"Rotten to the CORE!"

A certain Dr. Pahl recently, in the Journal of Lutheran Ethics, attacked the motives of those of us who have reacted to the actions of the CWA-09 by aligning ourselves with Lutheran CORE. He describes our movement as a 'White male backlash' corrupted by 'American Civil Religion' and resentment about our loss of power! He goes on to associate us with various and sundry heresies: Donatists and Docetists... and little lambs eat ivy, I suppose! It is quite a diatribe and We thought after reading it..."Well, it's not everyday that one gets to see a theologian show his ass in a theological journal!"

After some reflection, We have come to think better of the good Doctor. We will not impugn his motives...at least not at this time... as We are feeling rather charitable this morning. We think that we need to take some of his charges seriously and examine ourselves, as there may be the least grain of truth in a very little of what he says.


Be that as it may, what are our true motives? Plainly put, we think that the ELCA is in great error bordering heresy, and perhaps has fallen into heresy bordering on outright apostasy, and at the very least, they are more than tolerant of all of the above. It would not be honest for us to think otherwise...culturally conditioned as we are. We don't want a new Gospel where God is doing new things. We want the old Gospel where God is still doing the same old thing, reconciling the world to Himself in Jesus Christ, and where Jesus Christ is the same...yesterday, today and tomorrow! In a word, we want the orthodox catholic Church that transcends all human culture! And the universal consensus of that Church will yet have the last word over our parochial proclamations until the final Day of Judgment when there will be an accounting and a reckoning!

Perhaps Dr. Pahl is reacting a bit to the steady stream of rhetoric from our side which accuses the supporters of CWA-09's decisions of being conditioned by the autonomous culture of postmodern liberalism. The truth here is that both sides are conditioned by culture...and that, we think, is inevitable! The Holy Scriptures tell us that the Gospel seed will fall on different ground and that wheat and tares must be allowed to grow together. The wheat of the Gospel must grow with the tares of culture. Christianity will always reflect the culture in which it is planted. But culture, old or new, is a finite thing grounded in fashionable superstitions, folklore and myth. The Gospel is an infinite thing grounded in God's timeless Truth! The modern quest for truth is bankrupt only because it could not divorce truth from God. Culture should conform to God's truth not the other way 'round. If one rejects universal truth then one rejects God's universal dominion.

Jesus when asked about a matter of marriage went right passed the Deutoronimic Code with it's abominable shellfish and straight to the Order of Creation in Genesis. He pointed to the plain sense of the text and in so doing He went beyond human culture to reveal the Divine Intent for all cultures in all times and in all places. He pointed out that God had allowed cultural deviation. The point I am making is that it is God and not we ourselves that may do the allowing.

We think, that without a belief in absolute truth, the logical end of universal relativism is nihilism; and that the truth may not be had without first having God. We may therefore, indeed, be 'rotten to the core!' The thing is, that we actually have a core; universal relativism does not! Our CORE may be more rotten than the ELCA's for the same reason that angels can be more rotten than men, and turn into fallen angels or devils. We, who have experienced the Truth, can forsake it. With God's help we will not do that!

So, we have before us a choice: We can choose to give up our lust for power and learn the new 'gospel of inclusion'...the product of the latest innovations in biblical hermeneutics, which just so happen to adapt God's Word splendidly to the new liberal culture. Or we can choose to learn ever anew the old Gospel of Redemption as understood by two thousand years of Christian teaching and not just our own, conditioned as it is by, American Civil Religion.


Orthodoxy will not be an option in the ELCA! Not only because of something that Richard John Neuhouse said about orthodoxy being proscribed wherever it is first made into an option, but for the very good reason that no homosexual pastor could ever preach orthodoxy without contradicting the very thing he is supposed to represent...and none will ever try! This is not merely about church order...it is about the orthodox catholic faith! Women can and do preach orthodoxy...and there is the difference. Just as in the parsonage the homosexual can only parody the physical act of procreation, in the pulpit he can and will only preach a parody of the Gospel.

O yes, We forgot to mention that we are homophobes...but, we are trying to do better! Do those who contend against us have no bigotries, no prejudices, nothing to repent of except perhaps a few lingering vestiges of orthodoxy? Dr. Pahl asks the question, '...can homophobes be saved?' Fear of homosexuals does indeed infect the heart of CORE and though we would fear them less, we must fear God more, and with Luther, 'call a thing what it is'.... homosexual acts are sins to be repented of and not to be blessed in God's despite! All sinners are to be loved; all sin is to despised, confessed, and by grace, absolved!

