How the ELCA Left the Great Tradition for Liberal Protestantism

This is the title of an insightful article by Robert Benne in Christianity Today. He has some great insights into how the ELCA embraced sectarianism. Here is how he describes what happened.

"How did this come to be? On the one hand, the fact that the largest American
Lutheran church body had become the first confessional church to accept
homosexual conduct was a traumatic shock to many. There was much anger and
anguish. On the other hand, the decision was not at all unexpected by those of
us who have fought against the underlying currents operating in
the ELCA from its very inception. The fight has been long yet predictable. Liberal
Protestantism was the ELCA's destination. Indeed, its presiding Bishop, Mark
Hanson, is fast becoming the charismatic leader of liberal Protestantism.

"There is nothing but the social gospel," shouted a voting member at the assembly. But that is certainly not Lutheran doctrine. The various programs of social change taken to heart by the church are human works in God's left-hand reign, having to do with the Law, not the gospel. Rather, the real gospel is clear: the grace of God in Jesus Christ is offered to repentant sinners condemned by the Law and then called to amendment of life by the Spirit.

Liberating efforts in the realm of social and political change are
possibly effects of the gospel, but certainly not the gospel itself. But
the ELCA has accepted the social gospel as its working theology, even though its
constitution has a marvelous statement of the classic gospel. The liberating
movements fueled by militant feminism, multiculturalism, anti-racism,
anti-heterosexism, anti-imperialism, and now ecologism have been moved to the
center while the classic gospel and its missional imperatives have been pushed
to the periphery.

The policies issuing from these liberationist themes
are non-negotiable in the ELCA, which is compelling evidence that they are at
the center. No one can dislodge the ELCA's commitment to purge all masculine
language about God from its speech and worship, to demur on the biblically
normative status of the nuclear family, to refuse to put limits on abortion in
its internal policies or to advocate publicly for pro-life policies, to press
for left-wing public domestic and foreign policy, to replace evangelism abroad
with dialog, to commit to "full inclusion" of gays and lesbians at the expense
of church unity, and to buy in fully to the movement against global warming.
Though it is dogmatic on these issues, it is confused about something as
important as the assessment of homosexual conduct. Yet, it acts anyway because
of the pressure exerted by those who want to liberate church and society from
heterosexism."

So the Lutherans have embraced a new gospel. But it is a confessional church, a product of the Reformation. How could such a thing happen? Benne explains:

"But the ELCA has accepted the social gospel as its working theology, even
though its constitution has a marvelous statement of the classic gospel. The
liberating movements fueled by militant feminism, multiculturalism, anti-racism,
anti-heterosexism, anti-imperialism, and now ecologism have been moved to the
center while the classic gospel and its missional imperatives have been pushed
to the periphery.

But how did the liberal Protestant agenda replace the Christian core? There
are many reasons, a good number that many American evangelicals share with
Lutherans: a culture moving quickly toward permissive morality; the self-esteem
movement leading to cheap grace; lay individualism combined with apathy toward
Christian teaching; an obliviousness to church tradition and to the voice of the
world church; and, above all, the loss of an authentic principle of authority in
the church. This last item I will address in more detail later.

The ELCA has a particular history that has compounded these problems. The mid-1980s planning stage of the ELCA was dramatically affected by a group of radicals who pressed liberationist (feminist, black, multiculturalist, gay) legislative initiatives
right into the center of the ELCA structures. Among them was a quota system
that skews every committee, council, task force, synod assembly, and national
assembly toward the "progressive" side. (There are quotas for representing
specific groups in all the organized activity of the church. Sixty percent must
be lay, 50 percent must be women, 10 percent must be people of color or whose
language is other than English. The losers, of course, are white male pastors;
our Virginia delegation to the assembly, for example, had only one male pastor
among its eight elected members.)

Further, the prescribed structure distanced the 65 bishops from the decision-making of the church. The bishops have only influence, not power. (Aware of their divisiveness, the bishops voted 44-14 to require a two thirds majority for the enactment of the Sexuality Task Force's policy recommendations, but were ignored by both the church council and the Assembly.) Theologians were given no formal, ongoing, corporate role in setting the direction of the ELCA. They, too, were kept at a distance and actually viewed as one more competing interest group.

The radicals so decisive in the defining moments of the ELCA intended to smash the authority of the influential theologians and bishops who had informally kept both the American Lutheran Church and the Lutheran Church in America on course. The radicals wanted many voices and perspectives, especially those of the "marginalized," put forward in the ongoing deliberations of the ELCA. They were so successful that now, after 20 years, there is no authoritative biblical or theological guidance in the
church. There are only many voices. The 2009 Assembly legitimated those many
voices by adapting a "bound-conscience" principle, according to which anyone
claiming a sincerely-held conviction about any doctrine must be respected. The
truth of the Bible has been reduced to sincerely-held opinion."