Voting is the problem. . .

I was having coffee and reviewing the news with beloved wife some weeks back and mentioned that the Presbyterians had voted on the issue of whether their clergy had to be monogamous.  It was a shocking thing to think.  Churches will now be required to vote to keep their pastors from practicing one or more versions of the polygamy now becoming avante guarde.  My beloved responded that no matter how the vote turned out, the mere fact that you had to vote on it was itself a sign that the battle was lost.  How astute!  That is the problem with voting.  You vote once every year or two years or three but the effect of the vote is only as good as the last time you voted and only sure until the next time.

We seem always to vote in the Church for things we should not be voting for -- even good things!  It is a good thing, I suppose, to vote regularly for an all male priesthood or for close(d) communion or weekly Eucharist or the value of the liturgy and a host of other good, right, and salutary stuff.  But that is the problem with voting.  You are only as good as the last vote and the next one may change it all.  I am weary of voting.  It is the Achilles' Heel of democracy and it may well be the undoing of the Church down the road.  The mere fact we vote on things that are a given in God's Word and a staple of our confessional and creedal life means that these things are not enough and, without reaffirming them, we could actually overturn them (though the Word of God does require a two-thirds majority vote to be overturned!).

Whether in Australia or in Germany, recent events have shown us that even when the vote fails to change the practice from truth to error, there is always another vote and another opportunity to change the right side into the wrong one.  Even Rome knows that.  The mere fact that a diocese or two has voted to support the ordination of women, for example, shows the problem lies with the vote.  Voting does not establish doctrine but it cannot deny it.  What about the biggest ballot of all -- the one that sends up the white smoke?   And, too often, it does just that.  I cannot speak for Rome and what they are doing with their abundance of problems but I know in the Lutheran back yard voting has become the idea that we get a say so over what the Lord says and a say so over how we intend to implement what He has said.  That is the fallacy of voting.  Voting does not establish doctrine.  Only the Word of God can do that.  When we vote for practices that muddy the waters of doctrine or confuse what we say we confess, the problem lies already with the vote even before we get to what it is we were or are voting upon.

One convention I well recall is when we voted to rescind the XIV article of the Augsburg Confession.  It took nearly thirty years to fix that mistake and we did it by, yup, you guessed it, voting.  Which means we could screw it up all over again.  We were careful to say we were not changing doctrine back then but only tweaking with the practice but in the end we pretty much destroyed the idea of ordination (whether or not you think Apostolic practice is serious stuff or not) and the rite vocatus that led up to the laying on of hands.  Even if you win, unless your margin is 90/10 or so, you almost leave room for the opponents to come back again for another go at undoing what we said we believed and how we practiced it.  There were, after all, overtures submitted designed to turn back the clock so we could party like 1989 one more time.  I am writing this a little early so I will venture to say we did not give into that temptation -- at least not yet.

Some people think that it is a problem of who votes -- laymen or, in particular, female laity.  I think it is a problem of voting period.  We should vote less on even good things which we confess and practice.  Voting gives us the wrong impression -- namely that we are in charge!