another). Yesterday the world-wide movement for justice and equality got another big victory when the upper house of Argentina’s legislature legalized same-sex marriage, the 10th nation to do so according to a very thorough BBC article on line.

The church continues, however, to get its shorts in a knot about these infectious signs of progress. According to the Human Rights Campaign story on the DC Court decision, “While Bishop Harry Jackson, a pastor in Maryland, has been the public face of this litigation, the truth is that outside groups like the National Organization for Marriage and the Alliance Defense Fund are the driving force behind these anti-equality measures.” Rev. Jackson (is he a so-called or self-styled bishop?) is clearly a front for money from Focus on the Family, the National Organization for Marriage, and Family Research Council, who coughed up $200,000 to put the initiative on the DC ballot. NOM, incidentally, is on an anti-gay marriage “tour” in New Hampshire right now. Relentless scrubbing of the American people trying to get rid of this infectious minority!

Money spent in DC is now money squandered, because the Appellate Court decision trumps the P.R. blitzes with which big money saturates the media. HRC reveals that “more than $40,000 to Schubert Flint Public Affairs, the firm behind the Yes on Prop 8 deal in California and the Question 1 deal in Maine, “similar fear-based strategies in each to spread misinformation and narrowly win both votes.”

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The Latin American church has its shorts in a knot, too, about the decision in Argentina. According to the AP story,

The approval came despite a concerted campaign by the Roman Catholic Church and evangelical groups, which drew 60,000 people to march on Congress and urged parents in churches and schools to work against passage. Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio led the campaign, saying “children need to have the right to be raised and educated by a father and a mother.”This is just recycled prejudice. If it worked in California, maybe it will work in Argentina. Just spread misinformation about LGBT people and stoke indignation and maybe it will expunge the gay thing from the land!I am surprised the blowback in Argentina isn’t worse, given the fact that the law specifically allows gay/lesbian couples to adopt children. And the law will take effect in a matter of days.But what angers me about the Cardinal’s rant is that children continue to be pawns in adult relationships, even when just in concept. There is plenty of evidence that children are not harmed by having two moms or two dads, and in fact grow up remarkably well with only one mom or one dad. It is the quality of the relationship between parent and child that matters, not the gender or the sexuality.

Worse yet, same-gender couples do not all have children or desire children. This recycled prejudice tries to prevent all loving same-gender couples from having a civil and legal relationship with one another by shrieking about children. By my lights, I think we should start a national or global organization to protect the children from homophobia.

— Dan Hooper

Posted in Catholic matters, History, Homophobia, Lesbian/Gay Marriage, LGBT Rights | No Comments »

Prayer in the heart of Hollywood.

Thursday, March 25th, 2010

The music of Taizé has been around for a generation or more, but continues to grow in popularity, in part because of those who come from around the world to pray in this southern French town are met with simple and direct piety in an amazing blend of experiences.

Taizé was founded by Brother Roger during World War II, quickly became a refuge for Jews escaping the Nazi slaughter, and today draws as many as 7,000 visitors per week.

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We have begun to pattern our prayer life on the piety and music of Taizé here in Hollywood. It has begun as a Lenten experiment, will continue on Maundy Thursday next week, and hopefully in the weeks after Easter.

There is no doubt that the experience is monastic — it provides a temporary retreat from the world into pure contemplation. There a re few words, time for silence and easily repetitive prayer. But when monasticism gently opens its arms to the outside world, it is grace.

Better yet, the brothers of Taizé welcome imitation all over the world. Their simple ecumenism fits our emerging church sensibility that the only way to be post-denominational as Christians is to start living like Christians with no prefixes or suffixes.

Even more amazing, doctrine and official dogma clearly are in the back seat or not present at all. The texts give voice to the words of Scripture alone, and interpretation is simply left to the Spirit to bring to each heart. The worship style of Taizé takes seriously the prophetic words of Jeremiah 31, “This is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the LORD: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, ‘Know the LORD,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the LORD.”

In our experience, the role of the leader is unimportant, and formality is forgotten. Some sit on the floor or on cushions. Different people simply rise to read or to offer pray from the heart.

What is gratifying to many is that this kind of faith and spiritual expression is attracting young people. The music is singable, not complex, not packed with theology, and the mood enhanced by things as un-high tech as candles allows each person to bring what she or he has to offer and place it before God with honesty and simplicity. In our house of worship, each week different people have been close to tears. I hope we can continue this in the future to welcome people who don’t feel they belong in a church on a Sunday morning.

—Pastor Dan Hooper, Los Angeles

Posted in Bible & Interpretation, Catholic matters, Doctrine, Ecumenical Issues, Faith, PRAYERS, Spirituality | No Comments »

You can hide your money but not your behind.

Thursday, January 21st, 2010

Well, the Proposition 8 lawsuit in federal court right now is churning up a lot of stuff, and airing a lot of “dirty linen.” What would it be like if all of us had to live our everyday lives “under oath” to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth? How much sooner would the Catholic bishops have had to confess they were hiding the real child molesters, for example? but that’s another story.

