From
Living Theology in the Metropolitan Chicago Synod
Evangelical Lutheran Church In America
Volume 1, Number 4
September 1996
The Church and Salvation
More Sweat Than Blood
Let’s
Talk thanks Carl Isaacson for putting blood and passion into our synodical
theological dialog. We trust all will understand that irony can be irritating
and still be irenic.
Some slightly less bloody responses:
· Maxine
Washington was the author of the article--noted only in editorial brackets in
Carl’s piece. Granted, she was writing as a member of the Bishop’s Office, but
it was clearly her voice. And good theological dialog acknowledges
persons. Isn’t all theology embodied interpretation for the sake of obedience?
· We must all beware of reading cement into
liquid words. Our sister confessed missing Sunday worship in a rough first
month on the job. Ask her if she was writing this article itself “on the fly.”
Ask her where and how else she may have been gladly hearing and learning God’s
Word that month. And let us ask ourselves how we check out self and others on
the ways we honor days à la Romans 14.
· Hidden in Carl’s own irony is the implicit
message that, if our sister did set a bad example by neglecting worship
during a time fraught with anxieties, there is another, perhaps more alarming
bad example set by a system of episcopacy that is not adequately mobilized to
lift burdens and administer the gospel and sacraments apposite to real-life
brokenness or bent-ness. How can the pastor-for-the-pastors better help people
caught fretting over their sense of call? Let’s not miss that message.
· Such a real-life gospel-centeredness is
perhaps the difference between authority, which we need more of from every
Bishop’s office, and authoritarianism, which we could do with less of. We all
seem to be looking for a sure center to our theology and rhetoric. “Salvation
by grace through faith for the sake of Christ” is a great one. The reason it
seems so dissatisfying when we apply it to real-life is that it has this
irritating tendency to undermine all of our attempts to find final answers to
practical problems—such as whether we really, really have an inner call to
anything. Then it is not doctrine, but narrative, that emboldens us to sin and
sin boldly but believe in God’s grace more boldly still. Something to which
Maxine may have been testifying in her article.
JRS