DOXOLOGY II, 2023, addressed the pastoral care challenges a Seelsorger faces in these gray and latter days. Rev. Dr. John Kleinig marveled at the Mystery of Marriage and brought compassionate and wise care to the issue of Pornography. Rev. Dr. Joel Elowsky revealed the sexual chaos of the Roman world and how the church fathers considered our passions and their control. Rev. William Cwirla offered practical pastoral insight on the preparation and conduct of the Wedding itself. Dr. Beverly Yahnke delivered helpful guidance on assisting couples experiencing marriage difficulties. Rev. Matthew Wurm engaged helpful discussions on ministering to families with LGBTQ members and to cohabiting couples.
1. Kleinig, The Mystery of Marriage
John Kleinig opens from Proverbs 18:22 and Luther’s remark that many men have a wife but few ever find her, arguing that marriage is not merely a personal relationship but a God-given estate—a state of being into which a couple is placed. He surveys how differently marriage is enacted across cultures to show that God Himself is the hidden celebrant who joins and daily presents husband and wife to each other, grounding this in Genesis 2 and Ephesians 5. He distinguishes a secret, which stops being hidden once known, from a mystery, which deepens the more it is known, and treats Hebrews 13:4 on the marriage bed as clean and holy against the devil’s aim to defile and desecrate it. From 1 Timothy 4 and 1 Thessalonians 4 he teaches that marriage and sexual intercourse, created good, are sanctified by the Word of God and by prayer—above all through thanksgiving—received in the rite of marriage, the Divine Service, and daily devotion. Reading Ephesians 5, he shows Christ cleansing His bride by the washing of water with the Word and presenting her spotless, so that holy matrimony becomes a picture of justification by grace, the spouses covered in a righteousness given from outside themselves. Watch the lecture and read the transcript →
2. Kleinig, Pornography and Pastoral Care
Kleinig treats pornography not as a merely moral or physical problem but as idolatry—the worship of an imaginary body that promises life and delivers deadness, the murder of eros the devil intends. He first defends nudity as God’s good gift meant for self-disclosure and self-giving between husband and wife, then argues that pornography is not too explicit but not explicit enough, reducing sex to genital mechanics and breeding contempt for the real, gendered body. He names the cycle Paul describes in Ephesians 5—fornication, impurity, covetousness, idolatry—that plunges a person into darkness, and warns that pastors are especially vulnerable to it out of emotional depletion and self-pity. The remedy is to expose the darkness to the light of Christ: admission of the problem, confession and absolution, cleansing in the blood of Christ received in Holy Communion, baptismal renunciation, and the practice of thanksgiving, discerning what is pleasing to the Lord rather than following a rulebook. He closes with the Song of Songs as God’s own resource for purifying the sexual imagination through the language of praise and appreciation rather than criticism, and with C.S. Lewis on Christianity’s approval of the body. Watch the lecture and read the transcript →
3. Elowsky, Church Fathers and the Passions, part 1
Joel Elowsky first recovers what the church fathers meant by the passions—not one’s enthusiasm but the disordered movements of the soul, drawn from Scripture and reshaped from Stoic categories, pictured in Socrates’ charioteer straining between a noble and an ignoble horse. He shows Cyprian, writing amid plague and persecution, framing life with the passions as constant warfare in which conquering one vice only lets another spring up, and he sets this against a Greco-Roman culture—drawing on Kyle Harper—engineered to inflame the appetites through the slave trade, the games, the theater, and ubiquitous erotic imagery. He traces the fathers’ diagnosis of double-mindedness in Hermas, Origen’s account of the flesh, soul, and mind and God’s sometimes letting sin run its course as a cure, and Athanasius on the soul moving either toward God or back toward nothingness. Through the life of Anthony and the story of Abba Moses shown the armies of angels outnumbering the demons, he presses that the battle is real spiritual warfare in which Christ, His angels, and the Word and Sacraments are allies. He ends with the desert saying about becoming dead to both scorn and praise, and with Neil Postman’s warning against a Christianity made merely amusing. Watch the lecture and read the transcript →
4. Elowsky, Passions and the Church Fathers, part 2