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Mormon Church Aimed to Cover Tracks on Marriage Ban — Directed funds to outside organizationBy Will McCahill| Posted Jan 20, 10 9:45 PM CST

(Newser) – The Mormon church wanted its members to support the 2008 effort to ban same-sex marriage in California, but urged they do it through an outside organization to give the leadership “plausible deniability,” according to documents released today in the Proposition 8 trial in San Francisco. The Catholic church also helped bankroll the operation, an executive says in one email, while the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints provided “financial, organizational and management contributions.”Later in today’s session, a Stanford professor testified that although high-profile politicians pay lip service to homosexual issues, “Gays and lesbians do not possess a meaningful degree of political power. They are not able to protect their essential interests.” Though President Obama describes himself as a “fierce advocate” for gay causes, lack of action on the military’s ban on openly gay service members and other issues shows he “is not a reliable ally.”I can corroborate at least part of this. In the wake of the Prop 8 victory in November 2008 I spent several hours pouring over the donor list posted by the state of California, trying to find the contributions of the Mormon Church. Nothing significant turned up, and I was quite surprised. It began to dawn on me and many others that they had covered their behind successfully.It is no coincidence that Catholic and Mormon money funded a large part of the Proposition 8 campaign, however. Both have moral issues of their own they would just as soon hide or at least forget. It seems logical that the best way to distract the public memory from Mormon polygamy or Catholic priestly child molestation is to try to take the “moral high ground” when it comes to marriage.But the “moral high ground” lies quite bare and fallow when a court of law focuses its attention there. The high ground and plausible deniability simply don’t congeal. The moral high ground benefits from transparency, and it is quite obvious that the donors—major and minor—that literally “bought” Proposition 8 for the California Constitution—fear transparency and want their identity concealed as much as possible.Shame! Shame! Shame!

—Pastor Dan Hooper

Posted in Catholic matters, Fundamentalism, Go figure!, Lesbian/Gay Marriage, Public Affairs | No Comments »

More weight tipping the scale.

Tuesday, January 12th, 2010

On the heels of the no vote in New Jersey (where they only needed 4 or 5 more votes in the Senate), little by little, the objections to same-gender legal marriage continue to wither in other countries. This past week, the Parliament of Portugal voted to permit gay marriage, according to an Associated Press story.

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This unites the Iberian peninsula, because Spain already did this five years ago. Although both are heavily Roman Catholic countries, they have not fallen off into the Atlantic for their left-leaning liberalism! At what point will the international change reach a tipping point for the United States too? Why are we so, well, anal?

Last summer, according to the Huffington Post, Portugal’s highest Constitutional Court upheld a ban on same-sex marriage and rejected a suit by two lesbians, Teresa Pires and Helena Paixao. the high court considered the appeal brought from a lower court, and “the Constitutional Court said in a statement posted on its Web site that the constitution does not state that same-sex marriages must be permitted.”

But catch the prophetic outlook of one of the plaintiffs, which seems to anticipate this week’s shift:

The court said the question before it was not whether the constitution allows same-sex marriages, but whether the constitution compels them to be accepted, which it does not.       Paixao told The Associated Press by telephone she regarded the decision as “a victory” because the split decision demonstrated that attitudes are changing in Portugal. “It shows there’s a change coming. Bit by bit people will come around” and accept gay marriage, she said.www.Change.Org carries Michael Jones’ commentary from last Wednesday, “Portugal, Gay Marriage, and a Visit By Pope Benedict XVI“: Prime Minister Socrates made legalizing gay marriage a big component of his re-election campaign last year. When he won, in September, gay marriage activists saw the marriage equality writing on the wall. By the end of this week, the writing may be all over the country’s laws.       Meanwhile, even the Catholic Church is Portugal is sounding a bit conciliatory. Lisbon’s Catholic Cardinal Patriarch Jose Policarpo weighed in and said that same-sex marriage was “parliament’s responsibility,” and not something that Portugal’s Catholic Church should focus on. Ah, would that this philosophy spill over to the U.S. Catholic Church. Instead of leaving marriage up to state legislators, the U.S. Catholic Church gets involved regularly (hello Maine, hello California, hello New Jersey) in the same-sex marriage debate.

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Meanwhile, Australian Catholic Cath News notes that the parliament rejects allowing gay couples to adopt children. And further meanwhile, Aljazeera (!) notes that it was as recently as 1982 that homosexuality was a crime in Portugal. Is there any doubt that we are clamoring to a tipping point when (a) decriminalization to legal marriage is only 28 years apart; (b) Aljezeera news carries an objective news story on this without calling for death to the “infidels”?

— Pastor Dan Hooper

Posted in Catholic matters, Ecumenical Issues, Lesbian/Gay Marriage, Public Affairs, Uncategorized | No Comments »

Good news, religious lunacy.

