Repost: Marriage and Culture

Given the Iowa Supreme Court's recent impostition of same-sex marriage and the re-submission of "civil union" legislation in the Illinois Legislature, permit me to re-post this entry from last May. The claim by homosexual "advocates" is that the male-female distinction in marriage is only part of the "religious institution" of marriage, and thus ought not continue to be enshrined in civil law. It is a claim that relies (and apparently successfully) on the common ignorance of the history of Western Civilization and American law.

---

Talking about Marriage and our Culture (originally posted 17 May 2008)

I meant to post this several months ago, but in the light of the California Supreme Court's redefinition of "marriage" this week and the conversation it is eliciting in some segments of the Church, it seemed more urgent to transcribe this portion of an interview with John Witte, Jr., from a recent edition of Mars Hill Audio. In the interview, which draws upon his book God's Joust, God's Justice: Law and Religion in the Western Tradition (Eerdmans, 2006), Prof. Witte addresses why law needs to be understood in the context of its relation with other practices and disciplines, including religion.

Ken Meyers' last question in the interview is:

"One of the areas in which there's a lot of contention about morality and law right now are marriage laws. I know you've spent a lot of time studying marriage and family -- history of marriage and family. It seems that in some circles there's a reluctance to assert that our laws concerning family, what constitutes a family, what constitutes a marriage, should be based in some moral vision, that that itself is seen as a transgression of the Social Contract for a kind of pluralism. You think that it’s entirely possible to make moral arguments in the construction of laws governing family."

Witte responds:

"I think those are absolutely imperative to offer as alternatives in the discourse.

"It’s important to remember that the architects of our understanding of a social and government Contract (people like John Locke or Jean Jacques Rousseau and some of their American followers and contemporaries) had as their First Contract -- before the contract of society and the contract of government -- the First Contract was the Contract of Marriage. In Locke’s First and Second Treatise that’s presupposed. In Jean Jacques Rousseau’s work that’s presupposed. James Madison and Thomas Jefferson both presupposed that as well.

"The Marital Contract is the First Contract. It's the First School of Justice. It's the first chrysalis in which nurture, education, and habits of citizenship are encouraged in the population. It's only on the strength of that contract, from atavistic individuals in nature to this first institution, that we can then begin to build a notion of a Social Contract and, beyond that, a Government Contract.

"And that's an ancient insight that goes all the way back to Aristotle, that goes back to his "Politics" in Nicomachean Ethics, where he said the first institution of the polis is the family.

"So if that is the presupposition in Western understandings of how we organize our polities, it seems to me that it is a non-starter for us to be debating the essentials of marital and family norms, and procedures and policies, and exclude from that discourse all of the rich cultural, philosophical, and theological traditions that have helped to cultivate our understanding of marriage and family, and how it works within the broader polity.

"And religious communities that bracket their theological discourse, that choose to forego a deep reflection on the goods and the goals of what marriage and family life are all about in an attempt to be politically correct, or an attempt to avoid a political fence -- or in an attempt to First Amendment-ize themselves per the caricature of the separation of Church and State -- in my view, both are engaging in theological bracketing and trimming that's unnecessary. What they're ultimately engaging in [is] an omission from the discourse that's going to harm the polity in the long term.

"And that’s not to say that there's a preordained result about how these marriage and family debates are going to work out at the State level. But it is to say that, if we're going to have a real, serious discourse about changing 2500-year-old patterns about how marriage and family life come together in the West, we better do that with full ventilation of all of the philosophical, theological, moral, economic, sociological issues at stake."

Thus far, I see few signs of a "real, serious discourse" in my "religious community."

John Witte, Jr., is the Jonas Robitscher Professor of Law and Ethics at Emory Universty, where he is also serves as Director of the Center for the Study of Law and Religion. You can download or purchase the entire interview here. While you're at it, subscribe to Mars Hill Audio.

---

Stem Cells and Diabetes

It ought not go without emphasis: the experimental stem cell treatment for type-1 diabetes being reported on uses the patient's own stem cells.

No embryos (you were one once) needed to be sacrificed.

This Brazilian experiment used only 23 people. Watch for larger trials in Brazil and the US.

Alleluia! Christ Is Risen!

Come, ye faithful, raise the strain
    of triumphant gladness!
God hath brought his Israel
    into joy from sadness:
loosed from Pharoah's bitter yoke
    Jacob's sons and daughters,
led them with unmoistened foot
    through the Red Sea waters.

