With My Body I THEE Worship – Dr. Gregory Schulz

Transcript (edited for readability).

Well, I realize that I'm not going to be able to say that it's a great pleasure to be with you and speaking here this afternoon. Do you want to know why? That's because of a story that I heard from the greatest-generation era, reaching back to the time of Churchill and C.S. Lewis and the time of World War II. The story is about Winston Churchill. Thank you. Or is this… Okay, just… How's that? Is it better? Yeah. You heard the first part. Yeah.

The story is about Winston Churchill. He was master of the Toastmasters Guild, and the Toastmasters Guild apparently had, and maybe still has, the habit of imposing extemporaneous speeches on people after dinner. So what you basically have is the opportunity to hear what your topic is going to be, and the length of the walk up to the podium, to formulate what you're going to say. And the master of ceremonies said, "This evening, we're going to have Sir Winston Churchill speak to us on the topic of sex." Just about picture Churchill walking down the aisle, getting up a full boiler of steam, puffing on his cigar. He comes up to the lectern. He leans over, puts the cigar down, and says, "Gentlemen, it gives me great pleasure." And then, of course, he sits down.

I have a somewhat longer and more elaborated presentation for you this afternoon. You'll find it as the outline entitled "With My Body I Thee Worship." I'd like to explain that in very brief terms. My presentation is going to be in the key of pastoral care, and the tune to the music actually has to do with will, rather than cognition and rationality. So I was recently looking again at Luther's writing from the Large Catechism, on the third petition in our Lord's Prayer, "Thy will be done." And in there, you may notice, or want to double-check me, that Luther actually says this is a petition in which we see the church taking its defending posture toward the world. "Thy will be done," right? We're saying that to the Lord. We're praying that His will will be done in our world, and we're praying, I think, very specifically, that our will will be made in harmony with His will. Yes?

So pastoral theology is what we're after here, with all of the resources that I'm able to bring you, at least in brief compass this afternoon. But we can think about it under the heading of will, as in "Thy will be done," regarding our human being. The propositions that I give you are basically my outline. I'm actually going to read most of them and elaborate a little bit. I am planning—this is the first time I've done this, and I'm not sure about my timing—but I'm planning, in essence, to kind of hurry through, so we have a generous amount of time for conversation before we need to break for supper. Fair enough. So take your notes along the way here, and be set to go, okay?

Proposition one: Sex matters. I am setting this up like a philosophical argument, and that would actually be, I don't know, a matter of data, of empirical realization. But you'll notice from my parenthetical that I'm setting it up this way. First of all, there's a bit of an ambiguity in the word "sex" in here, isn't there? There's the question about whether we're talking about being male and female, as we were made in the image of God, or whether we're talking about engaging in the activity of being male and female within the covenant of marriage. Right. So I'm embracing that ambiguity, and I think they belong together, something like this.

So I had a chapel sermon a few years ago, where I hit on this opening sentence: "How often do you have sex?" And first of all, you should have seen the faculty faces come up. Secondly, you should have seen about two-thirds of the undergrad faces go down or sideways. But of course, it was a gentle introduction into the words of Genesis, reminding us that we are all man or woman. In an important sense, we have sex all the time, as a basis for talking about our biblical and Christ-centered understanding of our sexuality, as part of our very being.

I've included a few, I think to all of us, probably obvious passages in here. Genesis 1, with the mention of us being—our greatest grandparents, Adam and Eve—being made in the image of God. And you recall that in that exact passage, Moses was inspired to write, "Male and female He created them." I actually am a little bit discontent with the notion that the image of God is essentially our human rationality. First of all, just by the bye, I don't actually think that's what Aristotle was teaching. Aristotle was writing and thinking in Greek, you remember. I think that when Greek gets translated into Latin—sorry to a number of friends out there—bad things happen. I think usually a lot of the fruitfulness is lost. A lot of the precision goes by the bye, and something, just a piece of it, comes through.

So actually, Aristotle says, in the opening of Politics, Book One—remember, this is just a footnote for me; he is not my mainstay here—Aristotle says, in Politics, Book One, that the human being is zōon logon echon, a living being of animal type, not mere bios, by biology; a living being of the animal type, characterized by logos. Now, I'd love to do the whole spiel with you on that, but logos actually has to do with our essentially social nature. So it does involve our rationality, but that's not the whole show. Do you see? Male and female. And let's grant that Aristotle managed to catch a bit of that, which remains very obvious even after the fall, in the way we are, as human beings, together.

But back to the more worthwhile words of Scripture. So Matthew records our Lord talking in Matthew 19—you knew I was going to use that reference as soon as I got going. What may surprise you is, I think we really should stop and read this. So I actually prefer to read every one of the Bible passages that I have in here. Time speaks against that. But let's savor together the authoritative and effective words of God's Word. And I'm going to guess that almost all of us are going to want to send an email, craft a sermon, or get back to a conversation as a result of hearing Jesus talk to us through these inspired words. So here it is. This is actually the opening of Matthew 19, and I'll arbitrarily stop partway through the chapter.

"Jesus had now finished what He wanted to say, and He left Galilee and came into the part of Judea which is on the far side of the Jordan. Large crowds followed Him, and He healed them there. Some Pharisees approached Him, and to test Him they said, 'Is it against the law for a man to divorce his wife on any pretext whatever?' He answered, 'Have you not read that the Creator from the beginning made them male and female, and that He said, This is why a man must leave father and mother and cling to his wife, and the two become one body? They are no longer two, therefore, but one body. So then, what God has united, man must not divide.' They said to Him, 'Then why did Moses command that a writ of dismissal should be given in cases of divorce?' 'It was because you were so unteachable,' He said, 'that Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but it was not like this from the beginning. Now I say this to you: the man who divorces his wife—I am not speaking of fornication—and marries another, is guilty of adultery.' The disciples said to Him, 'If that is how things are between husband and wife, it is advisable not to marry.' But He replied, 'It is not everyone who can accept what I have said, but only those to whom it is granted. There are eunuchs born that way from their mother's womb, there are eunuchs made so by men, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves that way for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. Let anyone accept this who can.' People brought little children to Him, for Him to lay His hands on them and say a prayer. The disciples turned them away, but Jesus said, 'Let the little children alone, and do not stop them coming to Me, for it is to such as these that the kingdom of heaven belongs.' Then He laid His hands on them and went on His way."