Monday, November 30th, 2009

The web newscaster www.365gay.com does a cool job of monitoring AP news releases as well as publishing its own reports. One AP post recently (which I’d missed) is probably the best little tidbit of news I’ve seen in awhile, indicating that there is no smoking gun of gay priests behind the widespread Catholic sex abuse scandal.  Read the story:

Report: Homosexuality no factor in abusive priests 

by The Associated Press • 11.18.2009 9:22am EST

The report, commissioned and financed by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops to the tune of $2 million, did not find that the homosexual orientation of priests was any predictor of who would be involved in sexual abuse. In spite of a policy coming from the Vatican itself a year or so ago to essentially “weed out” homosexually-oriented candidates for the Catholic priesthood, the behavioralists and criminologists who have extensively studied sexual predation and pedophilia do not find a gay = child molester link.

According to the AP report, Margaret Smith of John Jay College of Criminal Justice reported to the Bishops meeting in Baltimore: “If that [Vatican anti-gay] exclusion were based on the fact that [a gay person] person would be more probable than any other candidate to abuse, we do not find that at this time.”

Also another finding from other reports, that I see as good news, is that clergy sexual abuse cases are on the decline ever since the 1980s. Most of the cases still shaming churches and emptying their coffers stem from abusive behavior in the 1960s and 1970s. Perhaps the “transparency” and media attention of more recent times is telling pedophiles and sexual opportunists that they won’t be able to hide their behavior as well as they once did.

On the down side, there is nothing on the horizon to suggest that the Roman Catholic Church will any time soon become more realistic about human sexuality in its moral theology. Its rule of celibacy (a rule of the Church, not a Christian doctrine) for clergy and its iniquitizing of any sexual activity outside of a heterosexual-and-procreative context continues to make its moral teaching seem ridiculous in the larger world and puts many Catholic faithful into a hypocritical bind.

Most ridiculous of all (another rule, not dogma) is to continue to ban women from the priesthood while male priests are deserting the ranks of the clergy if not bankrupting the Church. It has been reported that one-fourth of all Catholic parishes world wide have no priest. The numbers who have quit the priesthood to get (heterosexually) married continues to climb. And the molesters, guilty of some 14,000 sexual abuse cases since 1950, have cost the Church an estimated $2.3 billion in the same time period, according to the AP story.

I know that many of the rank-and-file are outraged at by all of this. The expenditure of money alone (yes, a lot of it paid by insurance companies) is appalling and disgusting. You would think the Church would be broke, but somehow it still finds the funds to fight against civil rights for gay and lesbian couples in California and Maine, too. What else can we do but shake our heads in astonishment and resignation to this religious lunacy. — Pastor Dan Hooper

Posted in Catholic matters, Doctrine, Ecumenical Issues, Go figure!, Lesbian/Gay Marriage, LGBT Christian, LGBT Rights, Ministry, Public Affairs, Sex | No Comments »

We’re here. We’re Christian. Get used to it.

Monday, November 23rd, 2009

The year 2009 has already been momentous enough in the world of faith, what with both the Episcopal Church and the Lutheran Church taking decisive left turns on sexuality issues. The Episcopal Church essentially ended its self-imposed moratorium of electing a lesbian/gay bishop, after the existence of out gay Bishop Gene Robinson set the world’s conservative Anglican into a firestorm of indignation.

Then a month later the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America did something almost unthinkable for a mid-America-dominated outfit of good decent folks: it lifted the 20 year old ban on the ordination of partnered lesbian and gay people into the Lutheran ministry. Since that momentous day in August, everybody seemed to threaten to stop talking to the Lutherans, including other Lutherans, Catholics, etc.

Every denomination of Christians knows full well that they already have lesbian and gay clergy in their ranks. But most of them have preferred the continuous hypocrisy of plausible deniability – that they are unaware or even sincerely believe that they do not have lesbian and gay clergy because, well, they don’t allow such a thing. (By the way, the word “plausible” has an interesting history of its own.)

At any rate, the outrage and indignation over the reality of sexual variation even among decent and God-fearing people, is at least the flashpoint for a lot of upheaval in the Christian world.

Upheaval is usually caused by a lot of light material being tossed around by stronger forces. (I imagine the example of, say, a card table full of champagne glasses is upset by a fast-moving house pet.) There is far less upheaval of any sort when something is built on bedrock, and I always thought that the Christian faith was built on bedrock. I was brought up to believe that. More on that later.

But upheaval there is, and many well-respected commentators have been suggesting now for years that what we see emerging is an enormous realignment in the world of religion. Breakaway groups from mainline Protestant denominations, for example, may simply team up and form new unions.

So as the CORE Lutherans announce they are moving ahead to form their own little churchbody, we can’t help wondering if they will eventually converge with the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod if that latter can trust their conservatism, or even the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod (which is really not evangelical and not Lutheran in my humble opinion).

As a side note, I will watch with enthusiasm mixed with amazement to see how many ELCA congregations actually do go with the CORE movement. My count today on their web site is that 87 congregations are moving in their direction. Keep in mind that somewhere between 300 and 400 ELCA congregations have signed on with the Lutherans Concerned Reconciling in Christ program to publicly welcome lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. So at the moment this doesn’t look like a serious realignment of apocalyptic proportions.

