A Love That Leaves People Alone in Their Guilt

Christ’s assumption of real flesh does not abolish the means by which he provides forgiveness of sins and eternal life.

“A love that left people alone in their guilt would not be real love.”
—Dietrich Bonhoeffer

¹⁹ And this is the judgment, that the Light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the Light; for their deeds were evil. ²⁰ For everyone who does evil hates the Light, and does not come to the Light, so that his deeds will not be exposed. ²¹ But the one who practices the truth comes to the Light, so that his deeds will be revealed as having been performed in God.” John 3:19–21

Rev. Matt Borrasso has, we infer, risen to the challenge of attempting an oblique defense of the goings-on in the Southeastern District.

As expected (and as reflected in the more substantive comments on the OSLCS reporting, together with a gauzy lament), the defense rests on a familiar premise: that expressing God’s Law is harsh, unfair, and ultimately incompatible with real love (love is love; love wins?). Compassion and empathy emerge as a self-authenticating metaphysics, while doctrinal discipline is recast as fear, suspicion, unbridled power, and even possible misconduct.

The central claims of critics of the OSCLS dispute coming to light are that a pastor was unjustly punished “not for false doctrine… but simply for caring”. It’s obviously a false dichotomy that makes caring incompatible with doctrinal fidelity. Hebrews 12:6 cannot be clearer:

“For whom the Lord loves He chastens,
And scourges every son whom He receives.”

Borrasso invokes the language of humility, incarnation, and “real humanity.” He builds his position almost entirely on compassion and empathy: Christ came for actual people, whereas the ‘inauthentic’ church prizes idealized humans; concern for pure doctrine is just abstraction and puritanical policing; fidelity to confession is treating people as “problems to be solved” rather than as human beings to be affirmed as God’s image bearers.

It sounds pious, and there are grains of truthiness to it. But it collapses completely if the objective is to argue that Wayne Fredericksen, or the structures protecting him, are innocent victims of prudes poking their noses where they don’t belong. It also implodes if you take that theological package into a difficult situation of sinful rebellion - the sinner will throw your “lack of compassion” right back at you and keep on keeping on.

Therefore, along with “new realities” comes a new unpardonable sin: to recognize and mention proudly public sins that are lathered in therapeutic moralism.

Christ separating the sheep and goats, Ca. 6th century, mosaic, Basilica of Sant’ Apollinare Nuovo, Ravenna, Italy. Source

Incarnation Detached from the OHM

The article’s signal failure is its apparent separation of the incarnation from the Office of Holy Ministry. Barrosso’s version of the incarnation comes across as “Jesus things; you are saved”. It lacks clarity of how salvation and and eternal life are won and provided to us through the specificity of Christ’s conception, birth, life, suffering, death, resurrection and ascension into heaven.

Once the separation of the incarnation and the preaching office are made, love is allowed to overwrite the Office of the Keys, leaving an astroturfed humility that could serve as a textbook definition of gospel reductionism.

Christ Jesus, fully God and fully man, who atoned for real sins with His real flesh which was glorified, is the same Christ who instituted the Office of the Keys. He never set His incarnation in opposition to the preaching office. He rules and loves His Bride through both. They are of one piece and for one purpose.

Ironically, the very abstraction Borrasso dislikes appears in his own formulation. The incarnation is abstracted from the Keys, turning mercy into a mood and love into a vibe rather than the concrete application of the whole counsel of God.

Open rebuke is better
Than love carefully concealed.

Faithful are the wounds of a friend,
But the kisses of an enemy are deceitful.
Proverbs 27:5–6

Law and Gospel as Therapy

The paraphrased maxim, the Law afflicts the comfortable; the Gospel comforts the afflicted, is rightly quoted but wrongly deployed.

Law and Gospel are not governed by intuition, emotional intelligence, or pastoral key performance indicators. They are administered. Those who enter the preaching office do so having accepted a charge not to truncate, dilute, or selectively apply either term. The Law is a scalpel of the heart, not a bludgeon, and the Gospel is a balm for the soul, not a narcotic.

Consequently, the Church has in its arsenal real words that really kill and really make alive, spoken from real mouths.

¹⁷ Therefore, in all things He had to be made like His brethren, that He might be a merciful and faithful High Priest in things pertaining to God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people. Hebrews 2:17

To wail about “programs of purification” is a dog whistle about witch burning. The rhetorical purpose is to force those who care about pure doctrine because of God’s Word and Christ’s atonement to internalize the Accuser’s voice. The logical endpoint is to reset adherence to, or desire for, doctrinal fidelity as mere ideology, which is where Borrasso lands.

Woe unto You, Scribes and Pharisees, illustration from The Life of Our Lord Jesus Christ, 1886-94 (wc over graphite on paper). James Jacques Joseph Tissot

That vector is explicit in many of the comments on recent articles, where calls for OSLCS to repent of blasphemy and the persecution of the complainants are rejected as strains of judgy lovelessness, neanderthal social ideas, “Christian Nationalism” and assorted right-wing tropes that must be feared. This is a signature playbook for LCMS liberalism.

