Proof! or Proof?

It seems that the subject of the ordination of women is always current.  In part, the reason for this is that there is no clear Biblical support for the ordination of women nor is there any hint in history to support the ordination of women.  Of course, those who are in favor of this break in continuity with the past will not let the lack one Biblical passage in support of the idea curtail their insistence that it is, indeed, Biblical.  So from time to time we get another version of the common attempt to discredit those passages in Scripture which would preclude the ordination of women.  Now there is one more.  The most recent edition of Lutheran Forum includes a spirited defense of the ordination of women which is less an exegesis of passages that support the idea than it is an attempt to deal with those which do not.  While it may seem to be a fresh attempt, the article breaks no new ground and reflects something that is common to most readers of Lutheran Forum and many within Lutheranism -- they have already decided to ordain women and they know it represents a significant disconnect from the position of Lutherans until the most modern of times and want to reconcile their departure from history to that history.

In any case, a curious assertion was made.  The author insisted that the burden of proof lie on the side of those to show that women should not or cannot be ordained.  

Those opposing women's ordination bear the burden of proof and so must establish their case beyond a reasonable doubt and to a moral certainty.  Lutheran Forum, Fall 2024, p. 57

I will certainly grant that the author in his own mind has come to that conclusion and is thoroughly convinced morally, historically, theologically, and Biblically that this is the right time and the right decision for the ordination of women.  The fallacy of his argument is this.  Tradition does not have to prove itself.  For nearly two thousand years the uncontroverted and consistent Biblical exegesis and doctrinal stance of the Church was that women were not to be ordained.  For Rome and Constantinople as well as Missouri, this remains the case.  The exception does need to be proved but the rule does not.  It is a false premise that Protestant practice or evangelical decision or liberal action somehow is enough to trump the clear and consistent teaching and practice of the Church over the ages.

The problem is this.  Canterbury and Chicago have buckled to the pressure of feminism and culture and now are looking for a justification for their break with tradition and their new understanding of Scripture.  Even break off groups like the ACNA and NALC who have disdained the LGBTQ+ positions of their former jurisdictions cannot bring themselves to even discuss or review the ordination of women.  It has become for them just as much a sacred cow as the sex decisions were to their former church bodies.  So when they sit down with Missouri, they do not know what to say about this break with the past except that it is beyond challenge within their churches and so it is not on the table.  It is for his reason that this doctrine is a lex in search of a ratio and it will not find one.  It will remain what it is -- a break with the tradition that these bodies claim to uphold that they are duty bound by their very existence to observe.  Their only hope is this.  Eventually Rome, St. Louis, and Canterbury will eventually cave as they have done and then they will not feel so conspicuous.

Over my lifetime I have known two women who were ordained in the then Lutheran Church in America and who blamed their church body for deciding to ordain them without a sufficient justification in Scripture or theology.  Both were actually quite accomplished individuals.  At some point, however, both of them abandoned their former churches, renounced their ordination, and became Roman Catholic.  I blame the reason for this more on the way this decision to ordain women was reached and the continuing lack of a clear theological, Biblical, and moral imperative to justify it.  Sadly, they did not even consider Missouri because of the sour taste in their mouths from decades of being told that saying no to the ordination of women was misogyny. The real haters of women are those who would put them in an untenable position by ordaining them without first establishing a theological and exegetical reason for departing from 2,000 years of unbroken confession and tradition.

 

Cross Pollination

The accepted thesis of the day is that church music, sacred music, borrowed from secular music and then somehow or other became entrenched in judgment against secular music.  Even Lutherans still promote the lie that Luther's tunes were borrowed from the tavern.  Indeed, a whole culture has arisen based upon the premise that the cross pollination occurs from the secular to the sacred.  But it is a modern lie and falsehood.  The cross pollination is the other way around and has been with exception for more modern times when we chose to believe what was not true and built a religious musical industry upon that false premise.

If you look at Scripture, you see that music was given to man to be used in worship, that the worship of the people of God informed and shaped the rest of the music in their lives, and that music served a primary role in catechesis and memorization long before the birth of Christ.  You cannot read the record of the Old Testament or make your way through the descriptions of worship or the commands associated with the Temple or understand the Psalms without encountering a musical groundwork and expectation.  Contrary to those who begin with the question what parts should we sing, the history of worship in the Old and New Testament was the presumption of song.  Indeed, the burden lay not with what parts should we sing but what parts might not be sung.

