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.

The Draft Social Statement on Human Sexuality - - Part III

DSSHS and Antinomianism

Classically, ‘antinomianism’ applies to any theological position that downgrades the authority or integrity of the law. If one were to say, like Luther’s contemporary Johann Agricola, that the law needs not to be proclaimed among Christians, then one clearly is flirting with antinomianism. The question is this: Is DSSHS antinomian?

To answer this question clearly, one must first get an operating definition of law. I like the following: x is a law if and only if x is promulgated by an authority, is binding upon a class, and is in principle enforceable. Lutheran thinking has classically started with the promulgation or giving of God’s law to creation. God is an authority that has a clear intent with respect to His creation, and this intent is accordingly binding upon it. Furthermore, this law is enforceable by God: violators - - all of us - - are worthy of ultimate punishment. For Luther and the classical Lutheran tradition, the ‘oughtness’ of things is grounded upon a transcendent ought-intentionality. Oughtness is built into the very nature of things because God loads ought into creation. Not only does is creation bound by the ought, God has a capacity to enforce this oughtness He loads into creation.

The classical Lutheran story does not derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’. The classical tradition realizes that the ‘ought’ of law can only be grounded in the transcendent ‘ought-intentionality’ of God. Sin, of course, interferes, and what ought to be is not. The Fall is profoundly understood as the nonconformity of ‘is’ to ‘ought’. All of creation is wayward. The natural law upon creation given by God is not followed. Human beings have turned away from God and what ought to be. While the being of Creation was designed to be in conformity with the divine ought, it is not now in conformity. All have fallen short of the glory of God.

The whole idea of redemption in classical Christian theology is that God arrives in His incarnation to justify, e.g., to make right, the nonconformity of creation’s ‘is’ to the divine ‘ought’. Justification, on the basis of Christ, occurs when God judges His wayward creation that is not what it ought to be to be, nonetheless, acceptable to Him, to the One who can only judge it as unacceptable. For Lutherans, there is a “happy exchange” between Christ and the sinner. Christ’s gifts of conformity to the ought are given to human beings, and human deficiency in the face of the ought is given to Christ. The result is that human beings live and Christ dies in accordance with God’s justice that can only properly judge nonconformity with the ought as worthy of death.

The fundamental problem with DSSHS is that a statement of what ought to be cannot be derived from a description of what is. To try to derive a prescription of how to behave sexually from a description of what God has done for us is a category mistake.

The profound problem with DSSHS turns out to be the ancient problem of “what has God said?” The notion of an external law claiming that human beings ought to behave in such and such a way seems fundamentally out of touch with our times. While human beings have never liked oughts, it seems that our time has a special disdain for them. In vast portions of western popular culture, normative ethics simply does not play. People can make no sense out of “absolute” claims that humans ought to be different than they are. The very notion of an objective reality that human beings must somehow conform to is today anathema. It is, of course, the triumph of Nietzsche. The medieval transcendentals of truth, goodness, and beauty have been unmasked and seen to be mere projections of the human will-to-power.

Lutheran theology in the last 125 years has strongly been influenced by Nietzsche’s critique. Accordingly, there is little hope that an ELCA committee on sexuality could move beyond the dominance of the subject and return to the object, to a way of thinking that allows again for the possibility of a real ought. To return to the ought, to an honest appraisal of how God intends things to be, means that human action will likely be curbed in particular ways. If man and woman ought to remain celibate outside of marriage, then that is what they ought to do, no matter how difficult that may be. That they won’t so remain is addressed by incarnation and justification. This is how it works; this is how it has always worked. But, as evidenced by DSSHS, this is no longer how it works.

The Draft Social Statement on Human Sexuality: Part II

DSSHS and the Divine “As If”

As others have pointed out, the term ‘Trinity’ occurs but once in the document, and there the three distinctive persons are not named. This is perhaps indicative of a deeper presupposition in the document: In discussing sin and law the document proceeds “as if” God were to exist apart from human awareness, perception, conception and language, and “as if” God had a definite set of attitudes towards the world. I say this “as if” pointedly because there is ample evidence in the document to suggest committee members actually reject the idea that that God has a primal intentionality towards His creation. Instead of viewing God as an individual divine being having a particular intention towards His creation (e.g., it is His Will that human beings do x under conditions y), God is understood as somehow having a general nature that human beings must “fill in.” The result of this “filling in” is that God’s “intentionality” towards x is asserted on the basis of the previous commitment of the drafters towards x.

In DSSHS, the nature of God and his relationship to His creation is understood on the basis of His graceful and merciful incarnational sojourn and justificatory activity. Given this general nature of the divine, what specific intentions would and could this God have for His people? Surely He would bring life out of death, make new the old, and do the unexpected (like rising from the dead). Since He dwells with us in our humanness in the incarnation, he accordingly dwells with us in our weakness and our weak wills. He is alongside of us in all of our sexual choices and foibles, never abandoning us. God loves us even in our weakness, so we are to love others in their weakness. God’s love for us clearly trumps his Judgment upon us. But outside of this, what more can be said about God?

