Why not?

All across the landscape of Christianity there are those who caution against taking Scripture too seriously.  Though for different reasons, perhaps, this warning has become normal in a world in which we take other things much more seriously -- from the opinions of others to our own desires and choices.  It has become epidemic.  Oddly enough, I read a little while ago that Bible sales for 2024 o4 2025 (can't recall which) were nearly double what they were for 5-10 years ago.  It would seem that by the shopping habits of many there is a strong desire to meet a voice that does not change and a message that is eternally the same, a Gospel rooted in the facts of Jesus' death and resurrection, and in the consequences of such a profound and saving love.  Against this, it also seems that there are those who are telling people to wait a second and slow down.  

Both Rome and liberal Protestantism seems to this common apprehension against taking Scripture too seriously.  The Council of Trent pitted Scripture against tradition -- even painting tradition as more reliable than Scripture and carrying more authority than the written Word of God.  It follows then that the faithful were then being directed to know and trust tradition more than Scripture and to enhance the church's voice over Scripture.  Liberal Protestantism would agree except in place of Scripture they would posit feelings, desire, and reason in place of tradition and over the Word of God.  In essence, they join Rome in saying that we need to trust ourselves over Scripture -- the self of Rome being the teaching magisterium and papacy but the self of liberal Protestantism being the individual alone.  We all seem to be searching for a pope or for many popes to tell the Scriptures what we will believe and what we will not -- no matter what that Word of God says.

In contrast to our modern age with its primacy of pope/teaching magisterium and the individual, the early church fathers lived in Scripture in a way we simply do not today.  They read Scripture as a living voice, not even a book and certainly not a compilation of stories or resource book from which to draw proof texts.  Everything pointed to Christ in a way that seems childish and naive today.  Indeed, we prefer to listen to their voices on doctrine more than to learn from them how they lived within the Scriptures overall.  This is alien and foreign to us today.  They do not rush to explain the mystery or bring it down to size but enable that mystery of God to be fully encountered through every page.  They see the Word of God not as a tool for them to use to pursue the loftier things but as the living voice of God and a door into His divine presence.  They live in God's Word in order to know Him who is that Word made flesh.

Catechesis is then not simply imparting information but incorporation of the individual into the life of God's Word.  It aims less for comprehension or understanding than appreciation, wrapping the person in Scripture -- the words, stories, events, and truth that is the portal to the eternal.  For them, living the baptismal life is not about living by rules to be followed but living out the new life born of the baptismal womb -- wanting the what God wants, filled with the desire for Him above all, and walking in the path enlightened by the Lord through His Word.  It is not static but lively.  The upward call of God is not about reordering this world to look like heaven but to live within the household of God where the heavenly ladder brings low what is from above and living out the new life that has another goal and hears another voice than instinct or the worldly values all around us.

Why not listen to this voice?  Why not take it seriously?  No one is saying that the Church is not needed to give guidance to the faithful or that every word was meant to be taken literally but very word is surely to be taken seriously, most seriously in a world which is serious about all the wrong things.  I will admit that sometimes this seems dangerous -- at least to the earthly orders and structures in which the Church lives and the social orders and authorities of the world outside the Kingdom of God.  It is.  It is surely dangerous.  Indeed, the most dangerous thing in the world is a Christian and a church listening to the voice of God, taking it seriously and following its voice over all the other competing voices around us.  

The early church fathers experienced this directly when the sexual ethic and shape of marriage and attention to the sacred character of life forced them to live in distinction to what was all around them.  It was and remains dangerous to do so -- to hold up the Biblical pattern of male and female, the shape of marriage between male and female, the importance of children, the refusal to accept the culture of death so easily promoted by our views of reproduction and abortion, and to remain steadfast in them.  But these are not the only arenas in which our lives in distinction to the world stand out and stand forth.  In the trust we place in technology, the way we seem to view AI as part of human evolution, and the primacy we place upon leisure and entertainment we are also standing out and standing forth -- at least if we listen to the voice of God's Word.  To suggest that this is real freedom in place of the self-indulgence of the world around us is to hear and apply God's Word to the most basic issues of life.  Why would we not take this seriously, listen to it over tradition, and heed it over even the most primal of our feelings and desires?

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.