But the this ecumenical thing popped into the news, the so-called Manhattan Declaration which came out three days ago, that attempts to put up a barricade to the enormous social change of recent decades, over the signatures of Orthodox, Catholic and Evangelical Christians.

(It seems more than a little odd this group would grab the title from the climate change people who in 2008 issued the Manhattan Declaration in Manhattan. This month’s 7-page religious moratorium was actually released in Washington D.C., not New York. I suppose now anybody could just write up his or her own version of truth and issue it under the title “The Holy Bible,” and it would be okay, huh?)

But this seems to fit the pattern of that “strange bedfellow” coalition of Mormons and Roman Catholics who donated huge sums to “defend” heterosexual marriage in California and again in Maine.

Bruce Garrett, of Truth Wins Out has written a cogent piece (“Statement Of Conscience: Just Give Us The Money”) on the Declaration and warns of its blatantly anti-gay political agenda.

Is there a real Christian realignment going on? Realignment is hard to detect for certainty when things change at glacial speed. And you know how the media loves to exaggerate, hence the word “upheaval” when 87 out of 10,000 congregations pick up their marbles and leave the ELCA’s game.

Personally, I doubt that there is a grand realignment that will abide for very long. The Mormon/Catholic alliance over Proposition 8 was a marriage of convenience. Both, as I have said, did their best to take the moral heat off of their own houses (a wild history of plural marriages, and a current pattern of sexually-abusive priests and pedophiles) by amping up their indignation over same-sex marriage.

Even in the current Declaration, there is so little holding Evangelical and Catholics together theologically that I doubt it means a massive or fundamental realignment. There are still plenty of evangelical Christians who think the Pope is Antichrist, for example. And Benedict XVI hasn’t done anything to dispel that age-old antipathy. It was more than amusing to see the Catholic News Agency identify some of the writers who put the Declaration together as including “renowned Evangelical leader Charles Colson.” Charles Colson, of Watergate notoriety? Charles Colson, who wrote “Born Again” in 1976 after serving time in prison for obstruction of justice? Well, I guess so, because he got into bed with ex-Lutheran convert to Roman Catholicism (the late) Richard John Neuhaus to publish “Evangelicals and Catholics Together: Toward a Common Mission” in 1995. (You can get your used copy from Amazon right now for 59¢.)

And I suspect the Orthodox are not about to cave into Roman Papal authority any time soon, especially in light of its astonishing resurgence in post-Soviet Russia. The ecumenism of recent years on that front has Orthodoxy being cordial but not really trusting the Papacy. And Benedict is not likely to suggest parity with the Patriarch. His recent”generous” offer to welcome disaffected Anglicans back into the Roman fold, for example, smacks of canon law machinations: an Anglican bishop can become a Roman priest, keeping his wife but forfeiting his episcopate. Gee thanks, Ben.

If the Christian faith and witness is built on real bedrock, it is not the bedrock of Christian history nor a unified view of the divisive social issues in any era. It could only be the bedrock of the Lordship of Jesus Christ and the historic creeds and confessions of what it means to be Christian. (So there go the Mormons, who hold to some very odd beliefs about God, Jesus, Adam, and human beings becoming Gods, and who turn up their noses at the ancient statements of faith.) Clearly, the bedrock of Christian faith, and the “core” of Lutheran theological teachings, are about what God does for humanity in Jesus Christ. Those core believes including nothing about who is Pope or whether one needs a pope, a bishop or a priest. the core believes including nothing about human sexuality, homosexuality, or marriage, for that matter.

You can appeal all you want to tradition, and loyalty to the real Holy Bible, but unity of faith is grounded on a great deal more than widely-held prejudices and a quickly assembled outrage and bluster promulgated to grab the attention of the media. And most important, a 7-page statement drawn up by indignant traditionalists does absolutely nothing to make reality go away. And a significant part of reality is that there are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and questioning human beings out there, many of whom were raised in Christian homes and in spite of all the conservative bluster still acknowledge the Lordship of Jesus Christ. We’re here, we’re queer. We’re Christian. Get used to it. Do I have to say that into Latin?

— Pastor Dan Hooper

Posted in Bible & Interpretation, Catholic matters, Doctrine, Ecumenical Issues, ELCA, History, LGBT Christian | No Comments »

Get on with repeal or ditch the constitution!

Friday, October 30th, 2009

Three cheers to Roland Stringfellow’s blog on Unite the Fight’s web site.

Here we are a year later and where do we find ourselves in the fight for marriage equality in California? Two major camps debating on whether to return to the ballot in 2010 or 2012 and we have to ask ourselves the question, “Have we learned from our mistakes?” Are egos and attitudes being altered in order for power to be shared and different voices heard? Has a clear strategy been created and presented? And what about our motivation – are we still angry and humiliated from our loss a year ago that we are planning to return to the polls with revenge? (“I’ll show you who is a second class citizen.”)

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Stringfellow writes on behalf of the faith communities in California who are organizing to overturn Proposition 8.