You may think I just forgot to stop, because the marriage stuff was earlier, and then comes the children's stuff. But you know, of course, that's part of the inspired narrative and the way it's set up. So we go right from the question about marriage and male and female, right into the question about sexuality, right into Jesus' love and concern for the children. Isn't that lovely and instructive?

I suggest to you some other examples: Revelation 20, sticking with the authoritative Word for a moment more and thinking about marriage there. I wanted to pile in Ephesians 5 and so forth, too. You might also think that sex matters based on our understanding of marriage in the West. We just heard a rather generous account of that in our previous lecture. You might think about your parents. And I actually do mean this in the two senses I was using before: the fact that your mom and dad are male and female, and the fact that they had marriage relations in order to lead to your conception and birth. And just for fun, I tossed in Sir Elton John, too. I think that it's a fairly non-debatable point, which is usually a philosopher's talk for, "I don't want you to debate it, so I can move on." But just consider that: sex matters.

Secondly, sex matters to each of us as human beings, male or female persons, who are members of a dimorphic species. I actually am not apologetic—or rather, I can give you a whole apology as to why I think that we church folk should charge right in and use some of this academic terminology also. We need to stop giving way at all levels of this conversation. So I'm just going to mention, "dimorphic" is just what you think: we are one species, but we have male and female. An earlier Christian philosopher in the 20th century, somebody with the last name of Stein, Sister Stein—a completely different person than you're thinking of—actually said that the human race is made of two species, the male and the female. And you might find a sermon illustration in there, too, not to mention something to talk over with your husband or wife at home.

An expression of our natural being, sex is immediate and personal. Keep in mind, I'm talking about being male and female here. So it is something that is immediate, and I mean that in the deliberate sense of there's no mediation. So my reason for mentioning this here is that human beings are body-and-soul beings. You want to make a synthon out of that, if you like the fancier talk, or you want to hyphenate that whole thing together, right? What's the reason for saying that we are body-and-soul beings? Because it's biblical, and because we're constantly fighting the Plato virus. This notion of downgrading the body, and all sorts of evil to the human person, comes about because of that. So in the 20th century, Ludwig Wittgenstein, a fairly famous British philosopher, said the best picture of a human soul is the human body. And there's something extremely important in that. This is not a denial of our soul. It is a reminder that we believe in the resurrection of the body. So we have been created body and soul, and except for a very brief—shall I say almost unnatural, but very temporary—period, assuming that we die before the final judgment day comes, we can exist as soul apart from our body. Think of the story of the rich man and Lazarus, or our Lord's resurrection, and so on. But this is not the way it's meant to be. So we are body-and-soul people, and personal.

I think I don't have to say as much as I intended here, because we just heard Professor George remind us that the locus of the person is the body, the body and soul. An expression of our natural being, sex is immediate and personal. I have jumped the gun with the quote I'm about to offer you, simply because it's a really good quote, and it's making the most of this biblical understanding of human nature as it is. This is from Brian Brock, Christian Ethics in a Technological Age: "Marriage reveals the moral meaning of the material order. To acknowledge that creation is good entails the acknowledgement that biological dimorphism—male and female—is not an artifact of the fall, but is in itself good. This is ratified by Christ in the Gospels and consummated in the union of marriage, which discloses the goodness of nature by elevating it to its teleological fulfillment in personal relationship." Teleological, as most of you know, means the purpose or the goal for it, the telos. Jesus said on the cross, among His seven words that we know of, "Tetelestai." "It is finished," which, as you know and have preached or heard your pastor preach, of course does not mean "I give up, I quit, I've reached the end of the road," but it means "I have fulfilled My mission." And by the way, it's in the perfect tense there. So it means "I have fulfilled this," and the ripples continue forever and ever, world without end.

A third point in this same cluster of thoughts about how sex matters to us. Three: sex matters to us as social beings of every nation, tribe, people, and language. An expression of our social being, sex is hardly private. You hear that I'm taking a little bit of an apologetic tone in what I'm doing. In other words, the notion that St. Peter tells us, always be ready to give an apologia for the reason of the hope that you have in Christ, right? So what I'd like to say here is that one of the words we want to watch out for, the way it's been co-opted, is the word "private." Religion is not private. "Private" is a way of marginalizing, of giving a paternalistic pat on the head, and saying, "There, there. If that's what you want to do, or that's what you want to believe, that's fine." Christianity is not private. We have spent millennia proclaiming and sharing and preaching and defending the faith. And when church folks talk about this stuff, you should never, never, never let somebody get away with saying, "Well, this is just a private business."

That is also, I think, obviously the case with sexuality—and I know that's going to sound really odd—sex is not a private matter. Right? This discussion about being male and female, and what it means, is not an occasion where somebody should pat us on the head and say, "If you have this archaic, obsolete, hateful view of things, we just kind of want to get this out of here." This is public discussion stuff. This is a matter that affects our very being as human beings, because we are not fundamentally individuals, autonomous individuals. We are rather social beings. Yes?

Here's a poem for you. It's fairly brief, too bad, but it's by William Blake. If you stick with me, I'll emphasize one part of it that I really want to share with you. "London": "I wander through each chartered street, near where the chartered Thames does flow, and mark in every face I meet marks of weakness, marks of woe. In every cry of every man, in every infant's cry of fear, in every voice, in every ban, the mind-forged manacles I hear. How the chimney-sweeper's cry every blackening church appalls, and the hapless soldier's sigh runs in blood down palace walls. But most, through midnight streets I hear how the youthful harlot's curse blasts the newborn infant's tear, and blights with plagues the marriage hearse." This is a couple of centuries old, but did you hear that notion about the harlot's curse, the effects on the newborn infants, and the blights and plagues on the marriage hearse? What the husbands were doing in private, with the prostitutes, is affecting the children of the family and the wives. Do you see? There's nothing private about sex in that sense either, if you understand me rightly.

