Co-missioners,
Last week Mike Hoy gave us a brief though closely documented account of ongoing efforts by the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) to reshape its ethnic and racial configuration.
And no wonder the effort is being made. From the moment it began operations on January 1, 1988, the ELCA has been accurately described as “the whitest denomination in America.” It understates the matter grossly to say that this has provoked steady consternation in ELCA leadership circles. Well, of course. One of the driving goals of the so-called Committee for a New Lutheran Church which cobbled the ELCA together in the mid-1980’s was to induce a significant mitigation of its overwhelming whiteness. Thirty-eight years later that goal is far from being achieved as Mike reminded us last week. Much greater progress has been made toward the related aim of breaking the pattern of male dominance in affairs both theological and ecclesiastical. That the majority of the ELCA’s synodical bishops in 2025 are women speaks vividly to this. Then again, hardly any of these bishops are black women.
Hence the latest efforts to undo this that Mike described last week. Today he turns his attention to the theology that underpins those efforts. He’ll find it wanting. Why he does this is something to look closely for as you read. It touches on an issue that is very much on our minds at Crossings these days. Kurt Hendel spoke to it in the two-part essay of his we published earlier this month. Our annual conference next January will be devoted to it. What is it, we ask, that prompts and shapes the kind of behavior that God delights in? Is it the law of God that tells us what we ought to do, or is it the gospel of Christ Crucified that lays the foundation of what we get to do?
In what follows, Mike will give an unequivocal answer to this question. We present it in the hope that you’ll think about it carefully and help us advertise it. Ensuring that Christ gets the credit especially on issues like this is what Crossings is about.
A quick final note: registration for the January conference will open in a few days. We hope you’ll sign up. We’d be ever so glad to see you there.
Peace and Joy,
Co-editor Jerry Burce
for the Crossings Community
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Civil Law, the Gospel, and the Church:
Theological Reflections on the ELCA’s Path Toward Authentic Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility (DEIA)
by Michael Hoy
Michael Hoy
Part Two: Going Deeper with the ELCA
Continuing from Part One—
I do not write this essay as one unattached to the ELCA. It has been my church home since its inception in 1988, and with roots in its predecessor church bodies prior to that. But having said that, what the ELCA does matters to me. It particularly matters to me, as it should be to all who associate with it, in regard to how faithful (or unfaithful) it has been and presently is to the gospel which is so central to our life together. In that regard, I restate and emphasize a powerful sentence in the report of the Strategy for Authentic Diversity (STAD) task force that provides a clue to this matter of faithfulness: “[T]he church must embody Christ’s mission through the lens of a [the?!] crucified Jesus, who gathers all to himself in one family devoid of hierarchies and unhealthy power structures.” I hope and pray that this crucified Jesus is still central to the “proclamation of the gospel” as also St. Paul emphasized (1 Cor. 1:18-31).
My doctor-father, the sainted + Carl Braaten, was among those who called into question that faithfulness of the ELCA. He did this not once, but twice, in the “Call to Faithfulness” conferences (1990, 1992) at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota. [30] The ELCA was just a baby then, but it was his perception that the baby was being nurtured on the wrong milk. Not that I always agreed with Carl on his assessments; but he did have a passion for faithfulness to the gospel. So do I.
I have, for some time now, been uncomfortable with the ELCA’s peculiar way of speaking about itself as “this church” (small “c”) to distinguish itself as a “human organization.” I suspect that it wants to be faithful to what it understands as the whole people of God in “the Church” (capitalized). To understand my point here, I would raise again the ecclesiology to which we are confessionally subscribed:
The church is the assembly of saints in which the gospel is taught purely and the sacraments are administered rightly. And it is enough for the true unity of the church to agree concerning the teaching of the gospel and the administration of the sacraments. It is not necessary that human traditions, rites, or ceremonies instituted by human beings be alike everywhere (Augsburg Confession VII; italics mine).
I suspect that for many years—maybe too many years—I gave the ELCA a pass on this confessional understanding, assuming it was bending in the direction of the gospel’s embrace. Frankly, spending most of my years as a pastor-theologian in both the parish and academia, it never seemed to matter much what the institution was doing in its seemingly zealous fidelity and preoccupation with its own constitutional polity. Of course, I know that the constitution and policies and social statements of the ELCA are an effort to establish its own canon law. However, I also know what Luther did with the canon law when he determined that it had undermined the gospel. [31] I also note that on numerous occasions the reforming confessors at Augsburg raised evangelical objections to church councils and their rulings on the grounds that these were not in harmony with the gospel. I was holding the ELCA accountable to its own constitutional claim that “All power in the Church belongs to our Lord Jesus Christ, its head. All actions of this church are to be carried out under his rule and authority. [ELCA constitution 3.01].” Comes the question: what happens in crunch time? Will the rule and authority of Jesus the Christ be invoked, or only the constitution?
