Draft Social Statement on Human Sexuality - - Part IV

Reading DSSHS Critically

Maybe it is, in fact, unfair to read DSSHS closely and critically. After all, it is the work of 14 committee members from different walks of life, having different educational backgrounds, different theological convictions, and different views on the propriety of same-sex relationships. However, since the document purports to be important enough that the entire ELCA study it, I shall take it with the seriousness it invites.

DSSHS starts promisingly enough, quoting Jesus’ summary of the law: 1) Love God above all things, and 2) love the other person as oneself (Matt. 22:36-40). But then things disintegrate rather quickly. As every good Lutheran knows, no one can do that, i.e., love God above all things and love the neighbor as oneself. While this fundamental material content of the law is binding on all human beings, nobody can accomplish it. Human beings have a fundamental deficiency before the law.

Unfortunately, DSSHS evades our full realization of this fundamental human deficiency. It asks, “What does it mean for us as sexual creatures to love our neighbors as ourselves and thus fulfill God’s law of love in this time and society?” (13-15) The game is lost from the outset because the question is the wrong one. A person simply cannot “fulfill God’s law of love.” The ‘thus’ in the question suggests that one could fulfill this law of love if one “as a sexual creature” did love the neighbor as oneself. But who can do this? To suggest it is possible is already to confuse law and gospel.

This confusion of law and gospel is further exacerbated when, a few lines later, the ELCA is identified as “a community of moral deliberation.” The use of this definition from a 1991 ELCA social statement is unfortunate because it confuses what the church is. Clearly, we should not expect members of the ELCA to have special ethical/moral insight or any special tools for ethical/moral reflection. The church is, as Luther says, those who hear the voice of their shepherd (Schmalkald Articles). But those hearing this voice are concerned not primarily with the development of acumen in ethical and moral reflection, but rather with salvation. They want to hear the voice and follow the shepherd, not learn how to mount ethical arguments. The church is a community gathered about a salvific concern (gospel), not an ethical one (law).

Further confusion ensues when DSSHS states that it wants to “speak in ways that can address both religious and secular discussions” (35-6). On the basis of this, one would expect DSSHS to identify something universal in Christian and secular experience. Lutheran ethics has traditionally been able to accomplish this with its two kingdoms approach: God deals with us with two hands. With the gospel of His right hand, human beings live in the realm of grace and faith. However, with His left hand, humans dwell in the kingdom of law and reason. The genius of Lutheran ethics has always been that because the foundation of ethical reasoning is not grounded in the particularity of Christian soteriology, ethical reflection from a Lutheran perspective retains a universal character.

However, any hope that DSSHS shall proceed in this time-honored fashion is immediately crushed by this: “[This document] contains important introductory material designed to explain how Lutherans approach ethics in the light of God’s incarnation and our hope in God who justifies us in Christ” (45-7). The foundation for a Lutheran contribution to a secular ethical discussion has now been lost. How might one find something in these two discussions that is common when the putative foundation for these discussions is the reality of incarnation and justification only granted by one of the conversation partners? This incoherency is never addressed in DSSHS.

Another theological problem occurs when DSSHS makes this startling claim: “As Lutherans we understand ourselves . . . as simultaneously righteous (saved by God’s grace alone) and sinful (convicted by the law)” (165-66). While one might argue on the basis of the “happy exchange” between Christ and the sinner, that ‘righteousness’ just is ‘being saved by God’s grace’, any putative identity between being sinful and being convicted by the law is wrongheaded. Being sinful and being convicted by the law are logically independent notions. One is clearly sinful from birth even if one has never been convicted by the law. To confuse the two is to mistake the reality of not conforming to the law with the experience of not so conforming.

DSSHS’s attempt to use Christian freedom somehow to “preserve and guide all churchly teaching” (164), is also problematic. How is it precisely that “freedom from the crushing burden of our unworthiness before the law” engenders “responsibility and humility in service to the neighbor (200)? While the document says that we are to serve others because of God’s “promises, compassion and mercy” (213), it does not show - - and indeed it cannot show - - how God’s promises, compassion and mercy fill in the contour of what we ought to do. The problem is logical: An ought cannot be derived from an is. We cannot derive that we ought to be compassionate because God is compassionate, though we can conclude that we are in fact compassionate because God is compassionate. DSSHS purports, however, to be an ethical document. Accordingly, it deals with what we ought to do. DSSHS clearly is concerned with what is sexually licit and what illicit.