There are many wonderful, hard working individuals who are putting their hearts on the line as they strive to make our world a more accepting and loving place for LGBTQI people and to make marriage equality a reality for us all. If our goal is to repair the divisions that exist in our society as we work for equality, we must examine and ask ourselves, “Do divisions exist within our movement for equality”?I agree with his view that we ought not to be divided over the 2010 vs. 2012 issue. It is an absurd dissipation of energies, and the supposed merits of each idea (get on the next ballot at all costs, or get on the presidential ballot when more liberals turn out) are probably stirred with personality issues that bubble over behind closed doors–even in the LGBT communities.Unfortunately, well-intended internal battles are part of human nature. You may have read or heard that another proposal is out there to completely revamp or replace the California Constitution, which would of course blow away the Proposition 8 language now enshrined by amendment.But even in this, there is division. Repair California is interested in “incremental change”, and filed ballot language yesterday for a measure that would call a limited Constitutional Convention (see press release; ballot language; fact sheet). Meanwhile, California Forward (www.caforward.org) has a different agenda: “fundamental change.” The two groups talk to one another, which is hopeful that there won’t be unnecessary intra-agenda fighting. But what worries me is that Repair California says it won’t touch our issue. What does that mean?

Mark Carlson in the Lutheran Office of Public Policy in Sacramento stated in an e-mail yesterday, “Jim Wunderman, the leader of Repair California, emphasized that the convention would not deal with marriage, abortion, gun control, or prayer in the schools” [italics added]. But the lunatic cesspools of power and money which seek to control those very things have to be drained of their toxic influence. But California Forward, so far, only addresses “fundamental change” in the area of money and budget, not civil rights.

It is all too clear that California is still ruled by several lunatic fringes. Yes, I know, the Religious Reich characterizes us that same way, but we know the truth. And we demonstrate our sanity every time one more of us comes out and tells the truth about our authentic selves, our lives, and our family relationships. Coming out remains the single most powerful tool we have for defeating conservative extremism. It is they who are on the lunatic fringes, because in addition to barrels of cash, they rely on lies, stereotypes fear and paranoia to push their anti-LGBT agenda.

Hopefully, we in the LGBT communities will be energized by what happens at next week’s polls. If marriage equality is set back further by the vote on Question 1 in Maine, for example, it may kick us into taking the reactionary lunatics far more seriously. It has, after all, come to light that the same money bags which financed Proposition 8 are pouring more of their cash into the Main steal-our-rights campaign. On the other hand, if the move to repeal Maine’s marriage rights law fails, it may energize us to claim our self-respect and go back at reversing the damage done by Proposition 8.

—Pastor Dan Hooper

Also see: Equality Events; includes Rachel Maddow coverage of Question 1 and interview’s Maine’s Catholic Pro-Marriage Governor (9 minutes).

Posted in "The Closet", Catholic matters, Coming Out, Lesbian/Gay Marriage, LGBT Rights, Public Affairs | No Comments »

Pope or poacher?

Sunday, October 25th, 2009

The man who walks in the “shoes of the fisherman” — Pope Benedict16 —has gone on a major fishing expedition that certainly raises more questions than eyebrows.

It is not surprising that Rome, under Ratzinger’s leadership, should try an opportunistic gesture to collect disaffected Anglicans back to Rome. After all, he doesn’t consider any Christian communion to be the genuine church unless it is under his authority. So it’s not surprising that his gesture of outreach to unhappy Anglicans and Episcopalians in this country fits with his agenda to strengthen and broaden his own personal authority.

But this latest may have the effect of actually weakening his authority, and this is where the surprises come from:

Rome has long has a curious dispensation to allow married Anglican priests (or, theoretically, married Orthodox priests) to come back to Rome and remain married. It seemed n anomaly of history and Canon Law when I first heard of that, since the Roman Catholic Church has enforced clerical celibacy for at least 800 years. (I have hundreds of pages in manuscript form that provide details on that). But this curiosity seemed all but a historical footnote until this latest gesture.

And Benedict is hurting for priests, as they exit the priesthood by old age and death, marriage, therapy or prison. I’ve been told on good authority (but it’s too broad to Google or Snopes this) that one quarter of all Catholic parishes globally have no priest.

But if the Pope wants to welcome married and disaffected Anglican priests back to Rome, with their wives, he has essentially reinforced the point that clerical celibacy is simply a rule of the church and has no real authority in Scripture or dogma. If it is simply a church rule that can be bent or relaxed by the guy who wears the authoritative hat, then why doesn’t he just get rid of the rule and welcome his own married ex-priests back to Catholic altars?

(It is hard enough to admit to a change of mind in public—the media and the opposition will tell you in a New York minute that you are “waffling”— but to change your mind and go against the last 90 Popes or 800 years, whatever, that takes nerves of steel.)

Benedict has also thrown in a bone to the Protestant Reformation by suggesting that disaffected Anglicans can keep their beloved Prayer Book, the very anchor of the Church of England since 1549, and as fiercely defended by Anglicans as the papacy is by Catholics. But if returning Anglicans can bring along their Prayer Book, in the English language, so much for the Roman Missal, the Roman Rite, and all the dogmatic baggage packed into the Mass. In other words, so much for Rome’s unblinking authority.

