The trickle of congregations departing the ELCA and the individuals who have chosen to worship elsewhere have been painful for both sides.  For those of us staying with the ELCA, we sadly bid those folks farewell with our best wishes.  We recognize that they have differing religious world views that may make the LCMS, or evangelical congregations, or the loose association of congregations known as LCMC, or even the yet to be created and defined Lutheran CORE denomination more compatible with their beliefs.  These departures are sad but understandable.

Less defensible is the decision of many individuals and congregations who choose to stay in the ELCA but to withhold funds.  Lutheran CORE bears responsibility for this manipulative and vindictive financial boycott that frankly is counterproductive to their effort to win friends and influence people.  I previously reported on the crack in Lutheran CORE’s resolve regarding this issue in the words of CORE spokesperson, Pastor Erma Wolf, who was quoted by a local newspaper after speaking to a congregation early in January:

“I’m not withholding my church offerings and I would not encourage a congregation to do that,” CORE’s Wolf said. “As long as we’re in the ELCA, we need to be financial stewards of the church.”

Following the Haiti disaster, Wolf followed up with a post on the Lutheran CORE blog urging contributions to ELCA disaster relief.  Since the CORE blog does not publish reader comments, it is uncertain how her position resonates with CORE leadership or followers.

All this is background to a story from Hope Lutheran Church of Fargo, North Dakota, the largest ELCA congregation in the largest city in the state.  It is merely an anecdote, one story that stands out from many others, and certainly should not be read as a trend; yet, it is a fascinating tale. 

Hope is one of those that remains in the ELCA but chose to withhold funds.  According to the story posted in Fargo’s Inforum, this decision emanated from pastoral leadership and congregational Council action.

In October, Hope Senior Pastor Chuck Olmstead wrote on the Hope Web site that the congregation’s “leadership has suspended all financial support to the ELCA.”

This top-down decision for the congregation didn’t sit well with certain members, including George Koeck, and he did something about it.  He proposed a counter-resolution at the annual congregational meeting, and his resolution passed.  The resolution authorized a gift of $10,000 to the ELCA synod.

George Koeck, a Hope Lutheran member, said he proposed the amendment Thursday because he believes “that the fundamental mission of Hope, to encourage all people to know the love of Christ, is far more important than differences of belief we may have on human sexuality.”

Eastern North Dakota Bishop Bill Rindy said he was “really glad” about the church’s decision on funding the national offices.  “Some really good ministries will be funded because of that,” he said.

Does this story signal a shift in attitude among those congregations uncomfortable with the actions of the 2009 Church Wide assembly?

As to whether this is a sign that backlash against decisions at the Churchwide Assembly are dying down, Rindy said, “I don’t know if it’s dying down as much as it is that most congregations are realizing that they have members all along the spectrum on this particular topic.”

And that, it seems to me, is the essence of bound conscience, a recognition that well meaning ELCA Lutherans can hold differing views without name-calling (“unchurched and heretical”), financial manipulation, and schismatic rabble rousing.  Thank you Mr. Koeck and Hope Lutheran for your example for the rest of us.  Thank you also, Pastor Wolf, for swimming against the Lutheran CORE current.

One of the blogs I follow on my RSS reader is Otagosh.  I think that Gavin, the author, is in New Zealand, but since there is no “about” page, I’m not sure.  Gavin, if you read this, can you provide more info?  In any case, Gavin offered his perspective on the question, What is the Bible and how do we use it? 

[It’s not fiction, like a novel], but by the same token it’s hardly factual writing either, whether New Testament Gospels or Old Testament “history.” If you want to take the Bible seriously you have to meet it on its terms [as an ancient text].

The problem then isn’t with the Bible. The problem is with post-Enlightenment people trying to shoehorn ancient texts into contemporary categories. The Bible isn’t meant to be read in the same way as an instruction manual, recipe book, or newspaper report. Nor is it like some kind of weird jigsaw puzzle where you have to string together bleeding chunks of text from all over with the aid of Cruden’s concordance.

Fundamentalism provides the most egregious “all or nothing” example: the Bible is either 100% reliable in everything, or it isn’t “true.” An army of skeptics happily rise up to accept that thesis, and conclude – quite rightly if you follow the logic – that as there are errors, the Bible is useless.

Lutheran Pastor and blogger Doug Kings of Chicago is critical of Christendom’s (and especially our own ELCA) wishy-washy failure to confront the often simplistic, naive, and literal assumptions of the folks in the pews.

[L]et the Bible be what it is: the collected thoughts of a particular ancient people, containing their prejudices and ignorance but also some genuinely profound insight into living with God and with one another in our paradoxical world of beauty and pain, purpose and confusion.