Point four: Sex matters tonight, and it matters for all our days. I want to catch a point in here that I think is extremely formative, and that is: sex matters now, and it always matters, because we are sexual beings, and we are immortals. This hearkens back, I think, certainly to Scripture, but in a more modern guise, to C.S. Lewis's essay "The Weight of Glory," right? You have never met a truly mortal human being. Remember his conversation about how, if you could see that person you meet today the way they're going to be forever and ever and ever after this life, they would look either like a horror such as you don't meet now, except maybe in your worst nightmare, or a glorious being that you would be tempted to fall down and worship. And then, of course, comes the reminder: civilizations and cultures are mortal; human beings are immortal. How about that for a cast on what is happening when abortion is practiced, or the end-of-life debates, or the quality-of-life debates, or exactly what we're talking about now, right? We are immortals.

That it matters to each of us personally, and to all of us socially, as I said in the earlier two points, is an outcome of who we are as homo sapiens, or more precisely, as homo iustificans. I've been toying around with this a little bit. You're going to see that I borrowed the essence of this from Oswald Bayer. But what is the human being essentially? I mean, when you try to boil this down to what you must have there to characterize a human being as a species, as a human being—how about the urge to justify ourselves, or to be justified? Now, Bayer got this from, and I'm really grateful to him for pointing me—and probably some of you are going to say the same thing—to Luther's 1536 Disputation Concerning Man. You're afraid I'm going to read the whole thing right now, aren't you? Well, of course, of course we should, but in deference, I'll just read a couple of the propositions. These are propositions 20 through 23 of Luther's 1536 Disputation Concerning Man, and it's actually, I think, one sentence in the German. I'm just reading one sentence: "Theology, to be sure, from the fullness of its wisdom, defines man as whole and perfect, namely, that man is a creature of God consisting of body and a living soul, made in the beginning after the image of God, without sin, so that he should procreate and rule over the created things, and never die; but after the fall of Adam, certainly, he was subject to the power of the devil, sin, and death—a twofold evil, for his powers, unconquerable and eternal. He can be freed and given eternal life only through the Son of God, Jesus Christ."

Now, homo sapiens will be a convenient jumping-off point, that characterizes the human being as the kind of being that does wisdom, right, that seeks wisdom, has wisdom, can exercise wisdom. How about a candidate for a more robust understanding: that the human being is the type of being who wants to justify his or her own existence, right? There actually is some stuff—I've got a book I've got to get at, from a guy in Toronto, a retired emeritus professor who has a book that talks about how the human being is always seeking justification. And I'd like to grab that and add it to our thinking and ministry, and say, well, of course, right? The human being is always looking for justification. The Christ-response to this is, we have all been justified freely by God's grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus. And things are gonna be wrong if you're doing anything short of that, if you're rejecting that, if you are disbelieving that universal justification, right? That's the source of our weal and woe and problems and distress and fragmentation and so forth, yes? All right. So if you don't believe in what Jesus has done for all, including you, then you are still a homo iustificans, because you're going to be seeking to justify what you are doing, or what you think we should be doing, and so forth. What a dandy description.

A little bit later, same disputation—this is proposition 32: "Paul in Romans 3 says, 'We hold that a man is justified by faith apart from works.' This briefly sums up the definition of man, saying, man is justified by faith." Now, you kind of sense we're going to have to do something with a clearer English translation to catch this. But man is the being that is justified by faith. Wow. Okay. Man is that sort of being. You are fully human, you are flourishing, only, only if you are flourishing in Christ. Everything else falls short. It fails to achieve terminal velocity. It will not get you there. Okay.

Point five. In other words, sex has centripetal and centrifugal dimensions—that means reaching out and reaching in—that are knowable existentially and discussable in terms of the hermeneutic circle. Quick check: are we all okay with what I mean by hermeneutic circle? So the basic thought there—don't make me write on the board—the basic thought there is, if you think of a cycle, we'll do the two Latin terms, because we can, and because we can follow them perfectly well as English speakers. At the top, put the word verba, for word—v-e-r-b-a—and at the bottom, put res, as in thing, the thing that you believe or think. You can start at the bottom with whatever it is you believe or think about things, and then you come in contact with the Word, and the Word, in a serious, not a trivial sense, informs you, informs your thinking and your being. Then you come back, and you're thinking about this, and you come back in contact with the Word again. Yes? You did know that, didn't you? Maybe it didn't use the term "hermeneutic circle" or "cycle." But my notion here is that this is critical for our being sexual beings, for being human beings who are male and female.

So that is, as a growth in understanding, when our race—our thinking and believing—is being formed and reformed by the verba. And I'd like to make the point here that this is the text of God's Word. This is not a reflection on our being apart from God's Word. You're going to see some heavy-duty stuff in my parenthetical. In our discussion, I'd be more than happy to talk at length about this. But let me take you to the phrase, the epistemological principle, nisi per verbum. This is from the Augsburg Confession, Article 4. The slightly longer part of the quote is, "God cannot be apprehended. He does not want to be treated nisi per verbum, except through the Word." Now, I call this epistemological because, well, I get paid a lot of money to use big philosophical terms. Epistemological is the question about knowledge—and I'll say understanding. What do you know? How do you know? Are you sure? Right? That's epistemological stuff.

