Killing a Synod With Kindness
For what business of mine is it to judge outsiders? Do you not judge those who are within the church? But those who are outside, God judges. REMOVE THE EVIL PERSON FROM AMONG YOURSELVES.
Lutherans have a hard time knowing when and how to deal with theological subversives. There is an understandable, but too reflexive, hesitation to move quickly and to be firm in discipline because we are so steeped in the Eighth Commandment (best construction), Matthew 5:38-40 (turn the other cheek), and Matthew 7:1 (Do not judge).1
Therefore, it is unsurprising that the history of Lutheranism in America (and of the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod (LCMS), in particular) includes many examples of bishops and parishioners treading too cautiously around material controversies and rebellions. In the contemporary era, confusion about human sexuality has been a rampant problem. It is not for a lack of teaching, but an insufficiency of discipline.
“Gay Christian”
The most recent example fits the same pattern of rejecting firm, unambiguous, and long-standing doctrines without real consequences. Just one day after the former District President of the Central Illinois District, Michael Mohr, was arrested and imprisoned for charges relating to the alleged production of child pornography, Unite Leadership Collective (ULC) released a podcast that declared homosexuality and transgenderism as compatible with Christianity.
One of the interviewees, Mark Schulz, is a retired pastor with a history of promoting LGBTQIA+ affinity in the LCMS through his “ministry”, Fully Known and Truly Loved.2 In the ULC podcast, Schulz upended established Christian doctrine and LCMS teaching to declare3,
“I have a gay brother. He’s married to another man—and he is a Christian.”
A fellow interviewee, Joshua Salzberg, is a film editor and screenwriter who co-founded “Lutherans for Racial Justice”, a node for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) activism in the LCMS. Salzberg’s contribution on the podcast was to introduce a common sleight of hand used by “queer Christians”, a merism to claim that the Genesis binary (male/female) might be a literary device like “day and night” that includes everything in between.4 In other words, God made male and female, but also every non-binary thing in between. 5
This language is not merely erroneous but detonates libraries of Christian doctrine.
The references to “my lived experience” are notable. Personalization and proximity are common tricks used to disarm Christians and appeal to their “judge not” switches that turn off critical Biblical thinking. Christian teaching about homosexuality and gender dysphoria declares them a sin requiring repentance and to flee from them. Schulz and Salzberg flip this, raising a smokescreen about complex biology and merisms that demand an empathy-first approach. Schulz and Salzberg warn the LCMS against being an “issue-mode” church, as it risks “alienating people”. Thereby, all three uses of the Law are sent out the nearest window.
Schulz has been openly blasphemous in the past, yet still has a welcome mat in many LCMS venues. For example, in an interview with Zach Zehnder three years ago, Schultz said,
“One other story—where I got myself into a bit of trouble in our church—came after the shooting at the gay nightclub in Florida. The following Sunday, as I introduced the prayers, I said that I truly believed this was the kind of place Jesus would have been spending time if He were alive today.
That statement caused some pushback. For some people, it felt out of context and landed abruptly. But when you think about it, this is precisely the criticism the religious leaders leveled at Jesus in His own day. It wasn’t a gay nightclub, of course—but they said the same thing: ‘You’re going to the homes of tax collectors? Are you kidding?”
[The transcript statement is rendered in cleaned prose for readability, without alteration of substance.]6
This is the antinomianism and universalism we have been warning about that has taken hold of large swathes of both the Confessional and Liberal wings of the Synod. Everything has become permissible in the name of an ungodly grace and mercy.
Hopefully, Schulz and Salzberg were placed under the minor ban pending a full and high-level pastoral intervention to bring them to repentance. If the sole response is to remove one podcast, then the Bishops have failed, gravely, in their duties.
The End of Winsome Church Management
The Bible is unambiguous about human sexuality. There are only two sexes, male and female. God created one man and gifted him one woman for the sake of producing and raising children in complementary companionship to worship God and receive His promises and gifts. The LCMS has issued innumerable scholarly papers and statements to reiterate those facts.
In spite of this, the Synod continues to endure waves of sexual deviancy that are increasing in amplitude and frequency, intended to batter the breakwaters of pastoral will and resolve, thereby soon to inundate parishioners.
This can be observed in LCMS parishes where “personal pronouns“ are used to signal “non-binary” affinity.7 It was visible at Concordia Portland with its Pride club and institutional commitment to homosexual advancement. It was obvious at Our Savior Lutheran Church, Arlington, VA, where a now resigned rather than defrocked pastor was defiant about modeling a transgender stole, while his life, parish, and school were draped with homosexual and transgender affinity. It is visible when that church’s leadership and its District President dig in their heels and blame social media for adverse publicity rather than repenting.
The era of gentle words, lenient handling, and lengthy deliberation must end. How many more children, pastors, parishes, Concordias, and Districts need to be sacrificed to ungodly sexual deviance and heresy before we see Scriptural standards being applied and upheld?
When a pastor uses pronouns, he is defrocked. When a pastor enters a strip club, he is defrocked. When a pastor equivocates on same-sex marriage, he is defrocked. When a pastor endorses a gender spectrum, he is defrocked. When a pastor attends a homosexual wedding, he is defrocked. When a school takes kids to a queer musical, everyone in authority is sent away. When a pastor steals another man’s wife, he is banished for good. When a District President fails to smash the foreign idols in his region, he is defrocked. When a pastor fails to correct obvious false teaching, he is disciplined. When a layman promotes false teaching, he is disciplined.
