The story generally is that the ordination of women is unrelated to the adoption of same sex marriage and the ordination of the great variety of GLBTQ+, etc... So the folks who have left the ELCA or the Episcopal Church over the issue of same sex marriage and its consequences for who should be ordained think that they are quite happy to retain the ordination of women but to draw the line there. That far and no further.The reality is that the two may not be related in the minds of those people who left but they are surely related for the church bodies in question. Take the Lutherans, for example. There is no Lutheran body which ordains only men but also accepts same sex marriage and ordains men of other sexual identities. On the other hand, based on 2014 data supplied by the Lutheran World Federation, 96.5% of Lutherans in Europe and North America that ordain women also support same-sex lifestyles and their full incorporation into the life of the church -- at all levels. The numbers of Lutherans who ordain women but do not ordain practicing homosexuals, approve gay marriage, and approve of the variety of claimed sexual identities and genders is small and getting smaller every day.
If for this reality only, Lutherans who are not willing to fully incorporate the full dimension of sexual identities and genders into the life of the Church and give full approval to them, should pause to reconsider the ordination of women -- if they currently do ordain women or are contemplating it. It is probably not politically correct to say this and I am sure that the people involved do not want to hear it, but this is the reality among Lutherans (and Episcopalians).
According to the LWF, the cause is “to make the issue of women in the ordained ministry explicit in order to embrace the full and equitable representation of women and men in leadership. This would be a sign of the continuous reformation and transformation of the church. It is not only about women, it is about the church, what kind of church do we want to witness in the on-going reformation.” This is clearly the direction of the LWF with respect to GLBTQ+ as well. In fact, it is generally a short period of time between the choice to ordain women and the acceptance of GLBTQ+ marriage and clergy. In most of these churches, it is the span of a generation or two. In some, it is much shorter.
Some women may think it unfair to lump together the issues of same sex marriage and homosexual clergy with the ordination of women, but it is the inevitable conclusion of a church once that church body has decided to ignore the unbroken history, tradition, theological rationale, and Scripture passages that attest to the ordination of men only. After setting aside Scriptural and confession reasons for maintaining the prohibition against the ordination of women, it is much easier to set them aside for other causes and other reasons. Call it the Domino Theory or not but that has proven to be the case for those churches who have ordained women.
4 comments:
"There is no Lutheran body which ordains only men but also accepts same sex marriage and knowingly ordains men of other sexual identities."
"On the other hand, based on 2014 data supplied by the Lufauxran World Federation, 96.5% of Lufauxrans in Europe and North America that ordain women also support same-sex lifestyles and their full incorporation into the life of the church -- at all levels."
"The numbers of Lufauxrans who ordain women but do not ordain practicing homosexuals, approve gay marriage, and approve of the variety of claimed sexual identities and genders is small and getting smaller every day."
"Lufauxrans who are not willing to fully incorporate the full dimension of sexual identities and genders into the life of the Church and give full approval to them, should pause to reconsider the ordination of women -- if they currently do ordain women or are contemplating it."
There. Fixed it.
The process (proximally speaking) was set in motion several hundred years ago with the acceptance among members of the European Protestant elite of a form of biblical criticism that took precedent over traditional understandings of scripture, and which, over the course of time, made its infernal origin unmistakable by continuing to push the doctrinal envelope to more and more un-Christian conclusions. In [i]Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century[/i], and in his anti-liberal writing in general, Karl Barth attributed the growth of liberal theology to the apologetic impulse (which he strongly mistrusted), but eventually lines were crossed in which this old-fashioned church liberalism could no longer "apologize" in face of its radical offspring (a phenomenon paralleled in the life of the universities).
The movement from acceptance of women's ordination to homosexuality follows this intensifying pattern characteristic of liberalism as a Satanic invention to which intellectual pride is particularly susceptible. What began as biblical interpretation subject to Enlightenment categories increasingly cut its moorings from the Christian tradition, moving from apologies to cultured despisers, through increasing dissociation of Christian symbolics from Christian dogma, to invention of a new religion which could only be called Christianity by deceit or ignorance.
Women's ordination is not so much a product of an intermediate, but the final, radical phase. Theologically, it is closer to homosexualism than to the "merely liberal" because of the symbolic weight of the sex of those who stand lectern and altar. A woman in those offices denies by her very existence in them the significance of the maleness of Christ, of whom the male in his maleness the Church has understood as an indispensable sign. This is the denial behind the insistence of egalitarian theologians that what is important about Jesus is not his maleness but his humanity, by which dictum they efface the significance of the sex of the Son of God. Orthodox Christians, however, believe that [i]everything[/i] about him, including the flesh of his incarnation, has endless, cosmic significance.
Pastor Peters wrote:
"So the folks who have left the ELCA or the Episcopal Church over the issue of same sex marriage and its consequences for who should be ordained think that they are quite happy to retain the ordination of women but to draw the line there. That far and no further."
Either the entire Bible is true or it isn't.
People may leave the ELCA, the Episcopal Church, or some other "relevant" or "progressive" church body. However, unless they renounce Historical/Higher Criticism, they will bring their social justice identity politics with them to the next congregation.
My earlier text correction of "knowingly" was in reference to Greg/Gina Eilers.
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