From
Living Theology in the Metropolitan Chicago Synod
Evangelical Lutheran Church In America
Volume 1, Number 4
September 1996
The Church and Salvation
Bleeding on the Page For the
Sake of Theology
As a rule, I’m not an avid reader of other folk’s
Pastor’s columns. Like most clergy I
receive at least half a dozen newsletters from other congregations. I read the
parish statistics, and check the program notes. But I don’t generally read the
Pastor’s column. The same applies to the Bishop’s missives in the synodical
insert to The Lutheran. I usually scan it, catch a line here or there,
but don’t really study it. However, the August 1996 “Thoughts from the Bishop’s
Office,” caught my attention. I’ve read it through several times and studied
its implicit message. It has paid benefits, and I’m grateful whenever I find
the bishop exercising the magisterial, teaching function of the office.
What I
liked most about the column was the pedagogical method the bishop adopted. It
would have been easy to state the questions the article implies, give the
proper citations from the Confessions and feel as if one had done the teaching
needed. That would have been easy, but dull. Instead, by assigning the task to
one of his assistants [Maxine Washington], and using a narrative style, the
column sent me back to the Confessions to find the answers for myself. That’s a
fine teaching tool, and I marvel at the personal risk taken for the sake of our
continuing education. After all, confession in the privacy of the Pastor’s
office allows for absolute confidentiality. But putting one’s sins on the pages
of The Lutheran exposes the
author to peer criticism, even as it prompts thought.
There
are at least three issues which the column raises. At the risk of stating the
obvious, let me recite these three. First, there’s the question of whether the
church has, at the behest of the culture, created a hierarchy of sins. Second,
there is the question of the viability of the magisterial office in a society
which intensely dislikes authority. Third, there’s the question of the
relationship between the inner call to ordained ministry and the external call
to a specific position in the church. Of course, the reflections also raise the
question of the nature and purpose of the church, the nature of Confessional
subscription and one of my favorite questions, the relationship between
experiential and doctrinal religion. It amazes me the bishop managed to raise
these deep and profound questions were in a few short, narrative paragraphs.
I feel
compelled to write about these first three. I’m wondering if others want to
discuss. I know I take the risk of sounding like a curmudgeonly neo-conservative
willing to attack a newly installed bishop’s assistant. But after the risk the
bishop’s assistant took, that’s nothing. Besides, I have no grudge against the
Bishop or his assistant. My goal is to set my thoughts down for my own sake,
and perhaps share them with others because I’m a writer and well, I enjoy the
process of bleeding on a page.
That
first question, the creation of a hierarchy of sins, puzzled me until I read
the “Thoughts” column. We had discussed this question in a Pastor’s support
group before I read the article. One of our group members insisted that
financial and sexual sins were the only ones which could get a Pastor dropped
from the clergy role. I insisted that there were others as well. Yes, murder
too might do as a reason for discipline. But covetousness is actually
encouraged by the church as we set out career paths from small struggling
congregations to high steeple churches with big salaries. Our colleague
insisted that we had constructed a hierarchy of sins in response to cultural
constraints. I insisted that as heirs of the reformation we knew better than to
distinguish among sins, dividing them into cardinal and venial sins.
I believe that this “Thoughts” column was a way to
put that same issue before us, demonstrating how far we have fallen from our
Lutheran conviction that all sins are signs of Sin and all sinners ought to be
treated alike, i.e., called upon to repent, offered divine forgiveness and the
opportunity for amendment of life. Here was the bishop’s assistant confessing
that she had neglected the Word of God and the preaching of it for at least a
month, and that she probably would have gone on neglecting it had her business
not forced her to attend worship. It seemed as if she was saying, “I too have
sinned. How will the church discipline me?”
She deftly used irony, presenting the same sort of excuses one hears
from clergy who become involved with parishioners. “‘I was angry with God.’ ‘I
was stressed out by my responsibilities.’ ‘I was anxious about the future.’
Therefore, I sinned. I stopped attending worship, neglected the Word of God and
the administration of the sacraments. I broke the third [Sabbath day]
commandment and ask for forgiveness.”
Of course I’m anxious to forgive her and rejoice
that she is feeling better about herself and her life and her call to ministry
as the auxiliary bishop of the Metro Synod. But I marvel at her courage. What
would the synodical authorities do if a Pastor of this Synod wrote a column for
The Lutheran confessing, “I was stressed out, angry with God and
overwhelmed by my new duties and therefore, I broke the sixth and seventh
[adultery, stealing] commandments. But I heard the voice of God and I have
repented and amended my life and I’m not breaking those commandments anymore.”