Modern scholarship has actually discovered a great deal about the Bible but much of it is ignored because it doesn’t tell us what we want to hear. Modern biblical study’s totally unsurprising conclusion is that the Bible is theology, through and through. Thus, it isn’t history, biology, geology, astronomy, economics, political science, psychology or any of the other contemporary subjects which so fascinate us and about which we have so many questions. For answers to them, we must look elsewhere.

Professor emeritus Walter Brueggemann is one of the most esteemed and influential Bible scholars around, and I previously offered a blog post on his Christian Century article in which he posited that Scripture is “Remembering an Imagined Past.”  Brueggemann has authored the leading work of Old Testament scholarship of the past generation entitled Theology of the Old Testament: testimony, dispute, advocacy.  In his preface, he offers the following explanation of his methodology.

I have focused on the metaphor and imagery of courtroom trial in order to regard the theological substance of the Old Testament as a series of claims asserted for Yahweh, the God of Israel.  All of these claims share a general commonality but also evidence considerable variation, competition, and conflict … where truth is at issue and at risk, testimony is given by many witnesses, witnesses are vigorously cross-examined, and out of such disputatious adjudication comes a verdict, an affirmed rendering of reality and an accepted version of truth.

Biblical scholarship is serious business, not amenable to simplistic sound bites or proof texts.  As someone who has been drawn to this discipline for the past generation and as an ELCA Lutheran active as an LGBT advocate within my denomination, I take particular offense at the Lutheran CORE putdown that the ELCA has become unbiblical.  From Lutheran CORE talking points comes the following tripe:

“The ELCA is the one that has departed from the teaching of the Bible”.  “Lutheran CORE intends to remain with the clear teaching of Scripture”.  “Lutheran CORE would like to help those in the ELCA who continue to uphold the authority of Scripture to find a way to continue to maintain basic Christian teaching as revealed in the Bible.”

Following a recent meeting of the big shots of CORE, WordAlone, and Lutheran Congregations in Mission for Christ (LCMS), a press release was issued containing a revealing paragraph about CORE’s attitude toward the Bible and scriptural interpretation:

Confessional Lutherans accept the Bible as the sole, divine source and norm for all Christian teaching and endorse the 1580 Book of Concord—the statement of Lutheran doctrines—as being accurate interpretations of Holy Scripture. The Bible repeatedly condemns sexual relationships outside of a marriage between one man and one woman.

There are learned persons, Biblical scholars and professors, who stand behind CORE; for that reason, this quasi-fundamentalist statement is stunning.  Let us parse this paragraph a bit.

Sole: only; exclusive; standing alone.   No room for reason.  No room for conscience.  No room for experience.   Simple.  Just consult the ancient book of rules to answer all modern questions.  Even Luther would have disagreed with such simplicity.

Unless I am convinced by the testimony of the Holy Scriptures or by evident reason … Thus I cannot and will not recant, because acting against one’s conscience [informed by Scripture] is neither safe nor sound. God help me. Amen.

Divine: not human; perfect; beyond question.  I guess Brueggemann was wrong—there is no “variation, competition, and conflict” present in this perfect expression of God’s will, nor CORE’s perfect interpretation of it.  To refer to the Bible as “divine” smacks of rank Bibliolatry, but in reality it is a political maneuver meant to limit debate or dissent from a fundamentalist view.  Much as the ancient Hebrews could not bear to look upon the face of God, one probes the divine Word at one’s peril.  Dare not ask questions of the divine text.

1580 Book of Concord: I confess that I am not well-read in the Lutheran writings of the sixteenth century.  What I find astounding in the statement, given the scholars that are part of CORE’s hierarchy, is CORE’s static interpretation of scripture according to a document dated 1580, which establishes the pre-modern worldview of the reformers as preferable to the  insights of the past four centuries.

The Bible repeatedly condemns sexual relationships outside of a marriage between one man and one woman:  If the fundamentalists say this often enough, will it come true?  Proving the falsity of this statement is like shooting fish in a barrel.  One example, that of Father Abraham, shall suffice, but we could go on and on.

So, after Abram had lived ten years in the land of Canaan, Sarai, Abram’s wife, took Hagar the Egyptian, her slave-girl, and gave her to her husband Abram as a wife.  He went in to Hagar, and she conceived.  Genesis 16:3-4a

Episcopal Priest Susan Russell recently offered a blog post in which she quoted an article from Professor Rosemary R. Reuther, entitled A Biblical View of Marriage: One Man and Several Women.

The point here is not to mandate either patriarchal polygamy or New Testament celibacy, but to dispute the notion that God in the Bible mandated one view of marriage, from the beginning and for all time. Rather marriage is a human arrangement which has varied over time, according to human (mostly male) views of their needs for sex, relationship, kinship alliances and progeny. In the West in the last few centuries the need to cement social alliances through marriage and to create (male) heirs has decreased, and the primary purpose of marriage has come to be seen as love, preferably between two people in a permanent relationship.