I was prompted to raise this question when I came across the following line in the effort of the Commission for a Renewed Lutheran Church (CRLC) to promote the principles of diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA) as scriptural and confessional.
The impetus for DEIA initiatives is deeply biblical, belongs to the best of the Lutheran heritage, and to the essence of the Church, that is, of the body of Christ (Gal. 3:28). The implementation of DEIA principles within this church’s governance and educational practices addresses current challenges in both Church and society and leverages them as opportunities to witness and live out both God’s law toward justice and the gospel’s embrace of all people.” [32]
Please don’t misunderstand my concern here. I do think that DEIA makes for good civil law—and maybe even more especially so in our deeply racist (or even fascist) era where laws are less faithful to divine laws. Even Martin Luther King, Jr. noted this. “There are two types of laws,” he wrote. “There are just and there are unjust laws.” [33] But good civil law, which Christians do well to lift up together with all people of good will, is not, nor can it ever be, the gospel. It was the gospel—the “gospel of freedom,” and all the real freedom that gospel brings—that gave King his impetus to stand up for freedom even against the unjust laws against humanity, particularly for poor and oppressed blacks.
Hence the question the CRLC begs when it speaks of “the implementation of DEIA principles.” How will these be implemented? If guided solely by DEIA principles, the law and only the law is at work coercing (or “leveraging”) people not to discriminate against others unfairly, even going so far as to impose God’s fair retribution and judgment upon them. On these grounds the ELCA as an institution (“this church”) can say (and already does, I think) that it will not discriminate against people unfairly on the basis of color, language, gender, and the like. Such coercion is what the law does.
From Canva
But the gospel is not based on coercion. Instead it takes our moral and theological failure before God (coram deo) into account, recognizing how it places us under judgment. From this emerges a given truth of God’s new creation: the gospel unfairly gives to sinners (including the discriminators) not what they have coming to them but what Christ has coming to him when he goes to the cross, making our sins his own and replacing this with his righteousness as our own. Thus is God’s love and forgiveness graced to us. Here is the freedom to love! And lest we place regrettable limits on love’s revolutionary quality, love goes beyond justice to bring Christ’s new justice (forgiveness and grace) to bear upon people.
But this all points to the deeper theological matter that needs to be addressed in the ELCA—namely, the conflation or mixing of law and promise under the rubric of “justice and peace.” The CRLC seeks to make this agenda through DEIA a scriptural and confessional principle under the category of “Commitment to the Dignity of All People” in this sweeping assessment:
The core principles of the Lutheran understanding of the work of the Triune God undergird the ELCA support for Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility (DEIA) policies and education. [34]
Under this questionable assessment, creational diversity, which holds human beings accountable for repairing what is broken, is equated with the gospel’s diversity which trusts that the Christ is the one who repairs our brokenness on the cross. In the process Jesus is categorized like the prophets of the law in living out “God’s call to respond to the needs of anyone who is marginalized and unjustly treated” rather than the one who takes our poor standing under the requirements of deserved justice and judgment and replaces it with his grace, etc. And with regard to the Lutheran tradition, the CRLC maintains “The Lutheran Confessions (Book of Concord) hold the government and the Church responsible for the well-being of vulnerable members of the community.” [35] Thus, our responsibility for the well-being of people (which is law) is put forward with no sense of the confessors’ (gospel) sense about that responsibility to which we are truly “called”—namely, our faithful answer that Christ crucified and risen is the very Responsum that we need and cannot live without, and which we boldly proclaim for all. [36]
To be sure, the CRLC skirts and mixes law and gospel in a manner that denies both their due Word(s) for us all. But this has been going on for far too many years under the aegis of the ELCA’s own “theology of the Word,” where law and gospel are not carefully distinguished as two very different Words of God, but considered part of the same Word of God. I had apparently glossed over this in my reading of the second chapter of the ELCA Constitution: “The proclamation of God’s message to us as both Law and Gospel is the Word of God, revealing judgment and mercy through word and deed, beginning with the Word in creation, continuing in the history of Israel, and centering in all its fullness in the person and work of Jesus Christ.” [2.02b] Regrettably, this can be twisted to mean that law and gospel are both the one Word of God; and when so fused, the law always wins out over the gospel. [37] But this would prompt a status confessionis for the very sake of the gospel—a call to faithfulness.