Would we forgive that Pastor for breaching his or her ordination vows? Would we
commend him or her for honesty, offer forgiveness, and assure the person that
all was well and they could continue with their function in the Pastoral
office? I doubt it. I think we would demand that the person who has breached
the trust placed in them resign from office as a condition of their forgiveness
and restoration to the fellowship.
That’s because we have clearly adopted the world’s
criteria for judging the seriousness of sins. Any sin which involves more than
one person is more serious than a sin which involves the individual and God.
Luther, of course, saw things the other way around. His theology makes all sins
an example of Sin against God. All sins are a violation of the first
commandment. One may justifiably ask if a Pastor’s neglect of Word and
Sacrament affects only the individual? Doesn’t it affect all of us when the
Bishop’s assistant is so busy with her work that she does not have time to
engage in corporate worship in a congregation? At the very least it sets a bad
example. It is difficult to work up much enthusiasm for evangelism when the
leadership of the Synod sees worship as something to avoid when the going gets
rough.
The
second question the article raises is the viability of episcopal authority in
an anti-authoritarian culture. Here again, the adoption of a narrative style, a
folksy narrative style if you will, raises the question indirectly. If the
Bishop had exercised the authority of his office directly we would have seen
him as stodgy, “Puritanical” and legalistic. It would be akin to receiving a
missive from the Bishop declaring that all clergy ought to attend public
functions in clerical collars. I’ve heard that one southern ELCA Bishop once
sent out such a letter. It made for a few unintended laughs, but taught neither
the dignity of the Pastoral office, nor sartorial propriety.
Our
clever Bishop instead addressed these issues in a veiled way. But is
indirection the best course? Isn’t it likely that many of us will miss the
subtlety of the arguments presented in August’s “Thoughts”. It isn’t that we’re
stupid or unliterary. I’d guess that most of the Metro Chicago Pastors I’ve met
are able to recognize irony when they see it. But most of us are busy, and
irony takes a certain amount of time out of the busy day. Maybe it would be
better for the Bishop to be a little more direct with his attempts at teaching
the church the meaning of sins and Sin. It’s possible that we would rebel, we
are of that breed of rebellious flesh after all. However, if the Bishop
directly exercised the teaching function of his office, we would at least be
certain of what we were rebelling against. As it is, this use of indirection,
this literary conceit, leads to some confusion. Are we really to take the
Bishop’s assistant as speaking only for herself, an individual soul and not as
theologian and representative of the office of Bishop? I’m not sure. It is the
polyvalence of narrative which inevitably leads to confusion.
The
final question the article touched upon is the struggle between the inner call
and the outward call of the church to a particular form of service. It seems to
me that I heard rumor that H. George Anderson was unwilling to answer the call
of the church to serve as its Bishop the first two times the call was issued
because he did not have an accompanying sense of inner call. I know how painful
that lack of inner call can be. I served a congregation when I lacked the inner
certainty that God was calling me to that place. The call was a disaster and
ended in less than three years. Perhaps the discussion of the pain the Bishop’s
assistant felt after accepting the call of the church and moving from Holy
Spirit Lutheran to the Synod office was a way of teaching that there must be
convergence of the inner and the outer call. Perhaps it was a tangential issue
to her main point about the uncertainty of subjectivism and the need for a
certain, objective word from God in Scripture and Confessions.
That, or
course, is both the problem with and the glory of narrative theology. Unlike
didacticism it has several possible valences. Narrative theology exposes the
“polyglot” nature of theological discourse, to borrow a term from Mikael
Bahktin. The glory is that one can attend to which ever voice one privileges in
the reading of the story. There is no one authoritative voice bearing the
narrative weight, but rather a competition of voices present even through the
mediation of a single narrator. The
problem of narrative as a teaching tool is that one cannot privilege a single
voice. While it is a wonderful way to pass on the lore of the tribe, it is less
apt as a disseminator of doctrinal truth. Doctrine tends, it seems to me, to be
univocal, or at least less multivalent than narrative.
So,
Bishop Olsen, thanks for the occasion to think about Sin, sins, social norms
and churchly discipline. Thanks for forcing me to reflect on my own call to
ministry in this place. Thanks for the chance to air the issues again. But,
next time you want to stimulate thought, make it a little less difficult to
discern your direction, if you get my drift.
Carl
Isaacson
Pastor of Unity, Chicago