Chant certainly solidified this understanding but it did not create it.  People sang before Gregorian Chant.  Music was not something indifferent but a medium whose primary purpose and goal was to glorify God.  The cross pollination that took place went from the sacred into the secular.  Sure, there were always those who profaned the gift and made it into something ugly or even vulgar.  That is the abuse of sin toward the things of beauty created by God for us and for us to use in the worship of God.  But the exception is not the rule.  The baudy, lewd, erotic, vulgar, and trivial are always the abuses of the gift and its form and function but never the rule.  Sacred music did not rescue the best of the secular but secular always profaned what was good, beautiful, noble, and the highest of our human offering.

In the age of Taylor Swift and a music industry that has become a very big business, we often forget this.  Where sacred music was the heavy hitter as far as the musical industry of the past, it now functions as the poor stepchild.  Worse, the cross pollination has robbed the sacred of its very character and identity and created a mixed genre in which it is nearly impossible to tell by the sound whether it is meant for the holy or the profane.  Contemporary Christian Music has exploited this to make itself into the largest segment of church music dollar wise.  Even liturgical congregations seem drawn to the idea of performance music in the idiomatic style of the day as a fit replacement for the choral, hymnic, and chant music of the past and present.  We have forgotten, however, that this was something new not that long ago.

Music today has become largely profane and not simply in terms of its venue.  The words speak of raw sex without moral inhibition or love and the vulgarities that inhabit the lyrics have made words once unspoken into normal speech.  The rhythms and beat of this music are designed less to communicate the text than to excite emotion and encourage the free surrender to it.  Could it be that as sacred music has diminished both in place and popularity, the secular music has become even more profane?  There is one thing missing today and that is any remnant of the cross pollination of the sacred into the secular.  It has become a one way street going the opposite direction.  This has ended up with the betrayal of what Luther once posited -- that music is the servant of the Word [text].  We have not been made more noble by this musical expression and that is exactly in contrast to the work and purpose of sacred music which does ennoble us as people as well as enshrine beauty as a very important cause.

Listen to the examples below and how, though different, they inspire, encourage, and draw us out of ourselves and into the realm of God's own beauty, majesty, and love.  If we heard more of this, might we be less satisfied by what passes for music in the pop count downs of every other genre?

 

 

The mess of IVF. . .

A gazillion years ago the Bionic Man appeared on TV.  Col. Steve Austin was created by technology better than he was created by God.  We have the technology.  We can do this.  And so it was that science began invading the area of reproduction.  It was no longer a matter of marital love or intimacy but technology.  In the beginning it seemed destined to offer real hope to those who have had trouble conceiving.  The costs were huge but eventually insurance paid the bills.  It seemed like a reasoned and solidly moral thing to do -- to help the childless reach their dream of a son or a daughter.  But along the way IVF and the rest of the tools in the reproductive technology toolbox began to leave questions unanswered and collateral damage along the way.  Part of this is the backdrop for the Alabama Supreme Court decision and this is the part that ought to make everyone of us -- Christian or non-Christian -- uncomfortable.  The rationale of we can does not answer the question of should we.

The IVF and reproductive technology industry is a mess.  While IVF affects a very small minority of live births each year (about 2 percent in the United States), it consumes a great deal of money and leaves us with difficult questions about the status of the fertilized eggs and frozen embryos that remain -- not to mention the number aborted in order to achieve a viable pregnancy. While those who oppose IVF may appear to be mean and unsympathetic folks, that is the opposite of the case.  The most unsympathetic view of such things believes the remains from IVF are banked for a future need or tossed out like yesterday's garbage.  Why would we spend so much and go through so much disappointment to conceive if none of this meant anything?  The question is not sympathy but a compassion big enough to encompass every side of this problem.

According to the CDC “IVF Success Estimator,” the odds of a successful live birth by IVF are affected by the mother’s age, weight, underlying fertility factors, and pregnancy history. So, for a 34-year-old female of average weight and height with no underlying pathologies, using her own (fresh, not frozen) egg, the success rate is high -- close to 50 percent.  The odds decline for someone older, or with a history of ovulatory or uterine disorders, or scar tissue.  These odds are the problem.  In order to achieve success, the lab must create of multiple embryos, choose the most robust, and stockpile 8 to 20 embryos for other attempts.  Those embryonic children not implanted are left to wait out their fate in a cryogenic limbo subject to lab integrity, care, and, of course, no acts of God.  Well over a million such embryos are stored in the United States.  We have no uniform plan or procedure for what happens to them and some will undoubtedly become scientific subjects for experimentation.  

