Normal can still be wrong. . .

There are many things which have become normal but which cannot in and of themselves be judged good or right or salutary.  While this is true of the world around us, it is also true of the Church.  Normal does not equate to right, at least with respect to God's Word and truth.  Such normality is evidence of how fallen we are within the Church as sinners and not only out there in the world around us.

Higher criticism and a skeptical view of the Scriptures is certainly normal.  It is the norm for higher academia both within the so-called church universities and even seminaries as well as secular institutions of higher education.  Even Rome is awash with the higher criticism that tends to relativize and diminish both the content and the character of the written Word of God.  It flies in the face of official teaching.  Though some Lutherans complain, most Lutherans have long ago jumped ship on an inerrant Bible and on accepting Biblical facts to the same regard as statements about salvation.  It may be normal but it is not Lutheran.

It may be normal that Lutherans forgot private confession or the weekly Eucharist or the liturgy or catechesis or ordained women or approved of same sex marriage but it is not right and it is not Lutheran in a confessional or historic sense.  There are a thousand things which you can insist are normal because many or even a majority may approve of them or do them but that does not make it right.  So those who would argue that the ordination of women is normal and therefore beyond debate or reconsideration have no real argument.  An appeal to the wider acceptance of something neither conceived of nor considered by our Confessions does write into those Confessions a bias toward acceptance or a post-facto approval of error.  We all know this but to often forget it.  Even an ingrown toenail is normal after you have had for so long but that does not mean it is what God intended or that its pain is normal.  Typical, perhaps, but not within the norms of history or confession.  There are practices which became normal during the pandemic but were set aside as soon as possible because they were not right or salutary when viewed from a later period or time or when compared to the ancient practices of the Church.

It is as if we are forever testing the legitimacy of my mother's old expression:  If everyone else jumped off a cliff, would you?  Mom knew knew the difference between something being normal and it being good, right, and salutary.  I only wish more of us had listened to her.