When we pray the words, 'Give us this day our daily bread' we pray for power. Power not to hold in dominion over others, but to fulfill our vocation. To do God's will. The vocation of the Church is to be found in the Great Commission and it requires the power to fulfill that vocation. Missionary work can never be condemned as 'colonial violence.' Missionary power has been waning in the ELCA, we hope for it's revival. Liberal theology is 'weak' in more ways than one. It was the weakness of an earlier liberal theology that inspired Barth to start the neo-orthodox movement. We can be, after all, even more 'inclusive' if we simply say that one religion is as good as the next, or no religion at all is even better. Some of the wonderful 'teaching theologians' of the ELCA are doing just that. But, where is the power in this message? Why take it into all the world? We in CORE want power...'the power of God unto Salvation...' found in the old Gospel of Redemption!

Now, Dear reader, here we should advise you that we do not speak for Lutheran CORE. We are only offering you our own poor thoughts and reflections, such as they are. We will include here, the text of a sermon by, Dr. Martin H. Franzmann published in the April 22, 1947 edition of The Lutheran Witness. We have edited it slightly, to exclude particular references to the LCMS and in one place inserted the phrase, 'Rotten to the CORE' to make it pertinent to our own message of today. We don't think Dr. Franzmann would mind and We are sure that he would have preferred that we all simply joined the LCMS...many, no doubt, have and will!

"The power of God unto salvation to everyone that believeth; to the Jew first, and also to the Greek"; that is the Gospel. And the whole meaning and the whole glory of our...history lies solely in the fact that we have preached that Gospel without additions, without abridgment, and without reservations. What we have offered the world is simply God's offer of salvation, implemented and guaranteed by God's power.

The salvation we offer means life. Life in it's only real sense, life without end; and there is no alternative. It is not a matter of choosing between life on the terms of this salvation and life on somewhat lower terms. There is no choice, no choice that anyone would choose.

It is either this salvation or the wrath of God abiding upon us. "He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life, and he that believeth not the Son shall not see life; but the wrath of God abideth on him." And the wrath of God on all outside Christ remains as real and as terrible as it was from the beginning: "It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God."

It is either this salvation that we have offered and still offer, or death. "He that believeth not the Son shall not see life." The line is drawn as sure by the power of God as rescue is offered by the power of God. There is no debatable land, no neutral place no room where a man may stand and be a looker-on. This crises is for every man alive.

It is either this salvation or perdition. "He that overcometh shall inherit all things; and I will be his God, and he shall be my son. But the fearful, and the unbelieving, and the abominable, and murderers, and whoremongers, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone, which is the second death." "The second death:--the perdition is as eternal as the salvation. The salvation which we preach is no less than eternal; the Christ of whom our Gospel speaks, in whom the salvation that we offer is, "Become the Author of our eternal salvation."

It is the only salvation, and it is indispensable. It is the salvation that all men need, Jew or Greek. Unless the Jew and all like him, all doers of works and accumulaters of merit, all the claimers of salvation by performance--unless they can bring to God a law perfectly and always kept, down to the last jot and tittle--and they cannot--they need this salvation. And unless the Greek and all like him, the seekers in wisdom and the exulters in culture, can show a knowledge of God complete and perfect, a knowledge so deep and so perfectly absorbed that it has guided and informed their lives and has made God all in all--they need this salvation. All men need it, "for the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men."

"Against all ungodliness"; that includes the worship of yourself, that subtle idolatry to which all religions of performance and all secular humanism are finally reducible. "And all unrighteousness"; the stubborn fact of sin remains, and as long as sin remains, there remain it's consequences: "The wages of sin is death."

Sin is being rediscovered of late, after lying long hid in theological attics; and the world that is rediscovering it had better reckon with its corollaries. All, all have sinned and come short of the glory of God; every mouth is stopped; and all the world is guilty before God.

In the face of this we offer, not something of our own, not a system to be followed, not a set of rules to be obeyed, not a wisdom to be assayed and absorbed; we offer a power, the power of God that delivers.

And we offer this salvation to all mankind, to everyone that believeth, to all the world; that is to say to all the guilty, for God's grace extends as far as His judgment. That is what we have been doing .....and that is what we are doing now, we 'exclusive' Lutherans....we narrowhearted Lutherans,....we 'rotten to the CORE' Lutherans,....we that have bound ourselves hand and foot--yea, brain, will, desire, heart, soul and all--to a book that will not let us go. We offer salvation to all. We offer it more freely because we know it more truly.

We lay down no conditions. We ask none to take any mans word as authority over him or any man's power to dominate him. It is God's Word that we ask men to accept and God's power that we ask men to succumb to. There are no conditions; only believe. We demand no performance. We ask no one to climb laborious ladders to a probable heaven. We ask men to believe and let God work. We place no bars racial, political, or social. The Lutheran Church is not a German church, an English church, or a Chinese church; it is neither a White man's church or a Black man's church; neither a rich man's church or a poor man's church. The Gospel that we preach is universal grace.

So we preach. We cannot do otherwise; our life principle is the Spirit of God; and if we live by the Spirit, we must also walk by the Spirit. In so preaching, whatever our shortcomings may have been, lies the glory of our past. In so preaching lies the only hope for our future. There is no conflict in conserving and going forward; for unless we conserve this, our life, we shall not go forward at all.