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Your Turn / Re: New CPH Large Catechism
« Last post by Tom Eckstein on Today at 05:28:34 PM »I don't agree with your take on slavery or the 10th Commandment. As for slavery, if nothing else, treating it as a punishment for sin that Christians must accept as a reality of the fall does not apply to any concrete case. To go back to Matthew Cochran's complaint about Rom. 13 and 5th Commandment, if someone came to enslave you or your children, would you have the Christian freedom and responsibility to defend yourself and your family from that fate with violent force? Why? I think it makes much more sense to acknowledge that God does not explicitly forbid slavery in Scripture except in so far as loving your neighbor as yourself is incompatible with claiming ownership of your neighbor.
There is a lot here I agree with, and I think a lot of people in the LCMS agree with. I think the LCMS, at the congregational level and national level, has been forthright and effective on issues like abortion and gay marriage. Transgenderism and critical race theory are comparatively new phenomena and people tend to talk past one another. It takes time just to get on the same page of what exactly we're talking about and hash things out from there. A shoot-from-the-hip attack on things ends up a) being easily treated as debunked a short time later, b) becomes fodder for opponents to claim we live up to their stereotypes of us, and c) never coming across as pastoral. You have to be careful not to say anything that is going to make a short term impact but be a long term liability. But given how quickly and drastically things are changing, I can understand how people would lose patience with an overly-careful, inoffensive approach and demand a more forthright, bold, and radical alternative to the culture, and I can understand how that might come more likely from a younger crowd.
As I read your post, though, what strikes me is that it sounds like you're describing widespread frustration with a strategy. CPH and the LCMS are not playing aggressively enough and are getting beat. It is like fans watching their team losing because the coach's game plan is too predictable and doesn't work. But it is one thing to be frustrated and say your team's play calling is terrible, it is quite another to speculate that the coach is secretly throwing the game because he has been paid off by the other team.
Had various confessional bloggers reviewed this LC volume and declared is disappointingly tame and bland, a missed opportunity to address some issues head on, too conciliatory to the culture, and not what is needed for the future of the synod given our cultural context, that would be one thing. Some would agree, others wouldn't, the reviews might start some good conversations, and maybe somebody's self-published "what the CPH volume should have said" book would be in the works. But that isn't what happened. The book was declared an example of wokeism. Perfectly orthodox authors were accused of denying the Scriptures and Confessions. It was yanked from distribution as though it were not just disappointingly bland but poisonous and heterodox. The editors and authors weren't just making bad coaching decisions for our team, they were declared to be on the other team. That is where I call b.s. and dismiss the ruckus as a tantrum and worse than a tantrum. It was/is friendly fire.
I just saw a seminarian who appears to be a good man and orthodox called "a son of the devil" with appended quote from John 8. I will agree with you that there is friendly fire going on, and it is distasteful.
My post is not so much a disagreement about strategy though, although I can see how it appears that way. Frankly, I don't think most of the synod would agree that according to the tenth commandment (not the ninth, as I said mistakenly), a wife is a possession of her husband. That is the plain reading of the commandment and of Luther's explanation, putting one's wife in a list with "wife, workers, and animals." (I don't have the German in front of me, but I doubt he is using the word "employee", but something closer to "slave.") I don't think most of the synod, "confessional" or not, would be able to agree with Walther that "the emancipation of women" was a bad thing, not without a whole lot of explanations and contextualizations to pull the stinger out. The problem is that quietly many of us, most of us, have internalized the values of the enlightenment, or whatever you want to call it.
Walther calls it "humanism" in the essay he wrote about slavery during the civil war. He gave another series of lectures on Communism and Socialism that I should have, but have not read. Walther was not avoiding his version of "wokeism" when he saw it being absorbed by the German immigrants in St. Louis. He was directly confronting it, attacking it at the roots, by saying slavery as such is actually not forbidden by God's Word, because God's Word does not promise us we are going to have temporal, bodily liberty in this world. Women are under the rule of their husbands as part of their curse in the fall. Slavery exists as a punishment for sin. This is the way he argued in the middle of the civil war where the consequences of doing so were as serious as they would be for us to speak in this way, or at least nearly so.
It's not merely a problem of strategy. I agree with you that this is not what I'm going to lead with when talking to people who know nothing, or next to nothing, about Christianity. But the reality is to speak this way is going to cause problems with Christians who have been Christians their entire lives.