Here it becomes more difficult. While Love and mercy are very good things, and while God’s gift of them to us maybe does suggest that we should be honest, sincere, and not jealous and envious in our relationships, love and mercy are not capable of providing a foundation for institutions such as marriage - - at least a foundation that can speak of marriage qua marriage. If love and mercy constitute the divine intention towards us, then it would seem that there is no greater reason to prefer married love to lesbian love. If God came and manifested love and mercy, should we not manifest love and mercy? And if we do, what reasons are there to do that within the context of heterosexual married love over homosexual, unmarried, committed love? It seems that it is a stretch to say that heterosexual love is more facilely derivable from the incarnation and justification than homosexual love.

The problem is that DSSHS does not avail itself of traditional Lutheran resources of natural law and orders of creation. By looking only at the incarnation for clues to God’s intention, readers of DSSHS seem to ignore what the Old Testament (and much of the New Testament) say about God’s rather distinctive intentionality for human life - - including human sexual life. It is obvious that DSSHS does not suppose that God has a general revelation for all human beings apart from the Christ event, and that the Bible has much to say about the specifics of God’s primal intentionality towards His creation. In fact, the fundamental question is not even asked in the document: Is homoerotic behavior in itself sinful? Is such behavior consistent with the Will of God, or does it run counter to His will? While it would seem to many Christians that one of these two alternatives must obtain, DSSHS seems to presuppose a third option: It is neither consistent with or inconsistent with that Will, and perhaps, to think it is, is itself profoundly wrongheaded. But to assume this is to assume that God is not the kind of being that has a definite will on these matters. Accordingly, the intentionality of God, while it might be an interesting theological construct, is not itself a real event or state.

The ELCA Draft Social Statement on Human Sexuality: Part I

Over the next few days I shall publish here my response to the ELCA Sexuality Statement. Below is Part I:

Since the time of David Hume (1711-76), philosophers have been struggling with the question of whether “ought” can be inferred from “is.” Famously, Hume held that it “seems altogether inconceivable how this new relation [ought] can be a deduction of others [is] which are entirely different from it.[i] Accordingly, propositions of how the world is simply cannot entail statements of how it ought to be.

Against this, naturalists of all stripes, including Hume’s contemporary Jeremy Bentham (1748 -1832) hold that how things are do entail how they ought to be. Famously, Bentham’s Principle of Utility “approves or disapproves of every action whatsoever, according to the tendency which it appears to have to augment or diminish the happiness of the party whose interest is in question.” [ii] Reflecting on the nature of this approval, classical utilitarianism argues that one ought to do that act which augments the happiness of those whose interest is in question. Evolutionary ethical theory thus permits a move from ‘is’ to ‘ought’. If human beings are instilled by the evolutionary process with a moral sense, then the fact of this sense does entail what they ought to do.

In 1903, G.E. Moore (1873-1958) launched a classic argument against any kind of ethical naturalism. In his “open question argument” he points out that a statement like Bentham’s ‘pleasure is good’ cannot mean that pleasure is identical to good, for if that were so, then ‘pleasure is good’ would entail ‘pleasure is pleasure’. [iii] But clearly it remains an “open question” whether or not ‘pleasure is good’, but not that 'pleasure is pleasure'. Thus, anyone asserting that pleasure is good must be “saying something more” about pleasure than that it is pleasure, and this “more” must presupposes a non-natural property of goodness. To say ‘x is good’ or ‘S ought to do y’ is to say something that is in principle irreducible to mere descriptions of natural and social facts. Accordingly, ‘ought’ is of another order than ‘is’.

While philosophers since Moore’s time have been divided over the validity of the open question argument, there is no mistaking that a very powerful tradition of twentieth century philosophical argument followed Hume in denying that ‘ought’ can be derived from ‘is’. After all, even if beneficent values were somehow evolutionarily loaded into human nature, it would still not entail that one ought to act in accordance with those values. For a number of reasons, I am convinced that Hume is essentially right, and that ‘ought’ cannot be derived from ‘is’.

So why do I raise this old controversy in this discussion of the ELCA Draft Social Statement on Human Sexuality (DSSHS)? It is my contention that unknown to the committee members of the ELCA Task Force on Human Sexuality, their work actually presupposes the minority position in this philosophical debate: DSSHS assumes that descriptive statements about God’s incarnation in Christ and His justification of sinful human beings can entail a prescriptive statement about how one ought to behave sexually. By attempting to ground sexual ethics in the Second Article, DSSHS not only is unorthodox, but incoherent. It not only does not hold together rhetorically, it cannot do so logically. By analyzing what God has done for us in Christ, we cannot logically derive how we ought to act as Christians. As paradoxical as this might sound, to claim that we can do so is to confuse Law and Gospel. While from a description of what God has done for us in Christ, we can infer something of what we do in fact do as Christians, we cannot infer what we ought to do as Christians. To claim otherwise is to derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’; it is to ground the Law in the Gospel; it is to strike out in a way that Lutherans simply cannot do.