Throughout DSSHS one runs across ambiguous statements, of which the following is an example: “At heart, human beings are captive to sin - - needy, fearful, often misguided, and sometimes broken” (225-26). Here DSSHS seemingly suggests that sin just is being needy, fearful, misguided and broken? But this is surely problematic; for being needy, fearful, misguided and broken is not, strictly speaking, sin. For Lutherans, sin is primarily enmity with God. Sin is a relational property, not a non-relational one. The logic of ‘sin’ is this: ‘A instances the property S of sin if and only if A has dispositions, attitudes and actions not intended by God for A’. But DSSHS seems to suggest the following: ‘A instances S if A has some cluster of non-relational properties P.’ Apparently, properties P are also what is psychologically unhealthy for A. But this is entirely wrongheaded, for what is psychologically healthy or unhealthy for a person is logically independent of that person’s sin.

DSSHS makes some statements that cannot truly be intended by the drafters. Surely, the committee did not mean to say that “Lutheran sexual ethics cannot suggest that sexual longing or sexual expression is sinful intrinsically” (275-76). But why can it not do this? Are we not willing any longer to say that there are classes of sexual longings or expressions that are not intended by God for human beings to have and do? Is not a sexual longing or expression toward a child intrinsically sinful? Is it not also the case with a murderous heart? The confusion here is deep: Just because something may be “natural” for A to experience does not mean that God intends that what is “natural” for A to obtain. We must distinguish God’s natural law that A instance a set of dispositions B from the natural disposition A has not instance B. The sad fact is that humans now are not as they ought to be. Clearly, if, as Luther says, “human beings sin against God whether they eat or sleep,” then there is a large class of sexual longings and expressions with are intrinsically sinful.

As has previously been discussed, DSSHS states that “a Lutheran sexual ethic looks to the death and resurrection of Christ as the source for the values that guide it (325-26).” But the question is how does the death and resurrection of Christ guide sexual value formation? What is the specific connection?

Here, lamentably, there simply is deep ambiguity. One can say such things as that God was so merciful that He, in Christ, went to His death on the Cross. But precisely what does this imply for sexual human beings? Are we to conclude that since Christ did not condemn (or judge) us, we ought not condemn (or judge) our brother or sister? While this is right, it tells only half the story. In reality, we are both condemned by God for our sin, and forgiven in Christ for that same sin. What Lutheran ethics cannot do is leave out the law. It is because we are condemned and lost before God that God became incarnate and justified us. Lutheran sexual ethics must not forget the reality of God’s primordial intentionality for his creation, and the deficiency of His creation in actualizing that intentionality. Living out our freedom on account of Christ does not entail that we can change the identity conditions for “being lost.”

Finally, for a church defining itself as “a community of moral discernment,” the section entitled “Scripture and Moral Discernment” must come as a disappointment, for in this section we learn very little about how Scripture is to be used to discern what God would have us do sexually. The focal biblical quote in the section is clearly this: “Scripture teaches that God’s will for humankind and creation can be comprehended only through the foolishness of the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ (405-07).” While this is, of course, true of God’s merciful will, Lutheran ethics simply cannot deny that God retains an original will for humans that “they be perfect as the Lord, thy God is perfect.”

The trouble here is very deep. It is as if the drafters of DSSHS have forgotten the ancient Marcionite heresy of denying the validity of the Old Testament and its teachings in favor of a single-minded concentration on the merciful salvific action of the saving God. For Marcion, Christ has come to rescue people from a situation created by a creator God who has made rather a mess of things. Accordingly, the old laws of the Old Testament have passed away and a new era has dawned. By steadfastly refusing to go to the OT and its law for determining the intentionality of God for human sexual being, DSSHS clearly flirts with the heresy of Marcionism.

As I have already said, the fundamental problem of DSSHS is that it forgets that God deals with His creation with two hands: on the left hand is law and reason, and on the right hand is gospel and faith. Lutheran theology teaches that it is one God who manifests Himself to us in these two ways. DSSHS consistently errs on the side of identifying God with only his right hand. But God is not one-handed; He is, in fact, ambidextrous. To work out a Lutheran social ethics on sexuality demands that both hands of God are equally considered. There is, on the one hand, the divinely-intentioned order that must be implemented; there is, on the other hand, the divinely-intentioned mercy that is freely given when the intentioned and just order is not implemented. An ethics without God’s left hand is cannot be a Lutheran sexual ethics. Accordingly, DSSHS, though written by Lutherans, is not a Lutheran document.