Living Theology
in the Metropolitan Chicago Synod
Volume 8, Number 1
Pentecost 2003
Human
Sexuality in the ELCA
I've got a big
problem. Two of them, actually. I've been asked to contribute this little
essay on sexuality, and on the ELCA's current study of sexuality, including the
examination of questions about blessing same-sex unions and ordaining gays and
lesbians in active and committed relationships. The problem is that I have very little to say about sexuality as
such. The various and eccentric
episodes of my personal life aside, I'm no expert on sexuality. Whatever it is that counts as expertise when
analyzing sexuality, I don't have much of it.
In fact, I'm not sure I know just what kind of thing
"sexuality" is.
Fortunately, there
appear to be a lot of people around who do, and these days, many of them are in
the church. And they're talking. A heavy load of books and articles, study
guides, biblical and theological summaries, and semi-official internet on-line
discussion groups have emerged during the past few years, all devoted to
dilating on the topic of human sexuality, especially on the matter of
homosexuality. The study on sexuality mandated by the 2001 ELCA Churchwide
assembly is turning out to be a serious business indeed.
However, this
provokes the second problem. A great
deal of this material is rife with specious appeals and dubious arguments. This should come as no great surprise to any
of us in the ELCA. Lutherans do not
typically do well with issues of this sort.
The reason that we do not do well with issues like "sexuality"
is that our traditional theological loci have addressed a fairly narrow range
of topics, and "sexuality" hasn't been even on the horizon of our
concerns. Frankly, Lutherans lack the
theological resources for engaging such matters (or so I shall argue in what
follows here). But we want to engage
them anyway, and so we go seeking after something -- anything -- that will
allow us to speak with a modicum of authority as we try to articulate the "Lutheran
position" on questions for which there is no Lutheran position.
If we take an
honest look at ourselves, we discover the truth that there is no distinctive
Lutheran stance on sexuality, or on a great many other subjects involving
ethical matters, either social or personal.
The fact that Luther was periodically embroiled in such concerns does
not in itself support the conclusion that there is any genuine theological
value for Lutherans in the act of locating ethical verities. Theology is not ethics, and Lutherans have
typically had a singular allegiance to theology.
Nonetheless, the
search for an authoritative talisman that Lutherans can confidently embrace in
the current discussion has led many in the ELCA to seize upon the notion that
there is a “biblical ethic” on sexuality, usually constructed in one of three
ways. The first involves the perception
that there are a number of scattered but specific references in scripture that
portray sexuality strictly as a marital activity between husband (male) and
wife (female), thereby excluding everything else, including same-sex genital
contact under any conditions. This is a
textual ethic; the text, simply because it is a particular kind of text, is
uniformly normative. Second, an
alternative ethic is developed out of the biblical injunction to love. Instead of an ethic framed by rules and
laws, firm boundaries and sharp edges, our approach to questions on sexuality
should grow out of a prior commitment to love our brothers and sisters, our
neighbors, even our enemies. Finally,
there is the newfound appreciation for natural law theory, whereby God
established a set of “natural orders” (including male-female marriage) under
which God intended human beings to live.
This version of natural law is not explicitly articulated in scripture,
but is extrapolated from a few congested passages, especially the first chapter
of Paul’s letter to the Romans.
All of this
exegetical activity is grounded in the premise that it is legitimate for
Lutherans, operating from within the Lutheran theological tradition, to sculpt
a “biblical ethic” from scriptural bedrock.
I confess that it is hard for me to see how this can be done, either by
means of a textual ethic, or by invoking the commandment to love, or by recourse
to natural law. Let me explain why this
is the case. In what follows, I will
only offer some preliminary observations and reactions to the struggles of the
ELCA over the past decade to assemble a coherent proposal on sexuality on the
basis of some elusive “biblical ethic.”
