The focus on sex. . .

While some might insist that orthodox Christianity with its focus on male/female gender, marriage as the shape of our society's God-given order, and children as the natural fruit of marriage as a sex issue, the reality is that sex has always been part of the equation since Eden.  After the Fall, Adam and Even could not even look at each other in the same way.  They were always naked but that nakedness became a problem only after sin too hold of desire.  They worked to handle it all themselves by covering up what they thought was the problem -- nakedness -- forgetting that sin was inside them and not living simply on the surface of their bodies.  

Sexual desire and intimacy between man and woman as God created them has always been keep to who we are and how we see ourselves.  Indeed, the sexual act is Biblically rooted and a gift of God in creation and not some secret information which man stumbled upon.  It is central to the basic social bond God established in creation (Gen. 2:24) and the very mandate given to man by God is to be fruitful and multiply -- because God made them male and female (Gen. 1:28).  We reproduce not out of instinct but as fulfillment of the divine command.  How we see this and judge it all is not an strange focus upon sex but getting God's creative will and purpose exactly right.  Sex lies at the heart of being human -- of being made male and female.  We are not focusing too much on sex but those who use free desire and gender identity are doing exactly that.  They are focusing on sex without seeing it as part of God's gift in creation or His order.

When churches celebrate the LGBTQ+ genders and the disordered desires, they make it exactly about sex and not at all about God's gift of creation nor the order established for us not as punishment but as the protection and blessing of that godly desire for the sake of all.  Pornography is not wrong because the body is meant to be hidden but because it makes trivial, inconsequential, and lurid the gift of God and His divine purpose.  Porn makes light of it all not for fun but for money and that taints the desire and its use as wrong.  In the end, however, it is not even that the various forms of desire and gender identity wish to be allowed to live and let live but have harnessed the machinery of the state precisely to demand that they receive approval, acceptance, and legitimacy.  They do not want privacy but public sanction for every desire and not just the ones championed now.

When Christianity affirms and celebrates the alphabet soup of sexual desire and gender identity, the Church gives sanction to it in God's name -- whether they pay attention to the voice of God in His Word or not.  In effect, the rainbow becomes part of the liturgical calendar of the Church, yes, but of the whole world.  Because of this, the Church must address sex issues or become an accomplice in the moral confusion of the day in which nothing is wrong except the denial of desire.  The Church is not interested in what goes on in the bedrooms of this world because of prurient interest but for the sake of setting free from the bondage of desire and for the sustenance of the will and purpose of God manifest in creation.  But those who celebrate the bedroom and move it into the most public sphere of all have made it all about the sex.  Period.  

This is not new.  In the earliest of days Christianity manifested a distinct ethic with regard to sex and marriage and children -- one that which immediately in conflict with the mores of the world then (as well as now).  Among these, the Old Testament condemnation of same sex relationships of any kind -- one repeated in the New Testament.  It is no less than St. Paul who insists that the man who sleeps with a prostitute has not only sinned for himself but for the wife left at home and the prostitute herself.  The begins with the insistence that it is possible to sin against your own flesh and that this sin is not refusing to be unbound by constraints but rather indulging them.  Sex is central to who we are as human beings and to our embodied selves not by accident but by intent.  Within the post-apostolic world, you find in the Didache, one of the earliest extant post-canonical writings, a rejection of abortion that has become a central cause of morality for the Christian community both then and now.  It was certainly no easier for the Church to stand against Rome and the remaining vestiges of its culture than it is today but, remarkably, that did not preclude the Church from growing but contributed to it.  To stand out and stand forth for the cause of God's creative gift and order will hardly be the death of Christianity but to ignore God's Word in this may well do just that.  

Myopic vision. . .

While reading a while ago I came across a quote by a well-known Roman Catholic exegete and Biblical scholar.  Raymond Brown, a name that should be well known to most of us, apparently wrote that it was his and a rather universal opinion that the exegetical method of the early church fathers was irrelevant to the study of the Bible today.  He likes patristics for the doctrinal words of the fathers but did not judge their reading of Scripture to be relevant or helpful to arriving at those doctrines.  In other words, he has separated Scripture from doctrine and written off the exegetical method of the fathers as completely alien and of no assistance to the modern exegete today.

I would suspect that most orthodox Lutherans would be appalled at such a conclusion -- even though I am sure that many on the liberal end of Lutheranism would agree and echo his sentiments.  We should rightly complain about the nearsightedness of such a reading of how the fathers read God's Word and condemn his judgment as less than scholarly and more than plainly wrong in its choices of lens through which the Bible is to be read.  Some of those who are reading this are probably asking me why I bother reading Raymond Brown.  I should be reading Luther, right?

That is the problem.  We Lutherans so often choose our own lens through which we look at things and although it is more modern than the early fathers, it is equally narrow.  We run the danger of making Luther the central focus of everything.  What Luther said about a passage or how he preached it often becomes the final word in our discussion.  How are we really being different from the narrowness of Raymond Brown and his own choice of blinders?  This may be what we do today but it is not the shape of historic Lutheranism.  After all, Patrologia was coined by Johann Gerhard, who published a book by the same name in 1653. 