'Tis the spring of souls today:
    Christ hath burst his prison,
and from three days' sleep in death
    as a sun hath risen;
all the winter of our sins,
    long and dark, is flying
from his light, to whom we give
    laud and praise undying.

Now the queen of seasons, bright
    with the day of splendor,
with the royal feast of feasts,
    comes its joy to render;
comes to glad Jerusalem,
    who with true affection
welcomes in unwearied strains
    Jesus' resurrection.

Neither might the gates of death,
    nor the tomb's dark portal,
nor the watchers, nor the seal
    hold thee as a mortal:
but today amidst the twelve
    thou didst stand, bestowing
that thy peace which evermore
    passeth human knowing.

Alleluia now we cry
    to our King Immortal,
who triumphant burst the bars
    of the tomb's dark portal;
alleluia, with the Son
    God the Father praising;
alleluia yet again
    to the Spirit raising.

        St. John of Damascus, c. 676-749
        tr. John Mason Neale, 1818-1866

South Side Lutherans to Celebrate Easter

Zion Evangelical Lutheran Church, 1534 S. Easton Avenue, Peoria, begins celebrating the Resurrection of Jesus Christ on Easter Sunday, April 12, with a “Sonrise” service of Holy Communion at 6:30 am. The observance of Easter continues with a second Holy Communion service at 10 am. The Rev. Steven P. Tibbetts, STS, Pastor at Zion, will be preacher and celebrant. All are welcome.

For information on other special services to better prepare for the Easter celebration, see here or the church's web site.

A congregation of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, Zion has been proclaiming the Gospel from the South Side of Peoria since 1894. The church is located at the corner of Easton Avenue and Hayes Street, one block west of the intersection of Jefferson and Western, on the South Side of Peoria. For more information call (309) 637-9150 or view Zion’s web site at www.zionpeoria.org.

April Seventh, Twenty Oh Nine

One year ago today my prostate gland was removed surgically and, since then, there have been no further signs of the cancer that was contained in it. Thanks be to God.

This afternoon shortly after four o'clock, I went to vote in the Peoria city election. I was the 31st person to cast a vote in my precinct. The 32nd came in while I was voting. The poll watchers and election workers were having a very slow, boring day.

Renewal of Commitment to Priestly Service

The pews on the Gospel side and the side aisles were full as I entered the Cathedral of Saint Mary of the Immaculate Conception in Peoria a couple minutes before one o'clock. The Epistle side was empty, set aside for the priests of the Diocese of Peoria who would in just a few moments process into Cathedral for the annual Chrism Mass, where they would renew their vows and Bishop Daniel Jenky, CSC, would bless the oils to be used in the coming year for sacramental use.

After his sermon, Bishop Jenky invited his priests to stand:

Bishop: My brothers, today we celebrate the memory of the first Eucharist, at which our Lord Jesus Christ shared with his apostles and with us his call to the priestly service of his Church. Now, in the presence of your bishop and God's holy people, are you ready to renew your own dedication to Christ as priests of his new covenant?

Priests: I am.

Bishop: At your ordination you accepted the responsibilities of the priesthood out of love for the Lord Jesus and his Church. Are you resolved to unite yourselves more closely to Christ and try to become more like him by joyfully sacrificing your own pleasure and ambition to bring his peace and love to your brothers and sisters?

Priests: I am.

Bishop: Are you resolved to be faithful ministers of the mysteries of God, to celebrate the Eucharist and the other liturgical service with sincere devotion? Are you resolved to imitate Jesus Christ, the head and shepherd of the Church, by teaching Christian faith without thinking of your own profit, solely for the well-being of the people you were sent to serve?

Priests: I am.

Bishop: (to the people) My brothers and sisters, pray for your priests. Ask the Lord to bless them with the fullness of his love, to help them be faithful ministers of Christ the High Priest, so that they will be able to lead you to him, the fountain of your salvation.

People: Lord Jesus Christ, hear and answer our prayer.

Bishop: Pray also for me that despite my own unworthiness I may faithfully fulfill the office of the apostle which Jesus Christ has entrusted to me. Pray that I may become more like our High Priest and Good Shepherd, the teacher and servant of all, and so be a genuine sign of Christ's loving presence among you.

People: Lord Jesus Christ, hear and answer our prayer.

Bishop: May the Lord in his love keep you close to him always, and may e bring all of us, his priests and people, to eternal life.

Ah, if only we Lutherans could have something like this...

Peoria Journal Star: Holy Traditions

Check out the front page of this morning's Peoria Journal Star! Here's the entire article, posted it its entirety here for non-commercial use under a Creative Commons license.