No sustained arguments or thorough documentation is provided here; if my
comments turn out to be useful, those things can be presented later. Above all, my scattered remarks reflect my
own long-standing frustration in trying to get clear about what is really at
stake for the ELCA in this discussion on sexuality.
Traditional Lutheran
formulations have emphasized the centrality of the cross of Christ as the point
of departure for all of our theological reflection. This stress on Christ’s death and resurrection has had, to be
sure, its existential dimension within Lutheranism (“I must take up my cross,
and follow Him”), but its primary significance for the early Lutheran reformers
was essentially epistemic and metaphysical.
Luther’s insistence, first in the Heidelburg Disputation and
later in The Bondage of the Will, that all of our knowledge of God is
mediated through Christ crucified, is matched by Melanchthon’s assertion, in
the Apology of the Augsburg Confession, that the natural man, because of
original sin, has no knowledge of God, and that authentic knowledge of God is
conveyed only through faith in the crucified and risen One. At the core of this knowledge is our
understanding of justification by grace through faith, which is “the main
doctrine of Christianity,” according to Melanchthon.
This means that our
knowledge of God is going to be severely limited indeed. If we wish to know God’s Person and His
purposes for creation, we have no option but to go to the cross. This exclusive concentration on the theology
of the cross is ordinarily contrasted, in Lutheran thought, with the several
varieties of theology of glory, including the epistemic and metaphysical
ones. As Lutherans, we have not
normally indulged ourselves in composing encompassing systems, worldviews,
manifestoes, and programs. The
occasional exception notwithstanding, Lutherans avoid such schemes for putting
the entire cosmos down on a single page, because those schemes represent the
hubris that encourages us to rest secure in the glory of our own metaphysical
speculations. Lutherans do not have a
“worldview.” We leave the creation of
Summas, Institutes and Church Dogmatics to others. We have the cross, and the cross alone.
Let me suggest an
illustration of what I mean. In 1953,
the philosopher and essayist Isaiah Berlin wrote a piece called, “The Hedgehog
and the Fox,” in which he says the following:
. . . there exists a great chasm
between those, on one side,
who relate everything to a single
central vision. . .and those
who, on the other side, pursue many
ends, often unrelated and
even contradictory. . .the first kind
of artistic and intellectual
personality belongs to the hedgehogs,
the second to the foxes
. . . (from The Proper Study of
Mankind, pages 436-437).
The fox knows an assortment of little things; the hedgehog knows one big thing. Berlin was referring to the profound differences between two contemporary social systems – the expansive and unruly western democracies as opposed to the ideologically disciplined Soviet Union. But he might as well have been describing various eclectic faith communities within Christianity, and the Lutherans. In Berlin’s taxonomy, Lutherans would be classified as prototypical hedgehogs. We are narrowly focused on the cross. Whatever the issue, if we cannot relate it to Christ crucified (and its corollary, the doctrine of justification), then it is of no significant theological interest. Lutherans are the ultimate theological reductionists.
This accounts for
Luther’s indifference to the totality of the biblical text as authoritative in
crafting the Christian’s theological commitments. He was unimpressed with the specific words and themes inscribed
in the New Testament books of James, Hebrews and Revelation, and occasionally
pointed out the discrepancies and inadequacies of certain Old Testament
passages. Not all scriptural texts were
created equal for Luther (and other early Lutheran reformers). Whatever proclaimed the gospel – the “one
big thing,” the justification we have received as a gift through Christ’s death
and resurrection – was the thing to be grasped as of utmost value, wherever it
occurred in the Bible. Some scriptural
passages are “thicker” with gospel than others, and Luther taught that these
“thick” texts are the ones the Christian is to seek out and cling to for
consolation and hope of salvation.