The Reformers insisted that they were not disdaining or ignoring but rather returning to the pure doctrine that the Church had taught from the time of Christ all the way up to their time.  They began by returning to the Scriptures, drawing their teaching from Jesus Christ and His apostles and the written record of Gospel.  In addition, the Lutherans rediscovered the true and saving doctrine in the writings of the Early Church fathers and delighted to find in them their knowledge of Scripture, their devotion to God's Word,  and how this translated into the classic formulations of Christian theology.  Yet today we seem rather myopic in our vision of the fathers, choosing instead to go first to Luther and seldom moving past him into the earlier days of our Christian life.

I do not know when it happened but it has and this is a betrayal to the rich and profound legacy our Lutheran fathers had on the witness and vision of those who went before.  Read through the Lutheran Confessions and, outside of the Small Catechism, you find an appeal to the fathers written into every page.  Even the phrases and vocabulary of the fathers made their way into Lutheranism. We do not afford veto power to any age or generation of men but prefer to build upon the work of the faithful who went before us giving Scripture alone the norming power over it all.  With the claim of catholicity written into our confessional documents, we cannot afford to being and end all things at Luther alone.  This does not in any way diminish the value or importance of Luther but, just the opposite, follows his own example and the pattern of those who followed him.  So let us more generally affirm that we are students of the fathers as they were students of Scripture and that we learn from them in how they handled God's Word even as we admit that they are not infallible.

Children are more honest. . .

Over the years I have lived with many who constantly remind me that ritual is just ritual and complain about rote recitation of the liturgy.  In my own tradition there are those who would insist that to worship may not be adiaphora but how you do it is.  Too often that is a direct slur against liturgy itself and the elevation of the worship of the heart over the rituals, ceremonies, and even words of the Mass.  It is tiring to hear the taunts of those who insist that empty liturgy and empty ritual is of no value whatsoever.  I fear it is the triumph of a rather false form of maturity that adults use to prove that they are not children.

The problem is that children are more honest than adults when it comes to symbolism, liturgy, ceremony, and ritual.  Adults too often fail to understand liturgy and ritual at all.  The very charge of empty ritual or outward ceremony that they so solemnly warn against only shows that they really do not get worship.  By their elevation of the higher rational activity of the mind, they signal that they are enemies of their own tradition and still in the dark about the real value of ceremony, ritual, and mere words.  

The Scriptures themselves do not disdain the value of ceremony.  Instead, the richness of Scripture is revealed in the way ritual is so easily woven into the pattern of belief.  It is impossible to read the Word of God and miss the unmistakable form of ritual unless you have opened the book with a bias against it.  To elevate the rational above the ritual is to turn the faith of the ages into something that mirrors more recent history more than it does the longer view of our history.  It is equally wrong to pit them against each other but the genius of Scripture is how they stand together, side by side.

Children get this.  Their learning as well as their play is rooted in ritual, repeated actions through which words are learned, language is experienced, and life framed.  The activity of play is too often falsely seen as the sole province of children and childhood.  St. Paul is invoked as having put away childish things and having outgrown the shape of life rooted in ritual and rite.  The reality is that we really never cease to experience life in this way even though it is often tempting to make it sound like merely an activity of childhood and the childish.  What we too often do is treat ritual as if it were too frivolous for adulthood.  How odd, then, that we have devolved into an entertainment culture in which the imagined reality of the video game and screen seems to consume more and more of our time over the established orders of marriage, children, family, and duty.

Some play is truly frivolous and some is even destructive, not simply a diversion but a destroyer of our humanity.  Some play is borne of the desire within our culture to find meaning but with a penchant for searching in all the wrong places, substituting false rituals for the authentic rituals of God, reflected in lives of honest faith and trust.  Some of this is reflected by the reverence given to the rituals of sport.  Games hold meanings higher than simple competition or entertainment and, often, the rituals of athletics or games are given a higher place than the rituals of common worship and devotion.   These games are themselves the game of replacing our deep religious need for things shallow and incapable ot answering that religious yearning for God, for meaning, and for purpose.  Most of all, the quest for transcendence. In this way some within the Church accept and given almost religious devotion to the rituals of play and games while at the same time insisting that these risk consuming us in the realm of religious devotion, preferring a cerebral religion over a ritualistic one.

When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I shall know just as I also am known. (1Co 13:11-12)  I propose that St. Paul here was not speaking of a maturity to be obtained in this world or this life but contrasting what we know now only by faith with what we shall know then, in eternity, face to face.  For now ritual is not a passing phase toward rational nirvana but its own very important shape of life here, by faith, toward eternity.  Until then, ritual allows us to practice and rehearse the eternal in the present, experiencing the foretaste of what is to come now by repeating what our Lord commanded.  The future is not something completely different but knowing fully and face to face what now we know only through a mirror dimly.  Until then, we practice or play, rehearing the rituals of our identity bequeathed to us by our Lord until we are ever swallowed up in the eternal, knowing its familiarity while also transcending what we have known now.

