The ELCA, the Episcopal Church, and the Integration of Church Teaching on Sexual Morality With Christian Doctrine

“You have the words of eternal life.  We have come to believe and are convinced that you are the Holy One of God.”  Peter’s response to Jesus in today’s Gospel reading (John 6:60-69) encapsulates the central teaching of our Catholic Christian faith.

As the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America recently voted to allow individual parishes to decide whether to call non-celibate homosexuals to the pulpit, Michael Perry asks “What does the ELCA get that, say, the magisterium doesn’t? Or vice versa?”

I'll leave it to others to more directly address the theology of the body that underlies the Magisterium’s teaching on sexual morality.  Instead, I wonder whether one possible answer lies in the Catholic Church's general integrity in proclaiming the Deposit of the Faith left by Christ  By “integrity” here, I mean not not so much soundness and candor (although those are vital as well) but a sense of cohesion and completeness.  When the Catholic Church teaches about morality, including a proper attitude toward the body and the gift of sexuality, that teaching cannot be divorced from the Church’s robust theology and understanding of Christ.

Might a departure from traditional Christian teaching on sexual morality set the stage for a broader dis-integration, not only of church structure and world-wide communion, but of basic Christian doctrine?  In this regard, the example of the Episcopal Church in the United States should be sobering.  Others have written widely about how the Episcopal Church has lost nearly half of its membership and now risks being separated from the larger Anglican communion, especially in Africa and Asia.  But I mean to emphasize something different here, the attendant dilution and adulteration of Christian doctrine.  As a former Episcopalian, I speak from personal experience about how something that was portrayed as but a single issue that could be discretely addressed instead proved to be the first step on an ever longer journey away from that Deposit of Faith.  It remains to be seen whether the ELCA will follow that same path.

In the general news media, and often for the typical Episcopalian in the pews, the great debate inside the Episcopal Church has been understood as a focused division about homosexuality among a group of fellow believers who otherwise stand largely in agreement on the basic theology and canons of the Episcopal Church.  That simply was not and is not the case.  Perhaps in theory, and certainly in the minds of some Episcopalians, a person could be orthodox in Christian faith generally and yet support recognition of committed same-sex unions.  But the active vanguard of the liberal movement in the Episcopal Church has hardly been limited to the matter of gay rights in its general desire to remake and redefine that denomination.

Within the Episcopal Church, those who took the leading role in challenging traditional church teaching on homosexuality tended to be quite liberal, even radical, in their thinking about moral questions and theology generally.  Leading gay priests have published books, not only advocating the full inclusion of gays in the church, but further insisting that monogamy was unrealistic and should not be expected of gays.  Indeed, monogamy in general gets little respect in the Episcopal Church today.  Divorced and remarried priests are common.  In fact, multiple divorces and remarriages, even for a bishop, are no bar to leadership in liberal Episcopal dioceses and parishes.  In effect, a form of serial polygamy enjoys growing tolerance in the Episcopal Church.  Having retreated from expectations of fidelity to monogamy among adults, the Episcopal Church not surprisingly has been in no a position to teach sexual morality to young people.  Instead, church leaders often trot out the “safe sex” canard that dominates non-religious discussions, largely defaulting to secularized approaches to the matter.

In addition, while there are exceptions, support for embracing same-sex sexuality has tended to go hand-in-hand with support for abortion.  Reversing traditional Episcopal positions on legal protection of unborn human life, the formal General Convention resolution in place today expresses “unequivocal opposition” to any executive, legislative, or judicial limitation on access to abortion.  The division in voting among the delegates on abortion and gay rights resolutions tend to be parallel.  The new Dean of the Episcopal Divinity School, a lesbian and leader in the gay rights movement, is also a board member of NARAL Pro-Choice and most notoriously has described “abortion as a blessing.”

Importantly, along with moral teaching, Christian theology is being subjected to ongoing post-modern revision inside the Episcopal Church (or at least those dioceses most aligned with the national church).  In liberal Episcopal venues, the death of Christ on the cross as a propitiation for our sins often is seen as an embarrassment to be quietly neglected or openly denigrated as retrograde.  Liberal Episcopal seminary teachers, priests, and bishops regard the resurrection of Christ as nothing more than a mythical message of hope, not as a factual description of an empty tomb.  The Nicene Creed is re-interpreted, so that its statements of the faith are watered-down into allegory and symbol, bearing little of their traditional meaning.

In liberal Episcopalian re-imaging, Jesus is left to molder in an abandoned grave, while Peter’s response to Jesus in today’s Gospel – that Jesus has “the words of eternal life” and is“the Holy One of God” – becomes unthinkable.  Even if Jesus was touched by holiness, he is demoted to one spiritual guru among many from many different religions and cultures, all of which are equally viable paths to God.  And with the most recent 2009 General Convention of the Episcopal Church, that liberal wing plainly is in the driver's seat.  No wonder that many fear the Episcopal Church could be moving into a Post-Christian Era.

Will the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America be able to avoid the same fate as the Episcopal Church, not only by averting a break-up of the denomination, but by resisting the disintegration of Christian teaching?  Is it possible to pluck out one thread from millennia of Christian teaching on sexual morality without starting to unravel the entire doctrinal garment?

Greg Sisk