All of this makes it difficult for latter-day Lutherans to treat the Bible in its entirety as a kind of divine encyclopedia, suitable for dipping into here and there, concocting textual solutions to all sorts of modern problems. The underlying difficulty, of course, is the endeavor to make the biblical text speak definitively to anything other than to the old, old story of how God acted in Christ to reconcile His creation to Himself. Whenever we sift scripture to find citations that will address this or that issue of ethics, or social justice, or organizational behavior, or institutional polity, we transform scripture from a divine proclamation to a normative program, from a declaration of God’s action in Christ to a compendia of advice on achieving moral rectitude. It is the way of the fox, not of the hedgehog.
What has any of this
to do with sexuality? Just this: when
Lutherans begin their search to locate biblical texts in order to ratify the
ancient structures of marriage and family, or to uphold the perennial
discouragement of same-sex genital activity (or to overturn either of these
injunctions), we had better be asking about the meaning and status of specific
passages. The Lutheran position on this
has been pretty clear for a long time:
while everything in scripture is canonical, not everything there is of
equal authority. And because all the
texts in scripture are not of equal authority, the effort to collate disparate
passages into a unified set of ethical principles, or to extract a macroscopic
paradigm – a biblical “theory of everything” – into which we can situate our
particular concerns for, say, marriage or homosexuality, is doomed to failure. Those principles and paradigms aren’t
there. There is no biblical answer to
our questions about sexuality. Nothing
remains for us but Christ crucified.
The good news is: that’s all we need.
But what about love?
However, it turns out
that love is not at all helpful when reflecting on moral decision-making in
actual ethically congested situations.
This is for two reasons. First,
love has no specific normative content.
We are always left asking ourselves, "Just what is the loving
action in this particular case?"
When I was a pastor and someone unknown to me would come to the church
office seeking financial assistance, I was routinely confronted with an
uncertainty as to what was the appropriate loving act. Give the person money? Send her to the food bank? Refer her to a social service agency? Sit her down and lecture her on the virtue
of self-reliance? There are a host of
possible answers, all of them driven by prudential or pragmatic factors, none
of them dictated by the commandment to love.
Even if I am acting out of love for the neighbor, that doesn't tell me
what I should actually do in a given instance.
The judgment about what to do will be informed by something else, and
that "something else" falls into the domain of ethics, not simply the
demands of love.
I've heard many
times, as I'm sure we all have, the claim that, "Love is not a feeling,
love is an action." But what is it
that allows us to determine that action A is an expression of love for the
neighbor, while action B is not an expression of love for the neighbor? Love itself will not help us make that
determination; some other criterion is required. The Church, it seems to me, has always been interested in making
those kinds of determinations, and it has had to borrow from prevailing moral
theories in the culture in order to do so.
The Church is a historical community, and it has frequently been
parasitic on the surrounding culture, absorbing and sanctifying "whatever
is true, noble and good" (Phil. 4:8) from its own historical context. Why should we think it might be different
when it comes to ethics?
Why is the lack of
normative content in love in itself a problem?
Simply because, in our culture, the vacuum created by the absence of
normative standards in moral decision-making is filled almost immediately by
the subject’s own idiosyncratic personal preferences. Where there are no external moral criteria to inform and guide
our decisions – and love by itself cannot supply that criteria – our internal
and eccentric predilections invariably take over. The result is a collapse of the human ability to distinguish
loving from unloving acts at all. The
ironic result, in other words, is that by relying on love as an ethical maxim,
we experience the loss of any meaningful loving behavior. But the fact is that we do employ
objective normative moral standards as Christians, quite apart from the impulse
to love, in order to discern genuinely loving actions; and it should neither
surprise nor embarrass us that those standards are habitually derived from our
cultural environment, and not from our theological premises.
A second concern is
that love is too broad a concept to inform our moral judgments. There are many things I do, prompted by
love, that have no particular ethical significance. I buy my wife flowers because I love her; I remind my teenage son
to drive carefully when he leaves the house because I love him; I keep my front
yard tidy because I love and respect my neighbors -- all of us have stories
like these to tell, I'm sure. But do
any of us think that there are specifically ethical issues that lie at
the heart of these behaviors? Love may
be an excellent motivation for all sorts of things, but there's no ethical
consideration involved in the act of buying flowers, or moral principle at
stake in the act of mowing the lawn.