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[i] David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature.

[ii] Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, Chapter 1.

[iii] G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica.

Nomological Confusions

Lutheran theology classically distinguishes the first and second use of the law. The first use is civil. Here the law works to keep human beings from descending into lawless chaos. The law in its first use functions to order society and to establish those requisite structures that make possible human life together. While this law is a curb, the second use of the law functions as a mirror so that we can see our waywardness and be driven by this realization to the foot of the cross. This theological use of the law was clearly thematized during the Reformation.

Lately there has been confusion in some otherwise solid Lutheran quarters about how the first and second use of the law connect to one another. Some have argued that human reason alone can establish the content established by the first use of the law. They have claimed that reason can establish that both homosexuality and mendacity are wrong. This reading claims, in nfact, that some ethical theory can provide solid grounds as to what is good and bad, right and wrong. For instance, instead of looking at divine proscription, they would argue that homosexuality is wrong on either an act or rule utilitarian perspective. The argument goes this way:

1) One ought to do those actions which conduce to the greatest happiness.
2) Homosexual actions cause physical and mental pain for the participants and their families.
3) Thus, one ought not to do homosexual actions.

The thing to notice about this argument is its consequentialism. It is, of course, the nature of a consequentialist argument to disagree about what consequences will likely follow from an act. To say that a homosexual act is wrong because it has a greater likelihood of causing medical problems in the participants, that it comcomittantly places a greater strain on medical resources, and that those so inclined to homosexual action would suffer more pain from engaging in the action than not engaging is to take part in a thoroughgoingly hermeneutical task. It is a question of the horizon of one's interpretation. Two intelligent people, equally well-trained in philosophy could disagree as to the extent that homosexual actions cause physical and mental pain. In such a case, as is well known, one's motivation for finding things to be a certain way can determine the way that one finds thing. Interpretations, after all, are entirely human matters. An interpretation is, in fact, in many ways like an artefact: One's motive partially manufactures it. An interpretation does not depend upon that which lies outside the self, rather it is autonomously produced by the self.

Now the rub comes. If an interpretation is a human artefact, and interpretations can be changed by the interpretants, then the material content of the first use of the law is determined by human reason. But how can that which is identified (and constructed) by human reason ever drive someone to the foot of the cross? Surely, to be driven to the foot of the cross presupposes that one is not who one ultimately should be, and that someone in power is upset by this. It seems to me that only if one deeply knows that he is not whom he should be could he ever be driven to the foot of the cross. Thus arises repentance and contrition, and the perceived need for the saving grace of the gospel.

Making the material content of the first use depend upon human autonomy, and the material content of the second upon divine heteronomy, clearly destroys the unity of the law and leads to nomological confusions. Within the context of such confusion, the old temptation of antinomianism flourishes alive and well.

A Basic Over-and-Againstness

Much has been written about the law as it was conceived by Luther and the Reformers. Of late, there has been a proclivity within Luther circles to get it wrong. In my opinion, the problem is that we Lutherans have been so enamored with anthropology since the Enlightenment, that we cannot any longer even conceive what terms like 'law' meant in their original Reformation context. We sons and daughters of Luther (viewed through the lens of Kant) quite naturally put a pro nobis behind all of the basic theological loci. But while grace is finally pro nobis, ought one say the same thing about law?

Lately Lutheran theologians have pushed the freedom of the justified from the law to such a point that Christ becomes the "end" of the law in an ontological as well as phenomenological sense. Of course, Christ frees us from the law in that we sinful and justified ones no longer need to build a bridge to the divine upon the basis of human works. The law has no applicability in the order of redemption. We are free indeed.

Unfortunately, this preoccupation on how the law affects us has undermined any thought of what the law is in itself. Traditionally, the law had everything to do with God as a real being apart from human being. The theological tradition asserts that God has a primal intentionality towards His creation, an intentionality that, since the advent of sin, can only confront human being as an ought. The law, ontologically considered, is the expression of divine intention, an intention that appears to man and woman as demand.

In Christ, of course, human beings are set free of the law; they are liberated from living under the onus of demand. This does not mean, or it ought not mean, that there is no longer any primal intentionality. To say that God is the end of the law in an ontological sense, would be to say that God either has a changed intention, has no longer intentionality, or no longer exists. In much of the contemporary discussion, it seems that we cannot talk meaningfully any longer about God apart from the horizon of man and woman.

But look what happens if God and divine law is reduced to phenomena for human being. Instead of human beings revolving about God - - this due to the basic artificer/artifact relationship - - God revolves about human beings; God only "shows up" on the horizon of man and woman. This "Copernican revolution" in theology has been so pervasive these past two centuries, that we no longer remember what it might have been like to have lived at the time of the Reformation. We Lutherans, so in love with Lutheran theology, can't quite imagine what a robust Lutheran theology would even look like.

Dennis Bielfeldt