---

Christians parade into Holy Week with Palm Sunday procession

By PATRICK OLDENDORF of the Journal Star
Posted Apr 05, 2009 @ 07:05 PM
Last update Apr 05, 2009 @ 10:02 PM
PEORIA — Sunday marked the start of Holy Week, the most somber seven days on the Christian calendar.

"The center of the Christian faith is Jesus' death and resurrection," said the Rev. Steven Tibbetts, pastor of Zion Evangelical Lutheran Church. "This is the week we remember the story."

The members of his congregation, like many other Christians, started the week with the celebration of Palm Sunday.

The service at Zion, 1534 S. Easton Ave., began with a procession in which members carried palms above their heads to symbolize the people of Jerusalem placing palms on the ground as Jesus entered the town five days before his death. They placed the palms down because they had proclaimed Jesus to be the son of David and a king, even if he wasn't acting like a typical one.

"Jesus road into town on a donkey," Tibbetts said to the congregation of about 50. "That would be like if when President Obama came to town, we parked an old Chevrolet at the airport and told him to drive himself."

he palm procession and other re-enactments that take place throughout Holy Week, such as acting out the passion of the Christ, are not new traditions, Tibbetts said.

"Christians have been doing this since the 200s and 300s, since before Christianity was legal," he said.

Holy Week is a somber remembrance of "everything Jesus went through," Tibbetts said.

By physically acting out the occurrences of Holy Week, Christians can actually show what they believe Christ went through.

"We do this to show it's not just words in a book," Tibbetts said. "We do it so people can actually see it with their eyes and feel it with their hearts."

On Thursday, Christians will remember the Last Supper, and on Friday, also known as Good Friday, they will gather to pray in remembrance of the day Jesus died.

"We focus on his death on Friday," Tibbetts said. "There are no decorations (in the church), everything is very sparse."

For its Easter Sunday celebration, Zion will start the day at 6:30 a.m., and the church will remain undecorated.

"We will bring things, like flowers, in as the sun rises," Tibbetts said. "It represents the resurrection of Christ."

Holy Week is a time that brings more people into the church.

"A lot of people came for Palm Sunday," Tibbetts said. "(Easter) Sunday will be big for us, too."

Patrick Oldendorf can be reached at 686-3196 or poldendorf@pjstar.com

---

South Side Lutherans Celebrate Holy Week

A Palm Sunday procession opens the celebration of Holy Week at Zion Evangelical Lutheran Church, 1534 S. Easton Avenue, Peoria, this Sunday, April 5, at 9 am. The service will continued with the reading of the Passion of Jesus Christ according to St. Mark and Holy Communion. The Rev. Steven P. Tibbetts, STS, Pastor at Zion, will be the celebrant.

Additional services for Holy Week begin a Healing Service on Wednesday, April 8, at 11 am. Maundy Thursday, April 9, will commemorate the Last Supper with the celebration of Holy Communion at 7 pm. On Good Friday, April 10, there will be a service with the reading of the Passion of Christ according to St. John at Noon. All are welcome to each of these worship services.

Holy Week commemorates the events of Jesus’ life that concluded with his Crucifixion at the hands of Roman and Jewish authorities in Jerusalem. Continuing public worship practices that pre-date the legalization of Christianity in the ancient Roman Empire, during Holy Week Christians re-enact key events of the last week of Jesus’ life, getting into the story of salvation by participating in its actions as preparation for the Easter celebration.

A congregation of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, Zion has been proclaiming the Gospel from the South Side of Peoria since 1894. The church is located at the corner of Easton Avenue and Hayes Street, one block west of the intersection of Jefferson and Western, on the South Side of Peoria. For more information call (309) 637-9150 or view Zion’s web site at www.zionpeoria.org.

ALPB Forum Online

Yes, ALPB Forum Online is down. The Forum Letter editor tells me, "Tech guy is working on it. Above my pay grade."

...Gift and Trust

I've finally read through, pen in hand, Human Sexuality: Gift and Trust, the proposed ELCA Social Statement on Human Sexuality first released six weeks ago along with Report and Recommendation on Ministry Policies -- which I've commented on earlier. What do I think?