Love may inspire our conduct even if it does not directly inform it;
indeed, love is nothing more than a motivation to action. Furthermore, love is only one possible
motivational causal factor among many for proper human behavior. But no one since the days of Joseph Fletcher
would say that if I am motivated by love, then whatever conduct I undertake is
thereby ethically appropriate. Actions
motivated by love may turn out to be pragmatically or prudentially suitable,
but they are not automatically ethical.
For that, some other, more narrowly focused, set of criteria is
necessary. That's where ethics comes
in. And that's why the injunction to
love is simply too broad to serve as a consistently reliable ethical principle.
In short, the
commandment to love may explain the Christian's motivation, but it will never
by itself provide the norms for ethical action. Without those norms, in our public deliberations about sexuality
it becomes equally plausible to claim that the loving action is, for instance,
to offer the blessing of Christ to same-sex unions, or to argue the
opposite. Love simply cannot bear the
ethical weight that some would impose on it.
Then there is natural
law. Natural law theory has had a long
and shining history; both Roman Catholic and Reformed theology are partial to
this approach in theological ethics.
Lutherans, on the other hand, have generally been skeptical of natural
law, and with good reason. On
inspection, natural law turns out to be yet another version of the theology of
glory. Here’s why.
The fundamental
position of natural law is this: human beings,
by observing and reflecting on natural phenomena and processes, can acquire all
necessary knowledge of God's nature and God's purposes, including God's
intentions for how human lives and human societies should be ordered. So natural law includes three general
claims:
First, a theological
claim, portraying God as a rational designer.
Because he is a rational designer, God's ways are intelligible to human
reason. God is a promulgator of laws,
principles and standards, which are all embedded in the operations of the
natural world. We can know the Creator,
and what he expects of us, by observing his creation.
Second, an
anthropological claim, in which human beings are defined as rational
creatures. Our link to God is via our
reason. We have a robust and incisive
rational power, the power to elicit from the natural world the basic truths
about reality. Probably the majority of
natural law theorists have assumed that this faculty of reason is the essential
ingredient in the Imago Dei. We can be co-creators
with God of our social and technological world, because we share with God the
potential for intelligent creation.
Third, an ethical
claim, that the human violation of these naturally-occurring dynamics and
procedures is identical with the transgression of God's laws and standards, and
are therefore, on that basis, wrong. To
violate nature is to violate God. Among
the many principles by which the natural world functions are fundamental moral
principles. Therefore, since God
created an orderly universe, and since human beings come rationally equipped to
discern that order, any snubbing of that order leads to ethical disorder.
There are two
problems here, as I see it. The first
is that, if God has created an orderly cosmos, including the principles by
which human beings ought to live, then who needs the cross? Natural law presents the following
plan: God made a system for human
beings to live in, human beings can figure out that system, and human
performance within that system is regulated by a series of rewards and
punishments. But Christ crucified only
makes sense if the system itself is dysfunctional, if the natural world does
not in fact present to us the opportunities and means for aligning ourselves
with God. It is only if the world is so
wracked by evil, and human beings so enslaved to sin and death, ensuring that
we cannot secure our salvation by working within the system, that the death and
resurrection of Christ can be genuinely understood. If creation operates the way natural law theorists say it does,
then the cross is superfluous.
The second problem is
natural law theory asserts that God can be authentically known through our
observation of nature. But this means
nature would have to reflect reliably the character of God. But it doesn't. That character of God is revealed to us historically, through the
life, death and resurrection of Christ.
This is the force of Luther's notion of the "hidden God." All we can genuinely know of God's being is
what has been revealed to us, not through nature, but through history,
particularly the historical event of Christ.
The God of the natural world, the Creator-God, is hidden from us. But the God who acts in human life and human
history is disclosed through the miracle of Christ. It is this ahistorical character of natural law that I find
troubling.