The third shocker is Benedict’s suggestion that Anglicans who come home to Rome can bring along their own bishops. If he thinks he will be expanding his authority by adding bishops under him, what becomes of Apostolic Succession? And come to think of it, this is backhanded gesture to undercut the authority and insult the person of Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams. It is as if to say, “since you can’t control your boys any more, I will take them off your hands.” Every Anglican Bishop that returns to Rome is one less Bishop under Canterbury.

Astonishingly, Rowan Williams seems content to accept this slap and spin it to sound like ecumenical progress! According to Steve Doughty of the U.K’s Daily Mail Online “Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams said it showed that relations between Anglicans and Roman Catholics were closer than ever.” Perhaps Archbishop (“Red Riding Hood”) Williams has mistaken Benedict for his own grandmother?

—Pastor Dan Hooper

Posted in Catholic matters, Doctrine, Ecumenical Issues, History, Ministry | No Comments »

Just Say Nope!

Saturday, October 24th, 2009

I offer somebody else’s blog and two comments.  i’ll save my comments until after I read some more news stories.  On its face, this is just too fascinating to pass up. — Dan Hooper

Pope Welcomes Disaffected Anglicans

Steve Benen points to the following.

“In a move expected to cause confusion within Anglican and Catholic parishes alike, the Vatican on Tuesday announced it would make it easier for Anglicans uncomfortable with the Church of England’s acceptance of women priests and openly gay bishops to join the Catholic Church. A new canonical entity will allow Anglicans ‘to enter full communion with the Catholic Church while preserving elements of the distinctive Anglican spiritual and liturgical patrimony,’ Cardinal William Levada, the prefect for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, said at a news conference here on Tuesday.”

What it probably means is that married Anglican priests can become married Catholic priests because God knows that priestly celibacy can be thrown overboard when put in service of denying women priesthood or acceptance of gays within the priesthood. Sounds like the patriarchy circling the wagons again.

Posted by Mary at October 24, 2009 09:57 AM | Religion | Technorati links 

Comments

The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith , previously known as the Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Roman and Universal Inquisition… which means Cardinal William Levada is the Grand Inquisitor. How cool is that!

Posted by: JimD at October 25, 2009 10:24 PM

Posted in Catholic matters, Doctrine, Ecumenical Issues, History | No Comments »

Lasting Peace: the Unsplit Life

Friday, October 23rd, 2009

On the train to Riverside today I finally picked up a book I had set aside last July: the anthology “Wrestling with the Angel” [Brian Bouldrey, ed.; New York: Riverhead Books, 1995]. Today I came to Andrew Holleran’s chapter in which he wrestles with Catholic guilt more than any angel.

Holleran (Eric Garber) is a gay novelist and essayist roughly my contemporary in age but far more advanced in finding his voice as an activist. You can Google for a lot about his life and work if you like.

So much of what he writes about religion parallels my own awareness if not experience, and I can’t help wondering if it is more because he was Catholic and I Lutheran that he left most of the faith behind and I never did. Holleran identifies, at least he did in 1995 in “The Sense of Sin” as a “cafeteria Catholic,” taking what he wants from the religious smorgasbord and leaving the rest behind. But his chief insight in his brief autobiography of confession reveals that he could neither abandon his childhood and adolescent Catholic faith nor fully embrace it.

“The sense of Sin is, of course, missing in some people, keen, more keen, keenest in others. When I drew up a list of my own one evening, I was surprised to see that all of mine amounted to sins that did not include homosexual acts themselves but the consequences of hiding them from people who loved and expected more out of me, perhaps than I’d given the world. In other words, I suspected myself of shame, withdrawal, and finally that most classic of Catholic sins, despair. Still, none of them seemed correctable; I hadn’t any more faith in homosexuality’s virtues, really, than I did in the existence of God—though the latter was no something I could bring myself to entirely disbelieve, either.”For me, this no-man’s land, this love-hate experience is what happens when one has absorbed the Religion of Christianity without ever finding a manner in which to live out the Christian Faith. Guilt truly is the gift that goes on giving, and we have good reason to jokingly insist that the Lutheran persuasion is “Catholic Lite: one third less guilt.”As a young writer and preacher I was always more than a bit brash, but taking the longer view now in mid-life and mature years I notice with enormous gratitude that I did not pick up much guilt about sex and sexuality in childhood and adolescence. Lutheran preachers were far too conventional and inhibited even to mention that sexuality exists. There were no warnings or scoldings from Sunday School teachers. Luther’s Small Catechism sticks to the basics of the Christian faith —faith in God and Christ and the Spirit and the Sacraments— rather than building moral fences and trying to provide guidelines to control our daily impulses. So to this day I insist that attitudes about human sexuality and homosexuality cannot, in and of themselves “split the church.” Opening our minds about gay and lesbian people and relationships is not an “abandonment of the historic faith” because, the Lutherans would insist, the true Christian faith does not contain doctrines about sex in the first place.

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Holleran’s dilemma is that he cannot live with the dire ultimatums which either Catholicism or fundamentalism presents to him, but he realizes at mid-life that homosexuality and sexual liberalism are not a substitute faith, either. Even as a fallen child of his Church, he sees his sexuality in Catholic vocabulary: “a cross one had to bear.”