On the first page is footnote number 2, which I post in its entirety:

Trust, as used in this statement, is a fundamental characteristic of right relationship. God is unfailingly trustworthy to us and all of creation. Just as we learn by faith that a right relationship with God is a relationship of trust rather than rebellious self-assertion, a right relationship with the neighbor is one in which each seeks to be truly worthy of the other’s trust. The trustworthiness that both fosters and can bear the weight of the others' trust emerges as a central value to cherish and promote. Broken promises and betrayed trust through lies, exploitation, and manipulative behavior are exposed, not just as an individual failing, but as an attack on the foundations of our lives as social beings. Trust is misunderstood if reduced to an emotion, an abstract principle, or a virtue of one’s disposition, although these all suggest its multidimensional role as an axis in human life.

In The Responsible Self (1963), H. Richard Niebuhr set Christian ethical reflection on a new course by treating trust as the center of Christian thinking based on the question of trust or distrust of God as the fundamental option in human existence. In terms of human relationships, he wrote, “Faith as trust or distrust accompanies all our encounters with others and qualifies all our responses” (118). Philosophers and theorists such as Hannah Arendt (The Human Condition, 1958), and Michael Polanyi (Personal Knowledge, 1958) have advanced reflection on the centrality of promise and networks of trusting reliance in human affairs and knowledge. Some social scientists have begun to identify social trust as an indispensable feature of healthy organizations, institutions, and whole societies, and social distrust as one of the destructive forces at work in the breakdown and dissolution of organized social arrangements. Such reflections operate in the background of this statement.

When I read the sentence --

Broken promises and betrayed trust through lies, exploitation, and manipulative behavior are exposed, not just as an individual failing, but as an attack on the foundations of our lives as social beings.

  -- I thought of the studies and discussions that I have been participating in since the 2001 ELCA Churchwide Assembly set in motion the process that is concluding with this proposed social statement. And the events (culminating in the "ordination" of Anita Hill in St. Paul, Minnesota, weeks before that Assembly) leading up to that Assembly's call for a social statement. Indeed, "broken promises and betrayed trust through lies, exploitation, and manipulative behavior" is precisely what came to my mind.

Going back, indeed, to the very first month of the ELCA's existence and the announcement that three gay seminarians who were unwilling to promise living chastely had been approved (either by the faculty of the very seminary I'd been accepted to [the ALC way] or the Professional Preparation Committee that had accepted me as a candidate for ordination [the LCA way]) for ordination in the last weeks of the old churches' existence.

Going through the first attempt at a Social Statement on Human Sexuality, the first draft of which nearly blew up the ELCA one year after my ordination, the second draft of which was so innocuous that the whole topic of human sexuality effectively disappeared from the ELCA's public spheres for a few years (as we in the ELCA argued over our ecumenical relationship with the Episcopal Church). Until the 2001 Churchwide Assembly drove us back into a second attempt at a social statement, bringing us to where we are right now in preparation for the 2009 Churchwide Assembly.

Yes, it has been "an attack on the foundation of our lives" as pastors of the ELCA seeking to be faithful to the teaching of the Lutheran churches. And as I read --

Some social scientists have begun to identify social trust as an indispensable feature of healthy organizations, institutions, and whole societies, and social distrust as one of the destructive forces at work in the breakdown and dissolution of organized social arrangements.

  -- I thought, "This describes what has happened in the ELCA," the destruction of what brought more than two-thirds of American Lutherans together in the mid-1980s in that giant step that brought us one big step closer to the old, old vision of one Lutheran church in America.

The footnote concludes,

Such reflections operate in the background of this statement.

This may be the truest, most prophetic statement in the entire document. For how else could a Lutheran church, established to embody a Christian tradition of theological seriousness within the practice of the True Faith, have produced such a muddled asserting (for no defense is offered) of a brand new teaching, one that simply abandons over 1900 years of Christian teaching and reflection as just another possible way?

In the conclusion of Human Sexuality: Gift and Trust, the Task Force (or a large majority of the Task Force; in addition to that linked statement two "dissenting positions" appear as appendices to the Report and Recommendation on Ministry Policies) writes,

This statement . . . seeks to tap the deep roots of Scripture and the Lutheran theological tradition for specific Christian convictions, themes, and wisdom that will assist people of faith to discern what is responsible and faithful action in the midst of the complexity of daily life. (p. 31)

My best construction (drawing on Luther's explanation of the 8th Commandment) is, it fails to do so. (Alas, given that I have grown to trust neither Human Sexuality: Gift and Trust nor the process that developed it, I have a worse construction. Perhaps you can figure it out.)

When I finished reading the proposed social statement, I didn't know whether to cry or bathe. So I turned out the light and went to sleep instead. It wasn't a good sleep.