Lutherans Embrace a Formless World

The blog at First Things has a great critique by Robert Benne on the latest report from the ELCA’s “Task Force on Sexuality.” Here’s an excerpt in the context of Benne’s broader argument for natural law:

“This formlessness appears immediately in the statement’s theological and ethical foundations. The law, though affirmed, remains a ghostly, abstract, and empty category. No commandments are mentioned. No covenantal structures—such as God’s gift of marriage to Adam and Eve—are affirmed. Indeed, there is no explication of male and female together being created in the image of God. Rather, the statement tries to derive its sexual ethic from the incarnation of Jesus and the justification his work has wrought. One of most astounding statements in the document asserts that ‘a Lutheran sexual ethic looks to the death and resurrection of Christ as the source for the values that guide it’ (emphasis mine).”

Emergent Liberalism

I’ve been following with some amusement the whole Emergent movement. I went through my postmodern phase in undergrad (it lasted a few months — lots of Foucault — so sad), then I grew-up and moved on to Barth and de Lubac. Anyway, I found this article from The Olive Press, the newspaper of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary (an SBC school in good ole North Carolina!), interesting. Mark Driscoll (famed pastor of Mars Hill Church in Seattle and Emergent pioneer) has been attacking, as in this speech at SEBTS, the revisionism becoming prevalent in Emergent circles. He pinpoints, in particular, Brian McClaren and Doug Pagitt. When questioned on homosexual marriage, Driscoll reports McClaren to have told him, “You know what? The thing that breaks my heart is that there is no way I can answer it without hurting someone on either side.” And in regard to Doug Pagitt, “I asked very specifically, ‘Is homosexual activity incompatible with Christian faith?’ His answer was ‘No. Being gay and Christian is not a contradiction in any way.’” Driscoll also cites obfuscation on the Atonement and McClaren’s support of the Jesus Seminar. So, here we go again. Pretentious hipsters with pseudo-theological skill re-imagine the Christian faith to reach today’s generation — and what happens? They become just like today’s generation. I was a little more optimistic in the early phases of the Emergent movement, but I shouldn’t be surprised. By “dialogue with secular, postmodern culture,” the emergents simply filtered Christian doctrine through secular, postmodern categories of thought, a la the constricting of Christian doctrine by the Enlightenment philosophers to their norms of rational criteria. It took philosophy a few hundred years until Nietzsche (and Kierkegaard) showed the whole thing to be a crock. Hopefully it won’t take the evangelical church that long to realize the same thing with the emergents.