Conclusion
We are, once again, witnessing the familiar LCMS failure to confuse mercy with suspending our doctrinal critical faculties. What is needed to distinguish the present fracas is not another set of statements rebutting slithery arguments, but a robust institutional response that names the false teaching, dismantles it, and calls its public proponents to public repentance.
The LCMS does not lack teaching on human sexuality, but it does get jelly legs about enforcing what the Bible states is required to be believed, taught, and confessed. We have a habit of tolerating vile theological novelty in the name of love. It does not redound to our Christian witness, but instead to the most servile cultural accommodation that should result in tables being turned over and a few whippings for good measure.
In the wake of the Mohr arrest, the days of deferring and diluting discipline to avoid unpleasant things must cease. The point is not to neutralize bad publicity, but to love righteousness and hate wickedness (Hebrews 1:9).
Pastoral care is not a certification in ambiguity, strategic silence, or the ratification of sinners in their self-righteousness and self-understanding. If our pastors are unable to be clear about the nature and fruits of repentance, then they will become muddled about the purpose of forgiveness, which is increasingly true.
If we desire to preserve the Church’s confession, then decisive and proportionate action is needed against doctrinal saboteurs. Sixth Commandment confusion is overwhelming the Synod because we have been afraid of manhandling scoundrels. Unless we start doing so, we will just hasten the end of the LCMS, which has lost its nerve to also be a church that condemns, rejects, and opposes (unless the object is at a safe distance in a different denomination).
Our theology and doctrines are crystal clear, but do we still actually believe they are binding?
1 Corinthians 5
Immorality Defiles the Church
5 It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you, and such sexual immorality as is not even named among the Gentiles—that a man has his father’s wife! 2 And you are puffed up, and have not rather mourned, that he who has done this deed might be taken away from among you. 3 For I indeed, as absent in body but present in spirit, have already judged (as though I were present) him who has so done this deed. 4 In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, when you are gathered together, along with my spirit, with the power of our Lord Jesus Christ, 5 deliver such a one to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus.
6 Your glorying is not good. Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump? 7 Therefore purge out the old leaven, that you may be a new lump, since you truly are unleavened. For indeed Christ, our Passover, was sacrificed for us. 8 Therefore let us keep the feast, not with old leaven, nor with the leaven of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.
Immorality Must Be Judged
9 I wrote to you in my epistle not to keep company with sexually immoral people. 10 Yet I certainly did not mean with the sexually immoral people of this world, or with the covetous, or extortioners, or idolaters, since then you would need to go out of the world. 11 But now I have written to you not to keep company with anyone named a brother, who is sexually immoral, or covetous, or an idolater, or a reviler, or a drunkard, or an extortioner—not even to eat with such a person.
12 For what have I to do with judging those also who are outside? Do you not judge those who are inside? 13 But those who are outside God judges. Therefore “put away from yourselves the evil person.”
Photo by Michael Krahn on Unsplash
Similar dynamics are in play when Christian countries are threatened and subverted by alien ideologies and mass immigration. When resistance is eventually offered, it is too late, and Christians become hostages of their own generosity and kindness.
For example, see this presentation to the Florida-Georgia District.
The podcast was removed at the request of Schulz following complaints from his District President and the LCMS Synod President.
At the 46-minute mark in the podcast, Salzberg says,
“Another example since you brought up male and female both in Genesis and Jesus words when was dusk created in Genesis 1 and two if we actually look what’s going on in the Hebrew there as we go through the creation story in Genesis 1 we’re looking at night and day and light and darkness and land from the sea and the waters from the waters. What that is is the authors there are taking these extreme examples of what they’re talking about. Does that not include dusk? Does that not include a pond? It includes everything. God didn’t create one or the other. He created everything. And again, I’m not making any kind of theological assertion, but people who are non-binary, trans, and LGBT community that are Christians that take the Bible seriously, they’re looking at that and going like, “Yeah, what’s the difference between creating all examples of gender and sex and how that works, as well as creating all examples of time and day and land and water and animal and fish and bird. It’s creating everything. Not just these two things that are mentioned. It’s a literary device there.”
[The transcript statement is rendered in cleaned prose for readability, without alteration of substance.]
Salzberg’s formulation (and linkage of sexual politics with racial justice) is nearly identical to that from Earth & Altar blog and magazine, which advocates for “…an expansively conceived credal orthodoxy as fully compatible with LGBTQ inclusion, gender equality, and racial justice.”
God creates male and female at the same time. Both are made in God’s image. This merism suggests that biological sex is not a binary, but a spectrum, with zakhar, “the one with phallus” on one end, and nekevah, “the one with the hole” on the other. It also does not place one above the other in importance, but side by side. One cannot infer that one sex is “better” than the other in any way from the first creation account. The second creation account in Genesis 2 is a near complete rebuttal of Genesis 1, placing the male above the female and making the female’s actions the catalyst of sin. You can decide which account is “right” and get back to me. My negotiation, based on my lived experience, is to take Genesis 1 into account over Genesis 2, and reinforce that the equality of gender and the spectrum of maleness and femaleness was created by God, in God’s image, and it was good enough to survive thousands of years to reach us today.
Merisms, Eunuchs, and the 8 Genders: A Christian Reflection on Gender and Identity - Part 1
Thank you. Seems to me that the root of all this trouble lies in Schultz's comment, "if he were alive today."
"I said that I truly believed this was the kind of place Jesus would have been spending time if He were alive today."
We must stop treating our enemies like that are a brother with whom we are having a disagreement. These are demonic teachings and they must be treated as such. Excellent article per usual.