One of the respondents to Not Your Smallest Lutheran Church, Russell Saltzman’s report on the recent creation of a new Lutheran body, objected to the conservatives leaving the mainline body to form another one. “[I]t’s not a good thing to be willing to splinter” over “dogma and religious practices,” he wrote. Divisions between Christians seriously damage our ability to speak to world effectively.
Back when I was an Episcopal activist, both liberals who were busy gutting the Episcopal Church of its traditional beliefs and conservatives who didn’t want to challenge them were fond of intoning “Schism is worse than heresy.” It was a little odd to hear this from members of a tradition that began in a break with the Church of which it had been a part over what its leaders thought to be heresies.
But the real problem with the claim was theological: that heresy is itself an act of schism. It is a break with the tradition, a rejection of what had been the shared and official belief, a willful refusal to remain in unity with one’s brothers, a transfer of allegiance and obedience to a new and alien ideology.
And it’s a more fundamental schism than schism, so to speak. The man who believes that Jesus Christ is “God of God” etc. and the man who believes He was a notably god-conscious mortal are much farther apart than the man who believes the Nicene Creed and also that our Lord gave us the papacy and the man who believes the Nicene Creed and also that the Lord gave us presbyteral government.
So, yes, breaking up religious bodies is not, abstractly speaking, a good thing. But in many cases the body has already broken up — has been broken up by people who thought they could turn the institution to their own ends while retaining the loyalty (and the work and the money) of those who wanted it to be what it had been, and who were understandably slow or reluctant to see how fundamentally it had changed. Both sides are better off when everyone sees that and makes the appropriate institutional changes.
By the way, this was expanded a little about ten minutes after posting.
September 1st, 2010 | 12:18 pm
“So, yes, breaking up religious bodies is not, abstractly speaking, a good thing. But in many cases the body has already broken up — has been broken up by people who thought they could turn the institution to their own ends…. Both sides are better off when everyone sees that and makes the appropriate institutional changes.”
Dear David Mills, you make a good apologetic for the Reformation.
Or were you thinking of the Great Schism in 1054?
:-)
Pax.
September 1st, 2010 | 1:34 pm
Speaking only for the ELCA debacle, of which I am intimately and painfully aware, one thinks of the quote, “Schismaticus est qui separationem causat, non qui separat.”
I am saddened that the vast majority of sisters and brothers decided to make homosexuality the hill upon which they would make their stand, instead of abortion.
But now, especially, reading the screed of a former presiding bishop of the denomination , I have to say the pro-homosexual folks in the ELCA remind of the guy in the story. You know the one.
A guy goes into the psychiatrists and takes the Rorschach test. First picture- “couple having sex.” Second picture- “couple having sex.” Third picture- “couple having sex.” And so on. At the end of the exam, the psychiatrist writes up his notes and then addresses the the patient. “The problem is,” he says, “you are obsessed with sex.” “I’M OBSESSED??” the guy responds. “You’re the one with all the dirty pictures!”
All the traditionalist/orthodox have ever done is hold up the pictures. The homosexualists are the ones who meet Churchill’s criteria of fanaticism.. They cannot change their minds and they will not change the topic.
Which is to say, in the parlance of the play grounds in which I grew up, “Yeah, well, they started it. [regarding schism]
September 1st, 2010 | 1:57 pm
It is certainly true that one can sometimes, perhaps even usually, trace a conflict ever backward to argue who started something, stopping at whatever point is convenient for one’s own POV. Yet just because lines are smudgy does not mean they don’t exist. Some actions by one party are undeniably a change or an escalation.
The key would seem to be whether one is kicking in a rotted door versus taking an axe to an intact one.
I was a pre-ELCA Lutheran, leaving long ago to become a Covenanter. Listening to enough recent seminarians patiently explaining to us, the great unwashed, at conferences and church camps in the 1980′s, convinced me the Lutherans had finally lost their grip. They offered other “possibilities” for understanding the Scriptures – a reasonable enough exercise – but it quickly became apparent that they really meant “this is the new way, and we’ve already rejected the old way so we’re not backing down.”
September 1st, 2010 | 5:35 pm
Matt Hummel
“I am saddened that the vast majority of sisters and brothers decided to make homosexuality the hill upon which they would make their stand, instead of abortion. ”
Your statement hit me like a ton of bricks- it’s so true. I’m Lutheran-LCMS and had a lot of hope that all the breakoff ELCA churches would rush back to the LCMS. I’m getting a quick and nasty education on just how far off from the Bible a lot of ELCA churches and their seminaries have strayed.
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