The problem isn't just strategic, it's that to a large degree we in the LCMS accept the premises of the enlightenment. It was unequivocally evil that white Christians owned slaves and that women didn't have property rights. If we agree with that, then we are also forced to concede a whole lot of other things. And it leads inexorably to agreement that "discrimination" against homosexuals is just another species of all the other discrimination Christians used to do that we now agree is wrong.
It's like the creation/evolution issue. If you preach to a cultured despiser of religion that they are sinners and Christ died to save them, they say, "Your bible says that, but it also says God created the world in 6 days, which we now know to be false." Preaching the Gospel faithfully necessitates that you chop down that oak. No, cosmologists are not a higher authority than God's Word. We are not going to allow you to hide behind the authority of scientists from Christ's call to repent, because God has set a date on which He will judge the world through this Jesus.
That's the problem we are having with feminism etc., except that here, most Lutherans are unwilling to fully believe that when God lists a man's wife along with his ox and his servants, He is not just accommodating the social realities of the times, but telling the truth about His ordering of the relationship between a man and his wife. This undercuts our preaching. Christ died for our sins becomes a comforting message we are allowed to preach in our dwindling congregations. When it comes up against the spirit of the age, we are not able to confront it and call it lies, and what it actually is--from the devil. If we do we may end up smeared in the press, with our churches visited by vandals and terrorists, and large numbers of our parishioners may leave.
Actually if we preach the Bible faithfully, we are calling for a radical transformation of our entire society, implicitly. But the problem is that many of us are embarrassed of what the Scripture teaches about women, slavery, and downstream homosexuality and transgenderism. Or we don't accept it. The hope is that by avoiding these issues we will still be allowed to preach the forgiveness of sins and administer the sacraments. But we are neutering ourselves. And in the long run they are not going to allow us to do that either. Soon we will not be permitted to openly confront homosexual/transgender ideology without legal penalties. Even Harrison has basically said that in print. So whether through unconsciously absorbing the enlightenment, or as a strategy to avoid confrontation with the devil's strongholds, the cost of our not speaking clearly on these "social-political" issues has been to paint us into an ever more narrow corner.
As for the 10th Commandment, I think you read way too much into the ordering of the words as you do, and misuse the general category of ownership. You're left calling for a society in which a man owns those who work for him. People who are manservants or maidservants just need to get used to the fact that as a punishment for the fall into sin, their boss owns them. To take a new job is the equivalent of having an illicit affair, to desert your owner and give into the coveting of another employer, who should have urged you to stay and do your duty to your owner.
It is a commandment against coveting, not a positive commandment for the particular arrangement of things coveted that it lists. Everyone understands that the phrase "ox or donkey" is not necessarily literal or exclusive to those kinds of animals, but is an example that stands in for any neighbor's means of support and possessions generally whether or not he owns an ox or a donkey. And I take it for granted that everyone understands that "my wife" is possession in the sense of "that which corresponds or pertains to me" not in the sense of literal ownership. We learn from St. Paul that the wife also belongs to her husband, but the husband also belongs to his wife. They go together. They belong to each other.
We are not to covet our neighbor's house (more than a literal building, but his whole station and place in the world) nor are to covet any of the individual components of that make up that place, which includes family, employment, possessions, etc. To use the catechism to argue for the ownership of wives by their husbands is force the words to carry way more weight than they're capable of. If nothing else, to make so much of the sexes of the people involved would mean it is okay to covet your neighbor's husband. Unless, of course, "your neighbor" can only refer to men.
Peter, I agree with your concerns about Hess' view of the 10th commandment and a wife being viewed as "property." I don't think that's the point of the 10th commandment, that is, that wives are "owned" by a husband. The point is that we should not covet what God has given to another - and God has given husbands and wives to each other in marriage.
As for Hess' understanding of 1st Tim. 2:12 teaching that women should not have ANY KIND of authority over men in ANY KIND of situation, I think he is in error. Paul is speaking of the spiritual/Christological authority of the pastoral office within the Divine Service and not of ANY KIND of authority - especially within the left-hand kingdom. In other words, Paul is not addressing the situation of a female CEO in a secular company having authority over her male employees nor is Paul forbidding a woman from being president of the United States. Hess is confusing two different kinds of authority, IMO.