How Lutherans Justify Sex

How Lutherans Justify Sex

An ELCA commission looked immorality in the eye and called it sin. So why did they blink when they came to homosexuality?

The release this fall of a draft statement on human sexuality by a task force of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) resulted in several days of distorted news reporting. Media coverage focused on the statement’s suggestion that the ELCA affirm lifelong, committed, faithful, same-sex relationships. And it typically reported only half of a statement about masturbation, omitting the cautionary phrase “unless it becomes compulsive or hinders development of life-fulfilling relationships.”

But the news media missed the real news: that in 1993 a mainline Protestant denomination was:

• releasing a sex statement that used the word sin freely to talk about that which the statement’s authors saw falling short of God’s ideal for his human creatures: adultery, for example, and promiscuity, pornography, sexual abuse, and prostitution;

• basing a sex statement largely on Scripture and theology, rather than social science and pop philosophy;

• thinking about sex as much in terms of its relationship to the community as to the individual, and as much in terms of right and wrong as in terms of compassion and caring.

The ELCA task force even called on unmarried couples to abstain from sex and not to live together until they could tie the knot. We commend the task force for not concocting some abstract principle such as “justice-love,” as a commission of the Presbyterian Church (USA) did several years ago, overhauling Christian sexual ethics. The Lutherans listened instead to Scripture and theology.

Gospel myopia

When the ELCA task force listened to Scripture and theology, however, it listened in a very Lutheran way. Every theological tradition has its strength; and every strength can also be a weakness.

Lutherans traditionally read Scripture Christologically and evangelically; that is, they emphasize whatever is of Christ and of the good news of God’s grace. We find strength in that approach. In the context of Lutheran theology, it is hard to miss the gospel and difficult to become distracted from the one big message of Scripture by its other messages.

That strength, however, can make it more difficult to find the truth embedded in Scripture’s account of how God ordered creation and made his covenant with Israel. (This is the kind of truth that Calvinists and Catholic natural-law theologians naturally emphasize.) Thus, Old Testament prohibitions against homosexuality do not automatically carry as large a weight for the Lutheran task force, and whatever smacks of law is suspect. In this statement, even the normative creation order of one man—one woman—one flesh—one lifetime seems to be relativized by Jesus’ pattern of welcoming sinners.

At one point, the task force says that ethical standards ought to be dispensed with when they seem to inhibit the spread of the gospel. Surely, the statement here confuses ethics with mores.

The Lutheran perspective need not lead in this direction. In its statement on marriage, the task force notes: “Jesus placed the faithful, mutually loving permanent ‘one flesh’ union of male and female at the core of the church’s teaching regarding marriage.” They could have carried over Jesus’ explicit affirmation of the two-sex nature of creation to their section on homosexuality. But in that section, the seamless robe of biblical ethics is ripped, and the task force stitches in a vague patch of “neighbor love” to guide us. They call for faithfulness, mutuality, and permanence in same-sex relationships, but they fail to see the implicit critique of any attempt to construct a pattern for same-sex marriages in Jesus’ words that “he who made them from the beginning made them male and female.”

Lutheran Christians will be discussing this statement over the coming months. Their feedback is due to the task force by June 30, 1994; after that, another draft will be prepared, to be voted on in August 1995. The ELCA has, for the most part, built a good foundation. May they have the wisdom to apply the whole counsel of God to the church’s understanding of sexuality.

By David Neff.

The Cybergeneration

Consider this scenario for Christmas morning: Instead of gathering your family around the Christmas tree, you all don helmets and special gloves and enjoy whatever holiday pleasure your little heart desires. None of you would have to leave your bed. Far fetched? Not really, thanks to a high-tech concept called “virtual reality,” or VR. The race is on to perfect this new technology.

VR merges your television, telephone, VCR, CD, and computer. Instead of being a passive user of these tools, in VR you become an active participant. VR creates an electronic environment—“cyberspace”—so real that you feel as if you’re inside it. In the most common form, a 3-D helmet and a “dataglove” wired to a computer enable you to see, hear, and touch objects in the simulated world.

What makes VR potent—and potentially dangerous—is the way it interfaces with the brain. Experts say the mind can only read about 100 bits—or characters—per second of text. But visually, we can absorb the equivalent of a billion bits of information per second. Like any technology, VR inherently is neither good nor bad. In the right hands, it promises beneficial applications in science, medicine, industry, and in potentially helping the church spread the Good News in dramatically new and imaginative ways.

A big breakthrough commercially will be interactive video games. If you are used to the rather crude, cartoonish images on your home video games, the quantum leap in realism may shock you. Within a few years, VR cyberspace should reach photographic quality.

For many people, especially teenagers, VR can be more enticing than the real world. It offers power, control, thrills, anonymity, and a second chance if you fail the first time. Already we are recognizing the harmful effects of just watching violence on television. What will be the social behavior effects of children spending hours each week realistically decapitating their foes in VR games that become an extension of their own hands, feet, and minds?

VR defenders say such activity provides a healthy outlet for frustration and aggression, and that kids have no difficulty distinguishing between fantasy and reality. Try telling that to the parent of the teen who was killed trying a stunt he saw in the film The Program. Many kids, especially those with tragic lives, already struggle with what reality is. The greatest risk will be for children who, due to divorce, abuse, or parental neglect, desperately long to escape reality.

Naturally, the pornographers eye this technology with dollar signs in their eyes. It offers yet another way to exploit an addiction, something they have already done with computer software.

VR has already spawned discussion about the meaning of reality as we have more “virtual” experiences. If there is virtual reality, is there also virtual truth, virtual spirituality, virtual love, or virtual virtue? What is the dividing line between virtual and actual? Will temptation yielded to in cyberspace become impossible to resist in reality?

Because VR is more than a new gadget on someone’s Christmas list, Christians cannot ignore the changing technology. For starters, we should:

• Be informed. Follow new developments in your newspaper or newsmagazine about VR.

• Know what your kids are doing with their video games and computers.

• Take prudent advantage of the positive potential of VR technology, including new ways to explore the world, to study science and other fields, and eventually to study the Bible or explore ministry opportunities. Imagine a VR treatment of first-century Jerusalem or one of Paul’s missionary journeys.

• Consider a career in VR if you are a student or looking for a career change. Our society badly needs people who will bring a solid Christian perspective to this emerging area. If we do not try to shape it, we should not complain when we see what VR brings us.

• Deepen your ties of genuine face-to-face Christian community. In the end, this is the best way to experience that depth of reality in comparison to which anything else can only be “virtual.”

By Howard A. Snyder, contributing editor and professor of evangelization and church renewal at United Theological Seminary, Dayton, Ohio.

Have something to add about this? See something we missed? Share your feedback here.