“But as for you, continue in what you have learned and firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it…”— 2 Timothy 3:14
A dear friend of mine, an Episcopalian, visited the other day. She had been crying. My friend was in town for the annual convention of the Episcopal Church-USA, which attracted world-wide attention for its decision to ratify the election of an openly homosexual minister as a bishop of the church. The decision brought her to tears.
A very strange hermeneutic is blowing through our churches. It is a hermeneutic characterized by expressive individualism, self-righteousness, and utter tolerance. What is good for me is good absolutely. What fulfills me is due me by inalienable right. It is my “culture,” or my “preference,” or my “nature,” etc. — and as such it can only be good. Biblical corroboration is not required.
Indeed, this is a hermeneutic that no longer pretends to begin or end in the Bible. It is a hermeneutic of culture, really — an effort to discover the truth of God in the cultural winds that swirl about us rather than the Word of God. And that is just the problem: the cultural winds that swirl — are about us. They blow wherever we make them. But they have not even the semblance of mooring in the Word of God.
I do not often comment on church politics in these pages — least of all, non-Lutheran politics. But this hermeneutic is bigger than Episcopalian. It is an all-too-familiar American mainline phenomenon. And it is laden with consequence for the practice of mission.
On the one hand, our new hermeneutic discounts the world church beyond our American shores — maybe, even, beyond the small circle of our own individual lives and parishes. This is the great liability of self-righteous individualism: practitioners eventually wind up with themselves. Virtually the entire Communion outside of America is dismayed at the decisions taken in Minneapolis. But their corroboration — even their ongoing fellowship — is unfortunately no longer required.
On the other hand, and worse, when our culture becomes our guide rather than our context we lose the vantage from which to speak the heavenly word of Christ’s unparalleled grace. Indeed, we have lost more than vantage; we stand in danger of losing the very cause for Christian mission. It is only the Word Beyond Culture and Personal Preference — what Lutherans like to call the Word delivered “extra nos” — that can show me my sin and Christ’s grace, who I am and what I can become in Jesus Christ. Our culture does not know about these things. It cannot.
So I might have cried, too. Yet perhaps there remains reason to hope.
It has been widely commented that the center of gravity of world Christianity has shifted from the north to the south. This, certainly, is very encouraging news. The church in the two-thirds world is growing deeper and broader, more missionary and more dynamic — though the church in America languishes. Perhaps we will yet learn how to practice genuine community with our sisters and brothers in the world church, to suspend our need to instruct them in our cultural agenda, to hear the Scriptures together in humble fellowship, and to partner in daring mission.
As you weep from time to time, don’t forget to hope. Pray for things like these.