There are smart and educated persons in CORE, and they ought to know better than to spout such unscholarly and fossilized views of the canon coupled with accusations that the rest of us are unbiblical.  It is not that we don’t take the Bible seriously, as CORE alleges, it is that we take it too seriously to avoid challenging questions informed by reason, experience, and the lessons of scholarship, both traditional and modern.

Just a few end of the week notes about Lutheran charitable activities.

The latest number reported for the ELCA Haiti disaster relief is $1.2 million.

Earlier, I posted about Pastor Erma Wolf’s apparent break with the Lutheran CORE financial boycott of the ELCA.  Interestingly, there are no comments published on her blog post.  Since I attempted to offer a supportive comment which the blog did not publish, I wonder if she or someone else is trying to avoid a full-blown discussion of her statement in which she said, “I am going to make a suggestion, request, perhaps plea is the best word for it, now.  Send an offering to the ELCA Vision for Mission Fund.”   Of course, her statement is in stark contrast to the prior entreaties from Lutheran CORE to redirect funds away from the ELCA.

Here are some interesting charitable giving tidbits.  It would take 3 Frenchmen, or 7 Germans, or 14 Italians to equal the amount of charitable giving of 1 American.  The average US family donates approximately $2,000 annually.  Lower income folks donate a much higher percentage of their income to charity than high income folks. 

And here’s a trivia question for you:  what American charity raises the most revenue annually—an amount that would place the organization in the upper half of the Fortune 500 if it were a private business?

The answer surprised me—it is Lutheran Social Services (LSS) with annual revenues of $16 billion!  LSS is strongly supported by the ELCA and LCMS, but these eye-popping sums come from a much broader base than merely these two denominations, and I suspect most of the revenue is fee for services based rather than charitable contributions.

Kurt Johnson, Sr. is an ELCA Lutheran who resides in the Austin, Texas area.  He is the author of a political non fiction book entitled Glass Walls released in May, 2009.  The book discusses the neoconservative influence on the Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003. 

GLASS WALLS is a flowing, descriptive study of how public policy decisions by government can be misguided by social, cultural and religious influences.

This post is not about the book but a subsequent paper by Johnson that discusses one of the neocon subjects of his book, Robert Benne.  This is the same Robert Benne who serves on the Lutheran CORE advisory board and who has authored several articles posted on the Lutheran CORE website, including the recent Why There Must be New Beginnings.  Based on Benne’s background in neocon politics, Johnson offers a paper in response to Benne’s New Beginnings article.  It is a scholarly paper (pdf format) that is more ponderous than a blog post, but it offers revealing insight into Benne and serves as a rebuttal to many of Benne’s positions.

Johnson briefly traces the Benne drift into neoconservatism (emphasis added).

[I]t is well documented that in the mid-to-late 1970s, Benne distanced himself significantly from his position embracing “social justice” and toward a distinctively white and middle-class (if not upper-middle-class) system of values. It is well documented that he became disillusioned with the civil rights movement and anti-war movement (Vietnam).

As part of that transition, Benne decided to take up with the “Chicago School” of economic theory as promoted by the economists at the University of Chicago, embracing the free-market ideas of Milton Friedman as distinguished from the long-accepted views of John Maynard Keynes. And perhaps most surprising because of its
remoteness from Benne’s pre-1975 views as a professor at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago was his position that “market arrangements” can (as per Benne quoting Assar Lindbeck) “reduce the need for compassion, patriotism, brotherly love and social solidarity as motivating forces behind social improvement.” And so, by the time the ELCA was being formed and attempting to engage the world on the cutting-edge issues, Benne already was in the process of retreating from it, aligning with the neoconservative values which are found substantively in the “white, middle-class, Euro-American composition.” All he needed to complete the schism was a virulent issue like human sexuality, which conveniently pulled the trigger.

Here are a few key points of Johnson’s rebuttal to Benne.

Based on his baseline premise that lifelong, monogamous, same gender relationships are necessarily sinful, Benne concludes that the ELCA willy nilly excuses sin and offers cheap grace.  I previously discussed this unquestioned assumption or paradigm here.  Johnson rightly argues that the ELCA has not gone into the business of excusing sinful behavior.  Instead, the ELCA now challenges the basic assumption of sinfulness and has achieved a paradigm shift in the church’s attitude about committed same gender relationships.