“That one kept thinking in Catholic phrases was, of course, part of the legacy of a Catholic childhood. The gay Catholic operates on two levels, I suspect; on the one hand, he believes it is quite moral to act on his sexual orientation, to form a sexual bond, of whatever duration, with another man; that the antihomosexual tenets of Christianity are parochial, culture-bound, and heterosexual; that the active gay man has acquired, and provided others, a human dimension available uniquely in erotic intimacy; that kindness, beauty, tenderness, love can be experienced only through the medium of another person. On the other, he suspects that he has turned sex into a form of fast-food junk, that he is trapped in a way of life from which there is no escape and no real chance of finding any lasting peace of mind. In other words, this was cognitive dissonance as a way of life.”All that I can counter is that I do not suffer that dissonance and I preach to dismantle its power over others. But my understanding is not to trivialize the core message of Jesus nor to re-Puritanize sexual expression. That I have remained not celibate but monogamous is not because I have struck some self-devised compromise with God or have internalized homophobic guilt about having casual or anonymous sexual experiences. It is because I have experienced the greatest personal and spiritual growth in relationships (one man, one Lord) which are long-lasting and able to grapple with the tension most human beings live with between the superficiality of the flesh and the overwhelming depth of the soul.If all of that is really a cross one has to bear, it is the cross I have chosen not because of a bifurcated life (hiding my sexuality from the church and hiding my faith from the boys at the gay bar), but because of my awareness that I live only one life and will struggle to keep it integrated. If I can live without splitting my life, then maybe the Church can live without splitting itself apart.—Pastor Dan Hooper

Posted in Catholic matters, Doctrine, Ecumenical Issues, Faith, Fundamentalism, Gay Catechism, LGBT Christian, Sex, Spirituality | No Comments »

Missouri Synod weighs in on gay clergy.

Monday, August 24th, 2009

First, this tidbit from KXMB CBS, in Bismarck, ND (with video?): “Update on the latest in religion news:”

“MINNEAPOLIS (AP) The president of the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod has told members of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America that their votes on gay issues will have negative consequences.”The Reverend Gerald Kieschnick (KEESH’-nik) addressed the churchwide assembly of the ELCA a day after its delegates lifted a ban on partnered gays and lesbians serving as clergy.

“Kieschnick said that decision will hurt relations between the nation’s two largest Lutheran denominations and “cause additional stress and disharmony within the ELCA.” Conservative Evangelical Lutheran congregations won’t be forced to hire gay clergy, but opponents nevertheless warned that straying from Scripture could result in a loss of members and finances.

“Lutheran CORE, a conservative group within the ELCA that fought the gay clergy policy, will hold a convention in Indianapolis next month to review its next steps.”  Sound: CUT ..235 (08/23/09)

I’ve been waiting for this since early Saturday — news from the Minneapolis Assembly about what “greetings” the head of the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod would bring in light of the ELCA’s assembly actions in the days before.Next I quote from the blog letter from Phil Soucy, Communications Director for Lutherans Concerned/North America:

“‘Greetings’ were brought to the assembly by Reverend Dr. Gerald Kieschnick, President of the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod. … The Reverend Dr. did not smile, but began his message by quoting Paul in 2 Corinthians 15: ‘…we implore you, on behalf of Christ: be reconciled to God. For our sake, He made Him to be sin who knew no sin so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God. What a blessing it is to know that our sin is forgiven, removed from us as far as the east is from the west because of the atoning sacrifice of Christ on Calvary’s cross…’ . . .”He later quoted from the Kolb-Wengert translation of the Formula of Concord on doctrinal controversy and discord, to wit: ‘…for these controversies are not merely misunderstandings or semantic arguments where someone might think that one group had not sufficiently grasped what the other group was trying to say or that the tensions were based upon only a few specific words of relatively little consequence. Rather, these controversies deal with important and significant matters, and they are of such a nature that the positions of the erring party neither could nor should be tolerated in the church of God, much less be excused or defended. Therefore necessity demands explanation of these disputed articles on the basis of God’s word and reliable writings so that those with a proper Christian understanding could recognize which position regarding the points under dispute is in accord with God’s word and the Christian Augsburg confession and which is not. And so the Christians of good will, who are concerned about the truth, might protect and guard themselves from the errors and corruptions that have appeared among us…’

“His was a serious message of rebuke, delivered somberly and, as he said, ‘…in deep humility with a heavy heart and no desire whatsoever to offend. The decisions by this assembly to grant non-celibate homosexual ministers the privilege of serving as rostered leaders in the ELCA and the affirmation of same-gender unions as pleasing to God will undoubtedly cause additional stress and disharmony within the ELCA. It will also negatively affect the relationships between our two church bodies. The current division between our churches threatens to become a chasm…’”