A little while ago, Professor George mentioned, somewhat offhandedly, the phrase "the God of the philosophers," and you've heard that before, I think. This is a very tiresome phrase, and a very thrown-away kind of phrase. Also, it's not true. The God of the philosophers is alleged to be the best idea of God that we can come up to apart from Scripture, with just our best thinking, right? You can't actually do that. I know for a fact, because I've grown up in the West, that you can't do it in the West. I suspect you can't do this worldwide, because, as Roger Scruton—I quote a heavier-duty source, he's also a contemporary published philosopher—as Roger Scruton says, the God of the philosophers reminds me of this: when we teach philosophy of religion, we need to be honest and remind ourselves that "God"—G-O-D—is always an attenuated reference to the God of the Bible. Now, what that means is, it's a watered-down version. It's a wraith version, it's a bleached-out version of the God of the Bible. And, of course, if you pick up any writing on philosophy of God, that's exactly what's happening. So let's be more honest, for one thing. Let's also be more robust, for another. It is through the Word that God reveals Himself to us. There is no other reliable source. Could He do it another way? Sure. That's not the question. The question is, how does He do it? This is an absolutely brilliant—not that the Reformers need me to say this—an absolutely brilliant and immediately useful observation. Don't presume to talk about God apart from the Word. Notice a double entendre there, too, right? It's the Word Himself. That's the Logos, actually, understanding of Word again, John 1: "The Word became flesh and tabernacled for a while among us, and we have seen His glory." Hebrews 1: "In the past, God spoke to our forefathers, to the prophets, at many different times and in various ways; but in these last days, He has spoken to us by His Son." That's the verbum. And, of course, all the 66 books of the Bible are about, and from, and focused on the Word, so it's Word in a—please understand me rightly—a derived sense, right? Jesus is the Word, the Word of God is all about Jesus, the Word of God. Okay? So that's very important.

And I wanted to make a comment here. I didn't know what kind of conversation we were going to have on natural law by this point in our seminar, but I would recommend that we all be sure to take a look at Chemnitz. You've got that on the shelf, right? Or a CD—your pastor should. You want to check out Chemnitz's Loci Theologici—some nice Latin there for us. Actually, I can just explain that. What happens is that I think you could say, we Lutherans, we confessional Lutherans, do believe in the natural law. It's just that we don't think it's effective. Right. So if you think about Luther, in some of his homey, down-to-earth examples—what happens if you preach until you're blue in the face to a donkey facing the barn? Nothing. Nothing. What happens if you preach God's Word to a human being? Ah, why is that? I suppose you could say it's got something to do with natural law. But natural law is not just illuminated by faith. The human being isn't just kind of brought up to a passing grade by faith. This is a complete ontological redoing, of the means of grace, on heart and mind and spirit and body. Do you see? Okay. We can come back to that if you'd like to. Let me hurry on.

Point six. Now, our sexual conversation and conduct—I'm intrigued by, and I'm going to take a quick lesson from, the fact that we can use the word "intercourse" for verbal and bodily intercourse. Now, with our sexual harassment training in the various areas where we serve, I believe I have studiously steered away from using the word "intercourse" in the sense of language, because I just think somebody's going to get bowled over by that and think I'm doing something I'm not doing. But this is very proper wording, isn't it? So, congress, intercourse—this works perfectly well for both. And let's bring those together, so that we don't get cut off from the full expression of our persons, which has to do with our sexuality, but also with what we say about it, what we do, or don't do, right? So, our sexual conversation and conduct—verbal and bodily intercourse—exhibits our presuppositions, or worldviews, as persons and as societies. Of course, I'd be glad to talk about that. A presupposition is that which is so taken for granted that nobody mentions it. I think we're pretty close, in most conversations, to having the evolutionary narrative as a presupposition, when thoughtful people, educated people, are talking, right? Most everybody in the room—not quite all of us, we'd like to say, but most everybody in the room—assumes that evolution is an explanation of how things came to be the way they are. They're so sure of it, they don't even talk about it. So, of course, our work is to bring the presupposition to light and talk about it. Worldview, I think, will work as a synonym for presuppositions. Do you know that that logical fallacy of begging the question actually refers to this issue, of having assumed a worldview that you haven't properly warranted or explained or defended, right? So begging the question is really much bigger than just using the word in its own definition or something. It's this big worldview thing.

Now, my parenthetical is perhaps important enough to get outside the parentheses. But note that the Lutheran Church cares for society by caring for the individual person. Persons, not societies, are immortal and redeemed by Christ. A society, in my view, would be Christian only in a derivative sense, if you have—I don't know if "majority" is the right term—but if you have enough Christians in the society that they would be influencing the character of the society by their Christian commitments, that would be Christian. You can't have a Christian society in any meaningful sense, I believe we say this, as Lutherans. You can't have a Christian society in any meaningful sense, and get Bible passages for that. Because the people are the target of our ministry, not the societies. This is a line of demarcation between confessional Lutheranism and evangelical Christianity, I suppose.

Our worldviews, that are exhibited in our verbal and bodily intercourse—remember the way I said that—are, in the final analysis, either secular/religious but not Christian, or they are Christian. There is, in fact, no third stance. I would suggest, in our thinking and prayer and conversations, that even though I respect and probably, in some sense, benefit from the notion of religious, this, and that, the telling thing here is not religious versus non-religious. It's either Christ as the center—the actual incarnate God Himself in the flesh, right, Christ as the center of things, His Word as the center of things—or not. And it doesn't really matter, in a certain sense, whether you identify yourself as religious but not believing that Christ is God incarnate, or secular. In the final analysis—maybe even in the day-to-day doing of our care for people around us—there is, in fact, no third stance. Feel free to argue with that in a little bit.