Cultural Christianity?

Cultural Christianity has eroded mightily from its once more vigorous self.  It is no longer firmly united by a common core of belief, a common ethic, a common set of moral values, and a common commitment to the need for some sort of religion even if it was not quite fully orthodox.  Now there are some who think that culture no longer needs Christianity has a partner and perhaps no religion at all is best.  Even Christians are not sure whether to celebrate or mourn the death of Cultural Christianity.  It is no surprise then that Christians are left divided and uncertain about what to do with the remnants of this Cultural Christian past and its vestiges.   

No matter how some like to wrap Christianity in the flag, Christian nationalism is hardly reflected in any denominations even though it might be tempting to many non-denominationals.  Cultural Christians have a strong desire to preserve the cultural, political, and intellectual traditions and institutions Christendom established and maintained in America then, if not now.  They are convinced that for the sake of our modern democracy, intellectual honesty, a common moral conviction, and the value of a common set of truths to under gird our society, what Christianity had once established was still needed.  If nothing else, the erosion of our unity and our conflicted society has surely been displayed in the dire consequences felt across politics, academia, and journalism in America -- as well as everything else. Though Cultural Christianity is part of the conservative social and political force in America, Christianity itself is not about improving or sustaining our culture, While cultural Christianity can prove valuable as a conservative force that resists the reforms of liberalism and progressivism, when divorced from the Church’s core mission of salvation and conversion, it can distract and detract from that core mission.  

Cultural Christianity is intent upon rescuing society -- evangelizing the culture -- while Christianity itself is intent upon rescuing sinners in the shadow of death -- evangelizing the individual.  No one would say that the ripple effects of this goal should be minimized or ignored for the sake of the nation and its various institutions but neither can this become the driving force of that goal.  Building a Christian culture is not a parallel project to the overall goal of being the bride of Christ and proclaiming the Gospel of Christ crucified and risen to the ends of the earth but it is a consequence of the Church’s mission to make known the God of our salvation and bring them into fellowship with the saints.  In the end, what Cultural Christianity wants to preserve of Christianity and what the Church wishes to keep are probably not at all the same.  This is the problem.  Cultural Christianity only reluctantly tolerates the very things that orthodox Christianity champions.  Yet, the reality is that society in America needs Christianity more than Christianity needs the approval of society.  That is what we as Christians need to remember or else we are nothing but an institution of the government.

Why not steps?

The mark of older chancels was often steps.  The altar was raised, the pulpit was raised, and the whole chancel was raised.  Sometimes there were a plenty of steps.  Some might suggest that this was due to the need to be seen but I wonder if it wasn't something else.  The God who is wholly other is accessible by steps.  The steps are not simply architectural but theological.  We must ascend to Him or He must descend to us or we have no communion.  The ancient Church more likely reflected this truth in architectural terms than the present and future Church does.  

Especially medieval buildings reflect this symbolic language within the floor plan. Every aspect of the medieval structures we do admire seems to echo or communicate theological truths. The churches built of stone and wood reflected a worldview that understands reality itself in hierarchical terms, the God who is wholly other and who is inaccessible until and unless He reveals Himself to us and makes Himself available to us and their sanctuaries reflect this very literally.  Indeed, from at least to the 8th century, the church buildings were designed in vertical layers, lifting the ministers as well as the vision of the worshipers to the God on high.  The entire building was intentionally designed to be a vertical map of this theological reality, a very expression of medieval Christian cosmology.  

Our present views on the subject of the buildings in which we worship are probably not as organized but they also reflect our cosmology.  Though we are more likely to be concerned about ease of access, to be sure, we are also driven by the idea that we are on His plane -- an egalitarian idea of our relationship with the mighty and eternal God.   It is not by accident that modern day liturgical churches construct buildings in which the altar and pulpit are often on the very same plane as the folks in the pew.  This might be something we do in the name of disability and ease of access but it is more likely a reflection of our desire to bring God down to us on our terms -- something not so foreign to the problem of Eden.

Medieval Christians and those who went before them could have certainly placed the altar at the same level as the congregation -- it would have been much easier on the task of constructing the building. They could have arranged the “worship space” in the manner that we do today -- so the congregation surrounded the sanctuary on most or all sides and in which the chancel is center but not above us. The reality is that generation after generation followed the early lead until the present day.  We forget that what we are doing is so out of sync with our own Christian past.  They have continued to construct churches whose architectural plan was intent upon proclaiming ascent, descent, hierarchy, sacrifice and the kingship of Christ.  At least until the past 70 years or more when we made a break with our own history.

We need to relearn how to read that symbolic language the architectural plans hide.  We need to learn how to be more intent upon faithful structures which visually reflect the Biblical image of God and how He interacts with us.  Without this, our buildings will continue to be living rooms or warehouses which do not look like our theology or at least like the Biblical reality which is supposed to inform our theology.