I am not at all surprised by Dr. K’s grim and humorless chastisement of the ELCA for taking the courageous step of opening the gates to lesbian/gay/partnered clergy. Actually, I chuckled at the line that he said ‘…in deep humility with a heavy heart and no desire whatsoever to offend.” Well, Rev. Dr., you certainly offended a lot of us, then, without desiring to! Neat trick, doubtless grounded in backward thinking if not in passion or desire.This is the very heart of the deep divide which has opened in the last four decades between different groups of Lutherans. The Missouri Synod has become more and more 19th century in its obsession about perfect agreement in all matters, even if it means continuing to cut all relationships with other Lutherans who differ. Perfect agreement in theology means nothing short of perfect thought control, and LC–MS seems to have achieved it. Kieschnick’s heavy-hearted remarks to the ELCA were not only a rebuke of us, but clearly a warning shot fired at his own churchbody. Don’t even think about raising any new discussions of human sexuality in the LC–MS. It is a settled matter which will not be revisited.

Kieschnick’s remarks, and the severe quotation from the Formula of Concord – which he obviously chose to lift out of its 16th century context and attempt to apply it in the 21st century – has all the marks of Missouri’s obsession about sin and evil, lockstep doctrinal conformity, and dire consequences for difference of opinion. Not only is he and his officialdom—to which the LC-MS churchbody has remained captive since J.A.O. Preus’ take-over of the LC-MS in the 1970s—unwilling to have any honest dialogue about where Christians disagree in matters of faith, he has chosen not to respect the deeply-held convictions of other fellow-Lutherans/fellow Christians who hold to those convictions by reason of their own conscience.

In other words, Kieschnick’s and LC–MS’s official interpretation of tough contemporary issues and matters of faith are the only ones which may have validity anywhere in Christendom. Any other point of view, according to his rough application of the quote from a document written in A.D. 1580, “should not be tolerated in the church of God.”

Has Kieschnick forgotten that the dispute back then which the Reformers could not tolerate were disputes with the Roman Catholic Church, not with fellow evangelicals? And has he not noticed that Pope Benedict XVI himself has basically said that all of us — all Lutherans and all Protestants and everybody else who are not under his personal authority are not even a “church” in the proper sense? In effect Kieschnick’s rebuke of the ELCA, a churchbody nearly twice the size of the LC–MS parallels Benedict’s rebuke of all other Christians. In Kieschnick’s case it is utter arrogance masquerading as doctrinal purity. In Benedict’s case it is utter arrogance masquerading as divine authority.

But Kieschnick’s quote is wrong for a more fundamental reason. Read this again, carefully: “Therefore necessity demands explanation of these disputed articles on the basis of God’s word and reliable writings so that those with a proper Christian understanding could recognize which position regarding the points under dispute is in accord with God’s word and the Christian Augsburg confession and which is not.”

Why I find this to be a deeply flawed application of a 440 year old document is that it refers to “these disputed articles”, meaning articles of faith. Do we need to remind Rev. Dr. Kieschnick that the Augsburg Confession (published in 1530) does not even contain an “article of faith” on human sexuality, let alone homosexuality? Should it not be pointed out to him that articles of faith are about God, Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit, justification by grace through faith, etc., and not about anthropology, sociology, biology or psychology. Christians do not put our faith in these matters or in our current understandings of any of them, even if we are influenced by them because they change. And when matters of anthropology, sociology, biology or psychology change, our opinions and attitudes change with them.

Strictly speaking, our faith is never in ourselves (gay or straight, Catholic or Lutheran, woman or man, married or single, sinner or saint). But the LC-MS obsession, like other fundamentalist religious obsessions, is that they get to define with exactitude what is sinful and against the will of God and therefore cannot be tolerated in the church of God.

As. St. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 14:36, “Or did the word of God originate with you? Or are you the only ones it has reached?” Yes, it’s kind of funny that Paul said that as a rebuke of one congregation with whom he disagreed over allowing women to speak in church, a real issue of faith that also has divided the ELCA and the LC–MS since the 1970s. (Missouri Synod does not ordain women to the ministry, and tries to keep them out of all authoritative positions over men in the church from the local congregation on up.) Their reasoning is as fundamentalist as you can get: they can point to some verses in the Bible that they say with vehement certainty applies to the present times, and because of their own certainty they will not even grant the civility to talk with a sister or brother in Christ who differs in discernment of what applies or doesn’t apply. In doing so they completely bypass and ignore a lot of other Holy Writ that reminds us to listen to one another, to pray for one another, to bear one another’s burdens, and to draw near to Christ rather than searching the scriptures for a proof text. They ignore the divine permission which Christians are given to “bind and loose” even matters which are covered in the Scriptures.

Maybe we will, sadly, look back on 2009 as the year when Christianity definitely began to crack into two irreconcilable camps. Each of us believes that we are reconciled to God, but not by our own achievements, conformity, certainty or doctrinal purity, but purely and solely by grace. Think about that, Rev. Dr.

—Pastor Dan Hooper

Posted in Bible & Interpretation, Catholic matters, Doctrine, Ecumenical Issues, Environment, Faith, History, Lesbian/Gay Marriage, LGBT Christian, LGBT Rights, Ministry, Public Affairs | No Comments »

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