Point eight. Secular, religious-but-not-Christian, sexual conversation and conduct is essentially willful. Now, I think that what Professor George was bringing to light for us before is important, worthwhile, and valuable: that the stance, let's say, for same-sex marriage, or the stance for homosexual sexual unions being healthy and fine and all of that, is not defensible intellectually. I think that's importantly right. But it's not fundamentally an intellectual conversation that's going on. It's willful human activity that's going on. I may be overdoing this for the convenience of my central point with you here today. But in the Lord's Prayer, there is no petition that talks about having sufficient knowledge, or acute rationality. There is, however, unmistakably, a complete, rather long petition that talks about God's will being done. This is, of course, a very important part of the human being. We are willful creatures, as surely as we are rational, emotional, and physical creatures—right, willful. And that's the bugaboo. Or, to put it in slightly friendlier and less pointed academic ways, this is our contribution to the situation that we find ourselves in.

I teach all the time that my undergrad and PhD students should be able to get out in the world and argue apologetically against the logical fallacies, weaknesses, and insufficiencies of secular worldviews, and other religious worldviews, right? And I do think we should do that. But, but that's not the whole story. The story has everything to do with the will. You can know what the right thing is to do, and yet you can will not to do it. Right? Bondage of the Will is one of Luther's major writings—not "Acquisition of Sufficient Handling of Natural Knowledge," right? Bondage of the Will. And again, that petition of the Lord's Prayer, I think, is pretty decisive. Essentially willful, and thus dismissive of human nature as it is, and of the Word of God as it is.

It is characterized—that is, the secular, religious-but-not-Christian view is characterized—by reductivism in terms of our human being. Reductivism means that you take a fundamentally okay thing. You want to reduce your understanding of something to the most basic, essential level, we used to say, right? But reductivism goes farther. It goes below the level of what the entity actually is, and makes what you might call a fallacy of composition, or mistaking a little part as if it were the real, entire thing. Think about this from a high school chemistry class or something, where somebody calculated, or was quoting a magazine article that calculated, the worth of a human being in terms of the chemicals that make up her body. That's reductivistic. The material analysis of the human being, apart from being intellectually untenable, is reductivistic. Science tends to be reductive—that's what it's powerful for, reducing things to components—but it tends, in the area of the human being, to be reductivistic, which is to go way too far, and end up, for instance, just talking about our material being as if now you've talked about the entire human being.

And it's characterized by will to power in regard to the meaning and practice of marriage. "Will to power" I grabbed from Nietzsche, who, I think, is very important to read, because of his honesty in analyzing what it means to take God out of culture and out of your life. The death of God is not a famous parable from him arguing for everybody to become atheist. It's actually something in which he explains how the West has to take the consequences of marginalizing the God of the Bible and eliminating it from public debate, seriously. I think he actually demonstrates that we're not up to living apart from God. Big surprise to readers of Ecclesiastes. Okay.

Now, speaking about will to power, just imposing your stuff on things, without a fundamental redoing of the rationality or anything—I have an interview byte from Jacques Derrida, whom you may know for his notion of deconstructionism. He did a lot more, but that's what he's most famous for. You may know that he was an outspoken advocate for gay marriage, gay rights, and so forth in France, and carried over that concern into the United States. He died a few years ago. And in a book—I gave you the title there, Learning to Live Finally: The Last Interview—Derrida, rather uncharacteristically, seems to have answered just about every question the interviewer was asking, including the question about, "Okay, so what do you suggest marriage should be?" And then, again, uncharacteristically, this really shrewd and brave journalist sent a copy of her Le Monde article to Derrida and said, "Did I get you right? Am I representing you?" And he said, "Yes." So you've got something here that was signed off on by Derrida, too.

So he says this. Let me just give you a little bit of my lead into this. In his last interview before his death, the contemporary French philosopher Jacques Derrida, famously associated with the practice of deconstruction, urged us to replace the institution of marriage with a contractual civil union. Here's a quote from him in translation: "A civil union, one that has been improved, refined, and would remain flexible and adaptable to partners whose sex and number would not be prescribed." Now, this isn't as shocking as I thought it was going to be, because we heard some instances of this from some more current writers in our earlier presentations this afternoon. But take a look at what he's saying in there, right? And the reason I bring this up is, I want to do something other than just arguing with the definition, which I think is helpful and valuable, and you should have that in your backpack. But take a look at your reaction to what Derrida is doing. Would you want your son or daughter to be engaged in this kind of sexual union? Why not? Do you see? Contrast the biblical—I'm going to say the biblical, and then lend it into Western culture—view of marriage: one man, one woman, for life. The Genesis stuff, the Gospel stuff, the Book of Revelation stuff about the marriage feast. Wouldn't you rather have that? This is not a lofty philosophical argument. Wouldn't you rather have that? Yes, you would. Why? Oh, because it's good, and it's true, and it's beautiful. If that weren't already the case from Scripture, you would want to persuade everybody in the world that this is the way marriage should be: one man, one wife, modeled after Christ's love for the church, and the church's love for Christ, and on and on, right? The winsome character of the Christian gospel—let it out of the bag. Put it out on the table. Right? Wasn't this Luther's comment? He said, you know, you've got to remember that actually defending God's Word with your own arguments is kind of like protecting your helmet with your head. Right? And he does the whole thing with the full armor of God, if you remember that.

Point nine. Christian sexual conversation and conduct, by contrast to the secular or religious-but-non-Christian sexual conversation and conduct, is characterized by a robust understanding of who we are as human beings, by virtue of our communion, in Word and Sacrament, with Jesus Messiah, God incarnate. Two brief but important reminders. Psalm 8: "What is man that You are mindful of him, the Son of Man that You care for him? You made him a little lower than the heavenly beings, yet crowned him with glory and honor." David is looking straight up. The conversation is on the vertical. We're being taught to ask the Creator about us as His creatures. This is marvelous. It's instructive, right? Pray the Psalms, for goodness' sake. And then, of course, this is continued, or given the authoritative commentary, in Hebrews chapter 2, where we've got the contrast between Jesus and the angels, the contrast between Jesus and everything else, and the writer to the Hebrews says, "Somewhere someone has written"—everybody ought to know it's David, kind of sad we don't today—"as someone somewhere has written, 'What is man that You are mindful of him, the Son of Man that You care for him? You made him a little lower than the heavenly beings for a time, and crowned him with glory and honor.'" And it turns out that the Son of Man there, in capital letters, is Jesus, the Son of Man. No Jesus, no the human being. Yes, no Jesus, no knowing the human being. This is the claim here.