Benne offers significant criticism of the ELCA quota system, as if it is part of a “pervasive, deep-seated and well planned conspiracy to overturn Lutheran confessionalism and a Lutheran interpretation of scripture,” according to Johnson’s characterization of the Benne view.  Johnson responds:

The inclusive, so-called quota system was developed in order to integrate the church and a world in need of ministry and sanctification. It was not developed to overturn important aspects of Lutheran doctrine. It is true that the quota system could be viewed as a threat to those who want to have the ELCA dominated by a “white, middle-class, Euro-American composition.”

Johnson concludes by raising the recurring question of how religion reacts to modernity, and suggests that the answer of Lutheran CORE is an unsatisfying retreat to Reformation era tenets of traditionalism.

It is understandable that the traditional orthodoxy represented by the Lutheran Core movement likely will dismiss these emerging developments and call them liberal, secular and heretical. The problem with this position … is that traditional orthodoxy is not likely to reassess how its message can reach and find acceptance in a society and world which are trying to digest such fast-moving changes.

Johnson’s paper is lengthy, but it’s worth the read.

Except for Pat Robertson and his 700 Club rant that suggested the Haitians deserved the hurricane that has devastated their country, the reaction of American religious communities has been swift and supportive, and this includes the ELCA.  Bishop Mark Hanson, who is both the presiding bishop of the ELCA and also the current president of the Lutheran World Federation, reported on Lutheran relief efforts, according to an ELCA press release:

CHICAGO (ELCA) — The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) is responding to the earthquake in Haiti through the Lutheran World Federation (LWF), wrote the Rev. Mark S. Hanson, ELCA presiding bishop, in a Jan. 13 letter to members.  Hanson, who is also president of the LWF, noted that the ELCA has committed substantial funds to support relief efforts, and encouraged members to share information and provide financial gifts.

The Jan. 12 earthquake caused considerable structural damage around the capital city, Port-au-Prince, and may have killed “more than a hundred thousand people,” Hanson wrote, quoting Haitian officials. Relief agencies’ immediate concerns were for the safety of survivors, plus needs for water, sanitation and communication.

In a brief interview, Hanson told the ELCA News Service that “this is a time for the ELCA to come together as we have so often done in our history.”  He said the church has the capacity to respond to human tragedy, and “members are called to bear witness to our faith by responding generously and working with partners” to provide relief.

The presiding bishop asked members to contribute financial gifts to the church’s relief efforts. Members can provide gifts online at http://www.ELCA.org/haitiearthquake or call 800-638-3522.

In his written message, Hanson noted that the ELCA already is responding through the LWF’s Haiti Program. “Given the devastation caused by this earthquake, the ELCA has committed an initial $250,000 from ELCA International Disaster Response for Haiti and has authorized an additional $500,000 as congregations respond both to the immediate needs and long-term rebuilding efforts,” he wrote.

Yet, when I scour the websites, press releases and blogs of Lutheran CORE, Lutheran Congregations in Mission for Christ (LCMC), and the WordAlone network, I see nothing.  I don’t infer that their members are uncaring, but organizations built on the negative, built upon being against something, seemingly have a hard time transitioning into the positive.  The reality is their focus is on ELCA bashing, and they do not have the infrastructure to deal with non-political religious matters.  Their whole focus is political and not mission or ministry.

Lutheran CORE spokesman Robert Benne’s touted article Why There Must Be New Beginnings itemized ten CORE goals (stated negatively as ELCA criticism, of course), and the one pertaining to foreign mission emphasized conversion of the heathens without mentioning medical, educational, disaster relief, or infrastructure development.

Even when WordAlone announces the formation of a chaplaincy corps, a closer look reveals more ELCA bashing, more political advice, more militancy.

The WordAlone Chaplain Corps is a new (launched January, 2010) program of the WordAlone Network through which pastors and laypersons alike may seek advice and counsel as regards the fallout from the positions taken by the ELCA pursuant to the church-wide assembly of that body held in August, 2009.

[From the booklet back cover] “Therefore take up the whole armor of God, so that you may be able to withstand on that evil day and having done everything to stand firm.”  (Ephesians 6:13)

The question needs to be asked: will the CORE financial boycott of the ELCA hinder efforts to help Haiti?  We know what these dissident organizations are against, what are they for?  We know that Lutheran CORE knows how to inflict pain through financial boycott, does CORE know how to heal?

UPDATE:

Pastor Justin Johnson offers his take on the silence out of Lutheran CORE, WordAlone, and LCMC.

The ELCA announced that its initial $250,000 contribution has already been increased to $600,000 based upon “a strong and generous response” from ELCA members.  If the rate of ELCA member giving continues, the ELCA contribution will soon exceed $1 million.

UPDATE TWO:

Please note my recent post  about Lutheran CORE spokesperson, Pastor Erma Wolf, urging financial support of the ELCA, especially for Haiti disaster relief, but perhaps also as a critique of CORE’s financial boycott generally.