The ELCA clearly does not “go deeper” into the diagnosis that ultimately exposes us as the enemies of God who deserve judgment and condemnation. Conversely, because it does not go that deep, it also does not lift us up in the full promising value of the prognosis: how it is that we are reconciled to God through the mercies of the crucified and risen Christ to trust and live as his own. But if one risks going that deep, taking that theological dive, and rising again in the promise (as in baptism), then the lens, the impetus, of the crucified Christ leads us to how we get to live, not simply how we have to live, as God’s people of promise.
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Endnotes
[30] Carl E. Braaten, Because of Christ: Memoirs of a Lutheran Theologian, (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans, 2010), 190-192.
[31] On December 10, 1520 at Wittenberg, Luther burned the canon law, adding also the papal bull that excommunicated him from the church (Exsurge Domine. Would such an act today constitute “willful disregard of the constitutions”? Or would it be seen as an act of faith vis-à-vis the constitutions own faith-statement? The arguments of the LCA who supported the constitutional inclusions are, in my estimation, critically suspect in light of how the constitution often gets invoked in crisis situations—i.e., without gospel integrity; cf. Trexler, Anatomy of a Merger, 144-145.
[32] “Response,” 29.
[33] King, “Letter,” 293. Italics are his.
[34] “Response,” 28.
[35] Ibid., 28-29. The balance of this section reads as follows: “Creation stories tell of the goodness of the majestic diversity that flows from God’s creative and sustaining power. (Genesis 1, 2.) Jesus lived out God’s call to respond to the needs of anyone who is marginalized and unjustly treated. At Pentecost the Holy Spirit signaled the divine intention for the Church to be inclusive of all peoples and languages by making the disciples able to communicate in the plurality of languages of their world (Acts 2:4). Paul explains in his letter to the Corinthians that within the diversity of the body of Christ some priority is given to those whom society despises or marginalizes: (1 Cor. 12:22).
2.2 Lutheran Heritage: Martin Luther championed the freedom and responsibility of Christians within the community. The Lutheran Confessions (Book of Concord) hold the government and the Church responsible for the well-being of vulnerable members of the community. Furthermore, from the beginning of the Reformation the Lutheran tradition highlighted the need of diversity of languages and cultures (i.e., the vernacular) in the proclamation of the Word and in the worship life of the Christian community (Luther’s An Open Letter on Translating 1530 and also Preface to The German Mass and Order of Divine Service 1526).
From the perspective of Lutheran ecclesiology, the Church is not merely an organization but an ekklesia—the people called, gathered and enlightened by God (Small Catechism, Article 3). This calling is not for the Church to perpetuate its own existence but to bear witness (with words and actions) to the saving work of Jesus Christ, heralding the imminent realization of God’s realm. As such, the Church as a human organization is transient, its ultimate purpose fulfilled in serving God’s purpose toward the well-being of all. The proclamation of the law and the gospel is central to this witness. God’s law (first use) compels us toward the enactment of justice, which demands denouncing evil and injustice. The second use of God’s law calls to repentance for both systemic sin and individual sins, including racism and patriarchy (ELCA Social Statements Race, Ethnicity, and Culture and Faith, Sexism and Justice). The good news of Jesus Christ (gospel) sets us free to seek (and delight in) the well-being of all people in the unique individuality in which God has created each one of us.
Moreover, the ELCA teaches that, “Faith is active in love; love calls for justice in the relationships and structures of society” (ELCA Social Statement Church in Society, A Lutheran Perspective) That is, as people justified by grace through faith, Lutherans are called to live out their faith in society by working toward a more just and inclusive world. This includes challenging systemic inequalities and ensuring that all members, regardless of race, ethnicity, sex, gender, or sexuality, are valued equally as part of God’s creation.”
[36] The words “called” (vocatio, Beruf) and “responsibility” (Antwort) have roots in forensic accountability, as in called to the witness stand, both before God (coram deo) as well as before others (coram hominibus). Cf. Robert W. Bertram, “From Reflection to Responsible Living: Where Do We Go From Here” (April 27, 1983); available online: https://crossings.org/from-reflection/. This point was lifted up in my formal presentation entitled, “A Crossings-Style-Theological Addressing of our Politically Polarized Society With Insights and Contributions from Robert W. Bertram’s ‘Political Preaching’” (currently unpublished).
[37] I credit my friend and colleague Steven Kuhl for lifting up this insight on the ELCA Constitution Chapter 2: “Like Barth, and the 20th Century ‘theology of the word,’ Law and Gospel are fused, seen as being on par. There is no sense that the gospel categorically is the Word of God that overrules, trumps the law. I suspect we have a lingering presence of the third use of the law and that makes law the substance of ‘Christian ethics.’ You’re right in saying that for the most part the framers of the Constitution are oblivious to an Elertian understanding of the distinction of law and gospel, that I think is also clearly stated in Article IV of the Apology.”