And I just want to mention, in point 10: Indeed, the Christian teaching regarding who we are as human beings, created and redeemed as male and female, is unique and winsome in character, given its noble view of human being and our final cause. That's a tip of the hat to the Aristotelian conversation. Final cause means, what is a thing for? What is its purpose?—which has dropped out of the scientific conversation as much as it can be excised. The question, though, of course, is, what is the human being for? What are we for? And in Colossians, right?—this is true in every book of the Bible, really, but in Colossians, everything has been made by Christ and for Christ. Or if you think about Revelation 7. Okay, this is what we're made for. I wanted to reiterate that same quote from Brock in Christian Ethics in a Technological Age: "Marriage"—think marriage in the thick, Christian, and traditional Western understanding, at least—"Marriage reveals the moral meaning of the material order. To acknowledge that creation is good entails the acknowledgement that biological dimorphism is not an artifact of the fall, but is in itself good, that is ratified by Christ in the Gospels and consummated in the union of marriage, which discloses the goodness of nature by elevating it to its teleological fulfillment in personal relationship."

A couple of wind-down and get-ready-for-discussion points to finish out my presentation. Number 11: Whereas our technological age construes marriage as nothing but a socially or legally constructed contract—think about Derrida, whom I just cited; you could also think about U.S. v. Windsor, that recent decision—Christ's teaching is that marriage is instituted by God, as a daily living out of His love for us, and our love for Him, and for our neighbor, in the concrete person of a woman's husband, and a husband's wife. I was at pains to try to do something that sounded somewhat elegant in there, and I realized, if I put all the qualifiers in that we might need, you wouldn't be able to follow the sentence, right? I meant, thinking of marriage as one man and one woman, husband and wife, and that wife to her husband, and that husband to his wife. Isn't that something? Okay.

Ephesians 5. I had an opportunity to visit the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Greek Orthodox Church in Milwaukee, or Wauwatosa, a couple summers ago during Greek festival, and mostly, to tell you the truth, my wife and I wanted to see the architecture. We had a friend, or an acquaintance, who had been on the trustees for that building, and he said they hated Frank Lloyd Wright, because his roofs always leak, and about every year they were putting a million dollars of repair into that roof. I wanted to see the architecture from the inside out. But we got this marvelous little lecture by a very devoted Orthodox woman who was talking about weddings there in this magnificent church. And she said, "And of course, in weddings here"—and you could just hear the disdain behind her smile—"we do not allow couples to pick their own thoughts or vows or words for the service, because we have the words of God that are read in every marriage service." As well they ought to be. Ephesians 5, right? My goodness. And you could also think about Hosea. When was the last time you read, preached, or pointed somebody to Hosea? And Luther's 1520 Treatise on Good Works, which is beyond my scope to develop it all here.

Twelve. Oh, by the way, Justice Scalia offered the dissent to—or one of the dissents to—the U.S. v. Windsor recent Supreme Court discussion. If you haven't had a look at that, I'd recommend that you do. There's no shame in taking somebody's excerpts from it, though some of us should go back and read the whole text. But I caught this. This is verbatim from Justice Scalia: "This case is about power in several respects. It is about the power of our people to govern themselves, and the power of this court to pronounce the law. Today's opinion aggrandizes the latter"—the power of the court—"with the predictable consequence of diminishing the former"—the power of the people. "We have no power to decide this case, and even if we did, we have no power under the Constitution to invalidate this democratically adopted legislation." Power—will to power. You see, it's not a careful study of what marriage has been, or of who or what human beings are, but it's a question of, what can I, or we, and my group, impose? What can we accomplish? The rational argumentation, defense, and interrogation should not fall by the wayside, but don't miss for one moment that this is an exercise of power, do you see? And it's the power of people's will versus the will of God. There is nothing sedate, I think, in Paul's opening salvo in Romans, where he talks about God's judgment being visited on people for conducting themselves in a homosexual lifestyle. I have something to come up about a distinction in there. But Paul talks about people being under God's judgment there. C.S. Lewis: there are two types of people in the world—those who say to God, "Thy will be done," and those to whom God says, "Thy will be done."

Then, if we look at my point 12 further: In concord with Christ and His verbatim Word, we confess that Christ's church and her ministers have been taught and authorized to lead human persons in the practice of repentance. This is a key term, surely, for our conference issue: repentance, which informs healthy, moral, godly conversation and conduct. I mistyped my equation a little bit. It should be R = C + FC, if that carried through in your copy—would you correct that? And then a parenthetical, "+ FF." So I thought, some years ago, when I was teaching my confirmation classes and adult Bible information classes in my congregation, that it would be helpful to have this in a quasi-chemical equation, right? So repentance equals contrition—which, you remember, is terror, smiting the conscience through the knowledge of sin; contrition, not being sorry, but being terrified over our sin, right—plus faith in Christ. Now, again, can I just say quickly, it's not exactly the faith that's important. It's the faith in Christ. It's the object of the faith that makes it faithful, it is. And then the parenthetical is plus the fruit of faith. You inevitably get the fruit of faith in repentance, so you can kind of mention it there, but you could also express—bless you—you could also express repentance as just R = contrition plus faith in Christ. And there, the first of Luther's 95 Theses, right?—probably our favorite out of them all: "Our Lord Jesus Christ, in saying 'Repent,' intended that the entire life of the believer be a life of repenting."