Borrasso appears to be betting that contemporary moral intuition, “kindness” versus “judgment”, will overwhelm the lack of theological precision in his argument, particularly in his curious subthread about “diversity,” “human beings as they are,” and Christ “bearing the new reality in His flesh.”

Which new reality, precisely? Say it, pastor!

¹⁵ For we are to God the fragrance of Christ among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing. ¹⁶ To the one we are the aroma of death leading to death, and to the other the aroma of life leading to life. And who is sufficient for these things? 2 Corinthians 2:15–16

Lutheran theology has never taught that doctrinal discipline is ideological cleansing. The only reason to construct that claim is that a subconscious ideological premise has set aside Christ’s clear doctrines. “New realities” (and one hardly needs to guess which ones must be in view) become escape hatches from the necessary application of the Law, and are deserving of the finest goose down Gospel comfort.

To imply that ecclesial discipline and the guarding of doctrine and praxis are violence against creation is to state, whether acknowledged or not, that Christ’s unambiguous instructions to His sheep and shepherds are unloving.

Christ does not leave sinners to rot in soul-destroying behavior and guilt unless He is thwarted by faithless pastors papering sin over with psychotherapeutic, gospelly throat clearing. He gave His Church authority to name sins, to warn that rejection of Christ ends in hell, and his pastors to bolt the gates of heaven to the stubbornly wicked.

Telltale Asymmetry

Borrasso’s argument has a glaring omission: the complainants.

None of the humility, patience, contextual sensitivity, delicate nuance, or incarnational charity he extols was applied to those who raised concerns or to the journalists who reported them. They are not treated as “real, complex, broken image-bearers” in need of pastoral care. They are reduced to abstractions: obstacles to compassion, accusers of the brethren, representatives of a dangerous impulse toward “uniformity” and “purification.”

Their humanity was not affirmed. It was bracketed as McCarthyism driving around in I.C.E. paddy wagons.

The asymmetry exposes Borrasso’s argument as a false appeal to humility since charity is distributed selectively and dissent from the compassion-empathy matrix is morally reframed. Ecclesial authority is rendered immune to consequences.

The fuzzy incarnation functions not as theology but as insulation, shielding ecclesial supervisors from scrutiny while recasting concern for right doctrine as unloving persecution that prevents sinners from being “met where they are at.”

It is meant to resemble Christ’s humility. But there is nothing humble about setting up doctrinal discipline as some schoolmarmish ideology. After all, Jesus met the Samaritan women at the well “where she was”, but gave her the faith to leave her place with a brand new heart and the gift of evangelism.

¹ As the distinction between the Law and the Gospel is a special brilliant light, which serves to the end that God’s Word may be rightly divided, and the Scriptures of the holy prophets and apostles may be properly explained and understood, we must guard it with especial care, in order that these two doctrines may not be mingled with one another, or a law be made out of the Gospel, whereby the merit of Christ is obscured and troubled consciences are robbed of their comfort, which they otherwise have in the holy Gospel when it is preached genuinely and in its purity, and by which they can support themselves in their most grievous trials against the terrors of the Law. Solid Declaration, V Law & Gospel

Compassion Without Christ’s Institution Is Not Love

Borrasso concludes by locating judgment, purification, and restoration exclusively in Christ’s hands “at the right hand of the Father.” It sounds pious, but it misses the mark badly.

Christ did not create the Church as a trifling bookmark for Judgment Day. He acts now. He teaches, judges, forgives, and saves as the incarnate Word. He binds and looses sins now through the stewards of His mysteries. He regenerates sinners now with baptismal water. He fortifies the new Adam now with His body and blood. He sanctifies you, now, with your collaboration in faith.

None of this present reality is idling in heaven awaiting activation upon His return. We are a Church that believes supernatural things are happening in our presence through the administration of ordinary things by sinful shepherds. They are not Talmudic sherpas offering us cryptic glimpses of a celestial bus route.

12 What business is it of mine to judge those outside the church? Are you not to judge those inside? 13 God will judge those outside. “Expel the wicked person from among you.” 1 Corinthians 5:12-13

To say “judgment is His, not ours” without qualification is to demote, if not deny, the Keys. Love that leaves people in open prideful opposition to the clear commands of Scripture is not love, but hatred that serves only to make the world a better place to go to hell from. It is hateful to refuse to identify and address manifestly wicked conduct where Christ has commanded it to be dealt with for the sake of the souls it puts at eternal risk. Love hates sin in the same way that sin hates love.

Our betrayed, abandoned, reviled, mocked, plucked, scourged, crucified, and pierced Christ won the victory, not compassion and empathy. His ripped and bloody battle standard was handed to His Bride for the remaining hostilities.

The Church is charged with signposting the narrow way, even as Christ warns that the cramped conditions will be despised by a majority who prefer the broad, luxurious highways built to accommodate the latest “new realities.”

¹³ “Enter by the narrow gate; for wide is the gate and broad is the way that leads to destruction, and there are many who go in by it. ¹⁴ Because narrow is the gate and difficult is the way which leads to life, and there are few who find it. Matthew 7:13-14

O Christ, hear us.
O Lord, have mercy.