These two objections,
taken together, summarize what I meant by associating natural law with a
theology of glory (the information-rich glories of nature), at the expense of a
theology of the cross.
I hope that no one is
tempted to respond to this by saying something like, "When it comes to
natural law ethics and a Christological focus, it's not either/or, it's
both/and." I don't see how that is
possible. You'd have to show me how
starting theological reflection with nature (according to natural law) creates
the necessity for Christ crucified. I
don't see how it can be done. But maybe
I've just got a blind spot here.
After all this, what else is left to say? If neither a textual ethics, nor a morality grounded in love, nor natural law theory, can supply a basis for our conversation about sexuality in the ELCA, what other resources do we have available to us? There is not much, I’m afraid. But discuss sexuality we will, and must. So we have become theological scavengers, taking up textual ethics from American evangelicals, or a “love ethic” from the heirs of nineteenth century liberal Protestantism, or natural law as mediated by the Roman Catholic tradition. We take refuge in these systematic approaches, none of which is congenial to Lutheranism, and snipe away at one another. It would be better to simply admit the truth: Lutherans can’t do ethics from within our own powerful but extremely narrow theological matrix, and insofar as sexuality is fundamentally an ethical matter, we can’t talk very well about sexuality either. I’m convinced this is why so much of what passes for dialogue on sexuality in the ELCA embodies specious appeals and dubious arguments.
There is, finally, yet another difficulty. Despite a history spanning nearly a
half-millennium, Lutherans have not successfully developed a tradition of
discourse. Consider the early church,
first with its heavy traffic of epistles engaging matters large and small,
later with councils hammering out doctrine from the midst of public
quarrels. Consider the medieval church
in the centuries leading up to the Reformation, with its incessant chatter of
formal disputations and informal mystical effusions. Consider the Reformed tradition, with its presbyterial structure
making hallow the practice of communal deliberation. Consider American evangelicalism, with its zeal for the platform
and the microphone. There has been a
lot of talk in Christian history, much of it shaped by specific practices of
rhetoric and dialectic cherished by their Christian practitioners.
Now consider the
Lutherans. We have had sixteenth
century bellicosity, seventeenth century orthodoxy, eighteenth century pietism,
nineteenth century ethnic isolation, and twentieth century organizational
self-absorption. But not much effort
devoted to fostering the practice of internal conversation. We simply do not have a heritage of
intentional interpersonal reflection as a basis for making corporate decisions
that allows us to perform well when we demand such decisions of ourselves. We might be better served if we were
Quakers, or Unitarians. But we are
Lutherans. We inherit our consensuses,
we do not make them. The American
experience for Lutherans has encouraged us to view Aristotelian and Renaissance
forms of rhetoric and logic as irrelevant to the deposit of confessional
theology. Any attempt to find an
effective mode of discourse for American Lutherans has rarely meant little more
than an effort to learn English as a second language.
It would seem, then,
that our greatest strength as Lutherans – our determined attention to the “one
big thing,” the cross of Jesus Christ, which yields the central truth of the
Christian message, that we are justified by grace through faith – ill-equips us
to engage successfully the topic of sexuality.
We simply do not have the resources within ourselves to investigate the
subject. Sexuality is an adiaphoron for
Lutherans, and more than an adiaphoron; it is a distraction. If we try to treat sexuality as a matter of
theological or ethical solemnity, we will fail. Perhaps if we regard sexuality, including the issues of blessing
same-sex unions or the ordination of gays and lesbians in active and committed
relationships, as an item of organizational polity rather than as the subject
of intense theological or ethical analysis, we will be more likely to reach an
acceptable resolution to our current neuralgic discussions. But it would be tragic if the ELCA, or the
Lutheran community as a whole, is disabled or even dismembered by an
adiaphoron. If we remember what we do
best, we may not suffer the worst.
Thomas
D. Pearson