Well, here's a quote. This one is from Brock's Christian Ethics in a Technological Age, again. He has an amazing thing in which, when he talks about sexuality and addresses marriage and problems with homosexual practice and so forth, where he does his chapter simultaneously about eating and sex—eating and sex. And he suggests that if you watch what's going on, for instance, in the New Testament—I think it's probably there in the Old—God is tutoring us in doing His will for our living as body-and-soul creatures. By the way, He teaches eating. He did that so expressly and in such a specific way for the Old Testament Israelites. It's there in the new tomb. And then the sex. So eating according to God's will—that interesting thought—and sexuality according to God's will, as a paired concern. Well, you know, here's what he says: "Eucharistic eating and drinking"—how's that for physical?—"are specifically oriented to increase believers' sensitivity to their embedding in a social fabric." Think of 1 Corinthians 11, right? "The biblical traditions, as elaborated in the New Testament, are underlain by a clearly structured framework for thinking theologically about bodies as sites of faith." Whether you eat or drink, or have sex or don't, right? "Do all to the glory of God." You say that, right? The body as sites of faith.

And finally, point 13, and then we should talk. In other words, we could say—and here I have a dreadful typo coming on, so just hold on—in other words, we could say that the Lutheran Church cultivates countercultural vocations. And I got all mixed up in my—trying to make this more understandable—cultivates countercultural vocations vis-à-vis, what I first had, celibacy, adultery, and homosexuality. So, for goodness' sake, correct that in there—all right, this is totally my fault, by the way, it's my typo. Vocations in regard to, or contrary to, common understandings of celibacy, adultery, and homosexuality—not the endorsement of sinning boldly and bodily with and against our fellow human beings, but the clear and caring condemnation of—and we haven't talked about this at all—but institutionalized celibacy, of sleeping with or even coveting someone else's spouse—doesn't adultery belong in this conversation, right?—of homosexual actions and self-justifications.

Now, here I have an extremely important book for recommendation. This is Robert Gagnon's The Bible and Homosexual Practice. How many of you have this or have read that? Would you agree with me? This should be on every pastor's shelf. And I think that everybody here, because of his or her concern for the topic, wants to get this book or give it to a friend, so you can have access to it. This is a magisterial work, and a warm, thoughtful, kind of pastoral work at the same time, going through fundamental misunderstandings and misrepresentations of homosexual practice, and the way Bible passages have been co-opted in order to support this. Actually, Gagnon just does all the spadework for us, plus more. In the concluding section of the book, he's got a very loving and well-documented section about the physical harm that is done to people in homosexual practices. Right? It's just quite a fine book.

Now, what I'd like to say here is, I'm just going to remind you of two places in our Confessions where we actually talk about this. The Smalcald Articles, Article 11, begins this way. This is under "The Marriage of Priests," and it's talking about the Roman Catholic papacy: "They have neither the authority nor the right to ban marriage and to burden the divine order of priests with perpetual celibacy. They have acted like antichristian, tyrannical, desperate scoundrels, and by this have caused all kinds of horrible, outrageous, innumerable sins of unchastity, depraved lusts in which they themselves still wallow. Now, neither we nor they have been given the power to make a woman out of a man, or a man out of a woman, or to nullify either sex. So they have had no authority to separate such creatures of God, or to forbid them from living honestly in marriage with one another." There are similar but lengthier comments in Augsburg at 23, for instance. I'm going to give you two excerpts, if I may: "Among all people, both of high and low degree, there has been loud complaint throughout the world concerning the flagrant immorality and the dissolute life of priests, who were not able to remain continent, and who went so far as to engage in abominable vices." A bit farther down: "When Christ said in Matthew 19, 'Not all men can receive this precept,' He indicated that few people have the gift of living in celibacy. And He certainly knew man's nature. God created man male and female, according to Genesis 1:27. Experience has made it all too manifest whether or not it lies in human power and ability to improve or change the creation of God, the Supreme Majesty, by means of human resolutions or vows, without a special gift or grace of God. What good has resulted? What honest and chaste manner of life, what Christian, upright, and honorable sort of conduct has resulted in many cases? It is well known what terrible torment and frightful disturbance of conscience many have experienced on their deathbeds on this account, and many have themselves acknowledged this."

A final quote for your consideration. This is from C.S. Lewis. It's from a letter in one of the editions of A Severe Mercy by Sheldon Vanauken, and it's from a 14 May 1954 letter, from Magdalen College in Oxford, to Sheldon Vanauken. You're going to love this, and at least it's going to give us something to talk about in about 70 seconds. "I take it for certain," Lewis writes, "that the physical satisfaction of homosexual desires is sin. This leaves the homosexual person no worse off than any normal person who is, for whatever reason, prevented from marrying. Our ignorance of the exact cause of homosexuality—similar to that of the blindness of the man from birth—suggests that in homosexuality, as in every other tribulation, those works of God should be made manifest in him." This suggests that in homosexuality, as in every other tribulation, those works can be made manifest—that is, that every disability conceals a vocation, if only we can find it, which will turn the necessity to glorious gain. You understand what he's saying. There's a vocation of homosexual persons in the Christian church. And so you don't misunderstand—or if I just caught your attention just now—the distinction here is between somebody who has, for whatever reason, a homosexual predisposition, a same-sex sexual attraction. That's one thing. But for somebody to be acting on that is something else. So we should differentiate, and we should use our terminology carefully. Homosexual disposition is a matter of temptation, which requires the fortification of the gospel in Word and Sacrament. Ready? In that sense, a homosexual individual should be encouraged to come frequently and regularly to holy communion, to come to church, right? To remember and use his or her baptism. Because just as probably the majority of us in this room would fight temptations to heterosexual adultery, right, this fellow member of Christ is fighting the temptation to a different kind of abuse of the same gift, our sexuality. Yes.

