A false idea. . .

There is, among some, the idea that the Church must always be reviewing matters long settled by creed, confession, or council.  Certainly this is the idea that is floating around the liberals in Rome.  No matter what a pope or council has said, they want to relitigate the matter of female deacons, the ordination of women, the stance toward gays, etc...  There is hardly a cause that is not under review even though it was long ago decided by Scripture and tradition.  Rome is not alone in suffering this, however.

We are always doing it as Lutherans as well.  The whole matter of close(d) communion has been argued ad nauseum not because the Scriptures have changed or the historic practice of the Church changed but only because we do not like the answer.  Therefore, we the right to reopen closed questions because what we want is not what was said.

The desire to open long settled matters of faith and practice is not fueled by mistakes in the past or even the failure to read Scripture rightly but solely by a dubious understanding of Gospel and freedom that is largely antinomian.  It is much like a child who insists you cannot make me when the parent says it is time to brush your teeth or go to bed.  The Gospel is not license to review and conclude differently on everything we do not like from Scripture or the faithful tradition handed down to us by our fathers in the faith.  The Gospel is not a principle which allows us to reject or override specific passages of Scripture which say something clearly (whether for or against).  Yet it is precisely this false idea that keeps showing up on discussion forums and chat groups with the presumption that unless you have the right to relitigate what was decided in the past, you are not open to the Spirit.  Hogwash.

There is another thing that keeps popping up.  That is the idea that the Church needs to be a listening Church and that we are doing far too much talking and not enough listening to the people.  The problem here is that we are also not listening to Scripture nor are we paying attention to the living tradition of the dead that was passed down to us.  The only thing this call to listen seems to be about is listening to those who do not like or are offended by or who reject what was settled by Scripture, creed, and confession.  The only listening the progressives want is the listening to those who already reject Scripture and its message in Christ and who believe that reason and prevailing popular opinion should carry at least as much weight as God's voice.  But that is precisely what got us in the mess we are in today.  We have been listening to anyone and everything except Scripture and the voice of God has become the voice of a stranger to a people who value their opinions more than God's Word.

It is maddening.  As soon as you repeat a passage of Scripture or a line from the creed or an article from our confession, somebody will ask if it really means what we have always thought it meant.  In other words, maybe we know better today than those who came before us.  Well of course we think we know better.  That is the hubris of our time.  We always know better than those who came before us and that includes God.  It is the difference between wanting Jesus to walk with us or we walking behind Jesus.  Honestly, it drives me crazy.  It is for this reason there is little meaningful conversation with liberal Protestants or progressive Lutherans or synodal Roman Catholics.  They only want the Scriptures and whose who stand upon God's Word to listen to them -- not the other way around.

There was a time when I tried setting a time to listen to the pulse of the parish.  We had a series of listening posts in which small groups of a dozen or two people would sit and discuss their answers to a series of questions I had raised.  Thank God I knew at least enough not to include doctrine as a subject up for grabs.  Mostly it was about such things as what we needed for staff, what programs were thought to be needed or beneficial to our people, and what we could do to improve our congregation, its governance, and our effectiveness in doing God's bidding in this place.  In the end, the only voices that wanted to speak were those who advocated change.  At the end of it all, a number of folks said to me privately that they were happy with how things were and that most of the congregation was on that same page and not to reinvent the wheel.  Wow, were they right!

God has not given us this faith as raw material to make into something useful or His Word as a starting point for our own conclusions.  God has placed in our hands this faith and the means of grace as a sacred deposit to be preserved and passed on faithfully.  Listening to Him is the posture of the Church then, today, and in the future.  It is the only way we will be successful before Him -- no matter the judgment of the world.  Think what we might have done with all the energy, time, and money directed toward listening to one another if we had used it all to hear and believe and keep what God has said.