What exactly constitutes "renewal" for the Church? This is the question that is burning in my mind as the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America releases a new "constellation of worship resources" for use in parishes in the United States. Of course, there is much to be desired here: culturally broader hymnody (like it or hate it, there are more hymns from the Anglican tradition, more African hymns from Lutheran-rich Tanzania and elsewhere, and contemporary hymnody by folks like Haas and Haugen), liturgies a bit more lyrical than the Lutheran Book of Worship's (our previous book) first setting, plus Luther's Small Catechism. Were it up to me, Lutheran churches would stick to the sixteenth and seventeenth century German hymns of writers like Johann Cruger, and the ancient Latin hymns that are sparse even in the LBW.

But I really do like some of the Anglican and African hymnody, and though Haugen and Haas are way too catchy and infectious for my tastes (and a little too focused on political correctness and so-called "social justice," to the exclusion of personal holiness and confession of sin against God himself). Here, we begin to see some of the problems with the very ideological underpinnings of our new "constellation."

The renewal being pressed for by certain factions within the ELCA seem to include the jettisoning of properly trinitarian speech. I suppose I should qualify such an accusation with a caveat-- this renewal includes the option of avoiding properly trinitarian speech.

God is known to us as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. We are brought into communion with this one God through the work of Jesus, who addressed the first person of the trinity as "Father." It is a priveledge, earned by the merits of Jesus Christ and his sufferings, that we are brought into the divine family. We are adopted into a household where Jesus is "firstborn among many children." Therefore, to substitute other terms for the proper trinitarian name "Father, Son, and Holy Spirit" is unacceptable, and to elide usage of this name completely is out of step with the Christian faith which we have received from our forebears.

I understand and sympathize with feminist concerns regarding equity and justice for all human beings, and as one who seeks to live out God's commandments, through the Spirit, want to respect the dignity and giftedness of each human person. However, I find the critique of so-called "patriarchal" language narrowly moralistic, even academic. Certainly many forms of speech are offensive and to be discouraged because they seek to harm others. But that usage of masculine pronouns causes irreprable damage to females seems too much of a claim.

And this argument, when applied to the Church's trinitarian language, seems even less germaine. We use masculine pronouns for the one Jesus addressed as "Father," because to fail to use pronouns is depersonalizing. Yet we do this in full knowledge that God the Father is other than human, and thus not gendered. And we do this in humble obedience to Jesus, who taught us to pray: "our Father." That this causes offense is not reason to change a few thousand years of doctrine, but reason rather to catechize and to form people in the received wisdom of the Church, the deposit given it from the Lord.

I wrote this weeks ago for the seminary interns who keep up with each other via an online bulletin board. Despite being dated, here are some thoughts on Benedict XVI's recent address and the awful reaction to it. You may also want to the fine analysis of Benedict's statements-- "God as Logos, Allah as Will"-- by Father James Schall here.


I'm sure you folks have been hearing about all the flak Benedict XVI has been getting from Muslims and the secular press lately. You can read the full speech here.


Notice, of course, that the actual subject of the address is much more nuanced and philosophical than the hamfisted quotes the media has been contorting it into. It certainly seems that it is all being blown way, way out of proportion!

This was an address to a scientific faculty on some of the problems that currently exist philosophically, between the broad conception of human knowledge and reason that the Church holds, and the dangerously narrowing constraints which the empirical sciences are placing on knowledge.

Benedict probably made a misstep by including some quite angry words from Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus about Muhammed. But let's consider the larger context!

First of all, the immediate surroundings of the author of that quote were turmoil and bloodshed-- Constantinople, the stronghold of the Christian East, was under seige and being destroyed. For many Christians in the East, the world literally was coming to an end (and its culture has never really been resucsitated after centuries of violent supression). Christians were slaughtered as they gathered in their churches to pray. Manuel II had some reason for being brusque.

Second, Benedict is including this quote to indicate that the Western cultural value of reason (the impetus for scientific exploration) grows out of the Christian conviction that God is identical with what is reasonable and true. Manuel II says, after all, that "not acting reasonably is contrary to God's nature. Faith is born of the soul, not the body. Whoever would lead someone to faith needs the ability to speak well and to reason properly, without violence and threats... To convince a reasonable soul, one does not need a strong arm, or weapons of any kind, or any other means of threatening a person with death..."

This valuation of reason is in marked contrast to those who hold that "God's transcendence and otherness are so exalted that our reason, our sense of the true and good, are no longer an authentic mirror of God, whose deepest possibilities remain eternally unattainable and hidden behind his actual decisions."

Benedict cites thinkers in the Church like Duns Scotus (and he might even have cited Barth here, too) that approach this kind of dangerous thinking about God. What little I know about Islam seems to match the ideas Benedict is talking about just above.

In contrast, he says that: the truly divine God is the God who has revealed himself as logos and, as logos, has acted and continues to act lovingly on our behalf."

Benedict goes on to give a sweeping history of the decline of this Christian conception of reason in the West, beginning with some of the seeds planted for this (though quite unintentionally) by the Reformation.

He then excoriates liberal theology a la von Harnack, and empiricism, both of which divest the Church of its fullness, and attempt to relegate its concerns to the purely subjective realm. Benedict points out that "[t]his is a dangerous state of affairs for humanity, as we see from the disturbing pathologies of religion and reason which necessarily erupt when reason is so reduced that questions of religion and ethics no longer concern it. Attempts to construct an ethic from the rules of evolution or from psychology and sociology, end up being simply inadequate."

It's kind of funny to me that the NPR crowd (and I like NPR most of the time, but its biases are sometimes deeply evident) sees Benedict's speech as an attack on Islam, when really it's an attack on the West's current "dictatorship of relativism" that most of the media is partially responsible for. It's both humorous and frightening to imagine how this might play out; it would be very odd to see militant Islamists and militant secularists united against Christianity in some power play. Of course, like most media "events" this is only a "meta-event, " a simulation of something real that is heightened for our entertainment, and will likely fall off the map when photos of Tom & Katie's baby finally see the light of day. That's more important than discussing the substance of the modern world's problems, right?