This is different, however—can I say it again?—this is different from practicing homosexuality, which is contrary to the will of God, no ifs, ands, or buts about it. It is also contrary to human nature. It is contrary to love for your neighbor. It is contrary to love and devotion to God. It is against God's will. And engaging in that activity—remember Romans 1—is actually an indication that you are under the judging, damning judgment of God. It's that serious. We would love to reach you with the saving Word before your time of grace is up, but we are not going to try to cut to the imaginary end of the story and say it's going to be okay at the end. You are smelling the sulfur right now. That's actually part of God's grace. Do you see? You see, that's what the Word is doing. It's the repentance thing. This is not a gentle tap on the shoulder. This isn't "a good idea," right? This is contrition that we're seeking to work. The Holy Ghost, doing His opus alienum, right—staggering people, bowling them over, boom. And then we're the folks who are also right here with the gospel. And we really want to present that to you. We really want to proclaim that unqualified forgiveness of Christ—not haphazardly, not over against whatever lifestyle you willfully choose, but to you, to call you from your life headed 180 degrees away from the God who loves you with an everlasting love.

Okay, I'm not quite done, sorry. Okay, "will turn the necessity to glorious gain." Lewis goes on: "Of course, the first step must be to accept any privations which, if so disabled, we can't lawfully get." The homosexual person has to accept sexual abstinence, just as the poor man has to forgo otherwise lawful pleasures, because he would be unjust to his wife and children if he took them. "Perhaps any homosexual person who humbly accepts his cross and puts himself under divine guidance will, however, be shown the way. I am sure that any attempt to evade it—for example, by mock or quasi-marriage with a member of one's own sex, even if this does not lead to other carnal acts—is certainly the wrong way." I didn't end as quickly as I wanted to, which always happens to me. Yes, and if we just ignore breaks in between things, as has happened to me at the start here, we can just go right until you have to go over for supper. Thanks for your thoughts.

You made the distinction between homosexual disposition and those that act upon those temptations. What about the idea of identity, and the way the person regards themselves? Regards themselves? Excuse me. So that if they have homosexual dispositions—I've always thought it better that they now regard themselves as baptized in Christ, and therefore redefined, and with a new identity, that identity being with Christ, and no longer calling themselves homosexuals. Whereas what I've heard from other people as well is, having that awareness helps them with the temptation itself—the awareness that they have the temptation. So if they can identify themselves somehow as having the homosexual dispositions, and therefore, in some ways, identifying themselves as homosexuals… And I've always kind of counseled them away from that. Do you think it's helpful for them to continue to identify themselves that way, or would you prefer that we re-identify them as those who were baptized?

The short answer is no. Well, but what I sense in play here is just a—I'm going to go ahead and say it, because I know this isn't your own terminology, you're reflecting it—this is just such a gruel-thin understanding of human beings, to talk about your identity being an inclination or desire that you have, that it barely deserves serious consideration. What I do love is your insistence that we find ourselves buried with Christ, and raised from the dead with Christ, in the sacrament of holy baptism. This is not an identity in some weak sense. This is a—what, communion? Maybe you can use the word identity, but not in a quick conversation, I think. Do you have a response to that?

They get really offended when I say to them, "You should no longer consider yourselves homosexual," because for them—and especially, I mean, being from California, this is a huge issue, as you might imagine—it's just such a part of who they're taught who they are. You know, this isn't just a part of your life or something to overcome. This is who you are. That's the mantra that we hear: that when you try to put away my homosexuality, you are denying my identity and who I am as a human being. That's the mantra that's brought out consistently.

Yeah, well, there is some help for that in what I offered you in my presentation earlier on. This notion of identity is, at best, some sort of pop psychology or pop philosophy, which is really no psychology or no philosophy at all. And you said "mantra." It should not be given status at all. I think you're onto something in the way you ask your question. So what you want to have is a genuine conversation. Right? What is… Well… Then you need to come to a couple of philosophy classes.

Yeah, I mean, Doctor, this is not the prevailing cultural norm. I mean, I just want to echo as a fellow pastor that which we battle: the culture assumes this is identity. I mean, even though it may be gruel to you, say, in a philosophical sense, this is—we have to have some kind of apologetic for it.

That is the apologetic. And I recognize that. Well, no, no, no. Look. I mean, my goodness. What are you guys gonna settle for? I know you wanted me to say this, and you're asking it. What are you gonna settle for? Are you gonna let somebody define human beings by themselves? No. No, of course not. So what is an acceptable understanding of the human being? Then you have to have the conversation. And you have to talk about—you get kind of a minimum daily requirement out of Aristotle, right? I mean, really, Luther used Aristotle at the start of Luther's 1536 Disputation Concerning Man. Aristotle is fine for some stuff, but he doesn't really—because he doesn't have Scripture and Christ, he doesn't get us where we need to go, right? So there is a proper apologetic pastoral response, to say, "Really? No. I mean, are you going to live your life and face your death by commercials or bumper stickers? Let's talk about this. Let's have a cup of coffee and talk this through." And then, of course, you want to get to the way the human being is described. Look at this: "What is man that You are mindful of him, the Son of Man that You care for him?" The Jewish rabbi, Abraham Heschel, in the last century, said, "This is the thing"—he was talking just about the Old Testament—"this is the thing that everybody misses. The important feature is not that God created the world, though He did. The important feature is that He cares for it." The important feature is that He cares for it. There's a bigger conversation.

One question. Some of the response to that might be helpful. In my experience—I lived through the farm crisis in the '70s, and farmers who committed suicide had identified themselves simply as farmers, and could not identify themselves as anything else. And to help and counsel, one needed to counsel them with the identity that they were human beings. They had many other aspects to their life. And as Christians that they were, they were obviously children of God, and that should be their primary identity. And, I mean, it was not always accepted, I will safely tell you, even by farmers. So, you know, it's important to make sure that we have a well-thought-out identity given to the people that we need to.

I'm wondering how a vocation—since you brought in that terminology, well, vocatio—can in fact be legitimate if it's contrary to God's intrinsic will to begin with, unless you perhaps see a homosexual disposition as not being intrinsically sinful against the will of God to start with?

Yeah, thanks. It may be that that question is better held off until Bev is going to go to work on this—is that tomorrow?—that we're talking about it. I'd be glad to come back to it a little bit at that time, too.