Now the odds of a successful birth decline precipitously when using embryos previously frozen.  The American Society of Reproductive Medicine reports the pregnancy success rate is between 2 and 12 percent per frozen egg.  The mess we have created is a technology ahead of our moral values and labs and physicians acting on their own moral character.  How can any of us be comforted by the fact that so many frozen embryos are in labs across America with the most likely outcome of becoming medical waste or destroyed accidentally or by equipment failure?  Good grief, we have more rules about the cribs we place our infants in and the car seats they sit in and the toys they play with than we have about over 1Million frozen embryos!  Even if you are fully onboard IVF and supportive of all that reproductive technology is doing, do you believe that this is credible or that the programs in place are acting with sufficient integrity and oversight?  

The dust up over the Alabama case forgets that the suit was brought by proponents of IVF who had invested in the promise of the technology but who insisted the clinic keeping their embryonic children in cryopreservation had not provided adequate protection, thus allowing a patient to somehow wander in and remove several embryos, causing their deaths. The parents sued to hold the clinic accountable not for the wrongful care of their property but for the wrongful death of their children.  In its opinion, the Alabama Supreme Court held that a statute protecting minors (including, as precedent held, embryos in the womb) contained no exception for embryos outside the womb. Indeed, the whole point of this lawsuit was to claim that IVF is a mess, the care provided the embryos is lax and uneven, and the duty, morally and legally, was higher rather than less.  Oddly enough, the suit wanted IVF to continue but under more stringent supervision and held to a higher standard!

Christians often prefer not knowing over a fully formed awareness of how these things work.  It is high time that we marshal the same resources we have used so effectively in the cause of life to address the mess of IVF.  Just because we can does not mean we should.  Many things possible are not beneficial -- even in an emotionally charged debate over IVF and reproductive technology we must be prepared to say that some things are just plain wrong!

The problem of group think. . .

The liberals love to point to the flat earth idea or the idea that the earth is the center of the universe (or at least our solar system) and giggle about the foolishness of the Bible and of Christianity.  Why, nobody but a fool would take that at face value, right?  And, of course, the authority of the Roman Catholic Church made possible the continuation of a lie so obviously in conflict with the data (read science here), right?  Giggle, giggle.  Yes, how utterly stupid, naive, and foolish are those Christians who take the Scriptures at face value!  God gave us an intellect, didn't He?  That is why we need to use that intellect to correct the foolishness of the Bible.

Okay.  It was sarcastic and simplistic but it is pretty much the way people poo poo creationism and nearly everything else in Scripture that does not fit their worldview.  But could the very problem be the blinders of their worldview?  The interesting reality is not that people watched the sun rise in the East and set in the West and the stars cross through the night sky.  The interesting reality is that this idea of the earth at the center of our solar system was thoroughly attested by the data of the time.  It was not a lie jealously guarded by the Roman Catholic Church so much as it was the observable truth as people knew it.  So 500 years ago or more, there was one commonly held scientific phenomenon that gave credence to one commonly held scientific conclusion.  The earth was the center of the solar system (and perhaps the universe) and it did not move but everything around it did.  All of this was observable and noted by the great minds of the time all the way back to Ptolemy.

The very reason for the success of this geocentric model for so long wasn’t groupthink but the evidence which supported these conclusions -- better, in fact, than any alternatives including the truth. While some bemoan Christianity and its power to enforce groupthink as the reason for the mistaken, the reality is that the evidence people observed did fit this conclusion.  So, you pick the more reasonable conclusion:

1. Either the earth is stationary, and the heavens (and everything in them) rotate about the earth (rotating 360° every 24 hours) with the moon and planets almost also in motion, OR,
2. The stars and other heavenly bodies (except the earth) are all stationary, while the earth rotates about its axis 360° every 24 hours.

Practically everyone in the ancient, Christian, classical, and medieval world opted for the first explanation -- not the second.  The problem was not that there was no evidence for the first but that there was even less evidence for the second.  A false scientific principle was born: “absence of evidence” means “evidence of absence.”  It was the 17th century work of Lutheran Johannes Kepler to dismiss the Copernican assumption that planetary orbits must be reliant on circles and postulate the accurate heliocentric model.  He did overcome the dogma of the day with regard to this and did observe a great deal of skepticism and rejection but in the end he actually employed laws of planetary motion to prove the heliocentric model.  The problem was fixed not by rejecting the dogma of the day but by employing the laws to deal with the problems in the theory.

Groupthink today is doing the same thing -- now to discredit the Biblical integrity.  Absence of evidence has become evidence of absence in the hands of liberals and progressives.  They have become the dogmatic ones who insist that just about everything in the Biblical timeline and record must be suspect.  Archeology is proving to be the Kepler of the day, finding evidence where there was thought to be none and thus proving the Biblical timeline must be dealt with.  The example of the existence of Biblical peoples like the Hittites who were once thought to be myth until archeological record provided the evidence.  The same could be said about the Pontius Pilate's existence.  Groupthink today has marshaled the forces of a false science which is no longer open to challenge or question to insist that evolution must be the only explanation for the origins of life and all things.  We have a false science that refuses any challenge as opposed to the real science which does not automatically presume that a lack of evidence is evidence of the lack of truth.  Maybe we need a few Lutheran Keplers today to poke necessary holes in so many lines of thought that have become truth that must be held and dare not be questioned -- in everything from the origins of life and all things to sexual desire, from gender identity to the shape of marriage, from euthanasia to reproductive technology.  

Real science is never above the challenge and real science does not run away from any real confrontation.  The reality, however, is that we have in our culture, educational system, and government policy things that parade as science that are charlatans and liars.  Christianity is neither the source of this untruth nor is it the power behind it.  We are the victims of a conspiracy of lies, half-truths, and errors that have been half baked into unassailable truths that are now governing just about everything in our lives -- from the university to the legislature to the business domain.

Who controls the narrative. . .

In the months and weeks gone by we have seen political news, social commentary, and even what passes for religious reporting defined less by facts or truth than ideology.  While this is nothing new, the rarity of news that is given without commentary or slant is harder and harder to find and even more difficult to trust -- given the skepticism of our times.  The charge is laid against propaganda that masquerades as news and ideology that passes itself off as truth.  Where did we learn this?

There was a time in which the bias of media was well known and understood.  Even medium sized cities had two strong newspapers and media outlets so that the bias of one was offset by the bias of the other.  Even then, it is was less likely to bury the facts under commentary as much as it might be how the facts were treated.  When did that change?  Was it the loss of the newspapers as a powerful source of news and commentary?  Was it the invention of the news media?  Could it have been the government?  

Christopher Daly chronicles the government involvement in propaganda that substitutes as news or fact in the Smithsonian.  You can read it all there but in summary it tells the story of how President Woodrow Wilson's administration sought to control one of the pillars of democracy by implementing a plan to control, manipulate and censor all news coverage, on a scale never seen in U.S. history.  The freedom of the press is lauded as one of the most important pillars on which democracy rests but following the lead of the Germans and British, Wilson's administration used propaganda and censorship to effectively control what Americans heard and what they thought.  It ended up being an all-out war against the freedom of the press entered into because of a world war.  There have been plenty of recent articles on how ideology and governmental policy have constrained the opposition or challenge to the party line as well as become an effective wall to prevent certain truths or subjects from being openly discussed in the media.  You can read all about it but my concern is how the control of the narrative cedes this control to those who oppose you and how it affects the faith.

Christianity has done a pretty good job surrendering the narrative to those who oppose Biblical, creedal, and confessional doctrine and practice.  The only press space given to religious stories both in the public media and in social media is that which supports or extends the generally liberal or progressive view of things overall.  Consider the debate over Christian nationalism and how the media has chosen to portray not simply that subject but to define who fits under that umbrella.  Long ago the conservative Christian theological and moral position became a pariah on university campuses and among the intellectual elite in culture and politics.  It is not simply a matter of what is told but how it is told.  Consider how the Alabama Supreme Court ruling on the status of fertilized eggs, embryos, and fetuses created by reproductive technology has been covered.  Again, it is not simply a matter of whether we hear the story but the lens through which the story is told.

I realize that to many Christians this is a messy thing and they do not want to get their hands dirty.  Neither do I.  But I also realize that unless we reclaim the narrative and learn how to separate the ideology from the truth, we may end up not simply persona non grata but people without access to the public square at all.  Surely this is what is trying to happen in Finland with its persecution of MP Paivi Rasanen and Bishop Juhana Pohjola.  It is not enough to be acquitted when charged.  We must learn how to express ourselves and speak forth the truth in an age increasingly unfriendly to and without access to this Biblical truth and moral perspective.  By no means should we be mean or resentful.  We must be reasoned but no less passionate than the ideological enemies of the truth of God's Word against whom we are fighting.  We must proceed in full awareness that the media no longer guarantee a fair hearing to our cause and that they have become ideologically biased against the true Gospel and its practice.  But we must not surrender the narrative to their distortions or to the slant given them by the progressive worldview that underlies such opposition.  Perhaps this is exactly what Jesus meant in saying that the sons of darkness are shrewer than the children of Light or we must be wise as serpents while still as innocent as doves.  The time has long ago passed when we can could on any news outlet or social media to present the objective truth on just about anything and this also includes the objective truth of God's Word.