Elowsky turns from the problem of the passions to their remedy, working through John Cassian’s fifth Conference on the eight faults—gluttony, fornication, avarice, anger, dejection, acedia, vainglory, and pride. He explains Serapion’s scheme: some passions arise within us and some from outside, some require a bodily act and some do not, and the fleshly ones like gluttony and lust need a double remedy of bodily abstinence together with meditation on Scripture, watchfulness, and withdrawal, while community and the company of the brethren expose and cure others. He walks the audience through Serapion’s contested reading of Christ’s temptation as paralleling Adam’s—gluttony, vainglory, pride—inviting objection and openly working it out, and he affirms the recapitulation of the first and second Adam, born of the Virgin. He lays out how the vices interconnect so that conquering the stronger ones eases the rest, and details the kinds of each fault, from three sorts of anger to the sleep and flight of acedia. Throughout he insists no one overcomes the passions by his own strength apart from God’s Spirit, Word, Baptism, and the Supper, and that the offensive weapon is cultivating the virtues and fruits of the Spirit so the vices find no room to return. Watch the lecture and read the transcript →
5. Cwirla, The Wedding as Pastoral Care
William Cwirla sets out to restore joy to the pastor’s work as celebrant at weddings, confessing that for years he found them a burden until he learned, from Norman Nagel, to put the best construction on the couple and the occasion. He grounds the teaching in Genesis 2:24 as the doctrinal basis of marriage—leaving, cleaving, becoming one flesh—woman derived from man’s side as a suitable counterpart, and traces how the New Testament takes up that verse three times: Matthew 19 on divorce, where what God joins man cannot separate; Ephesians 5, where the one-flesh union is the great mystery of Christ and His Church; and 1 Corinthians 6, where union even with a prostitute is a one-fleshing, showing that intimacy itself carries spiritual weight. He distinguishes God-given eros from lust, which is eros corrupted and curved inward, and orders marriage rightly as commitment, then intimacy, then children—against a culture that reverses them. The practical half covers premarital conversation using the wedding rite and catechism, the location and music and dignity of the service, handling photographers and the mother of the bride, sensitivity toward cohabiting couples and unbelieving guests, and post-wedding pastoral care and written congregational policy, all so the pastor pours out Cana’s joy while pointing to God as the true celebrant of the marriage. Watch the lecture and read the transcript →
6. Yahnke, Marriage Counsel and Care
Beverly Yahnke equips pastors to care for marriages in trouble, opening with sobering census and clinical data on divorce, delayed marriage, cohabitation, and the toll on children, and insisting that faithful weekly preaching and teaching on marriage reaches the many whose marriages struggle but who never enter the study. She frames the pastor as the purveyor of hope—pointing to Christ’s gifts, forgiveness, prayer, and blessing when the couple believes there is no hope—while first discerning why the couple came and what role they need him to fill. She offers a consultation template: welcome and confidentiality, defining what he can do and how long the visit runs, letting each spouse tell what brought them in and how they are doing, and scheduling a next visit so spiritual care is not left unfinished. She reads the presenting problems and, without playing therapist, uses tools like the one-to-ten mood scale to detect depression and know when to refer, and she names the stages of marital disaffection from disillusionment through hurt, anger, ambivalence, and indifference. She ends with building agreement and remorse, proposing a one-week truce with daily encouragement and shared prayer, and wrapping the couple in absolution, blessing, and continued spiritual care alongside any referral. Watch the lecture and read the transcript →
7. Wurm, Cohabitation and the Conscience
Matthew Wurm addresses the pastoral care of couples who cohabit, insisting the pastor is not a moral policeman but a curate of souls, and that cohabitation’s root is not chiefly the Sixth Commandment but the First and Third—hearts curved in on themselves, loving their own intimacy above God and avoiding His Word. Drawing on Numbers 25 and the priest Phinehas, he shows how a private sin spills over onto family, elders, and congregation, and he prepares the pastor for this work through the pastor’s own confession and absolution, so a cleansed conscience can deliver a good conscience to others. Leaning on Kleinig and Trobisch, he unpacks the three sides of Genesis 2:24—leaving, cleaving, becoming one flesh—and argues cohabitation runs the order backwards, cleaving before the public commitment that would set the bedroom rightly in order. He commends going through the marriage rite with a couple to put the devil out of the bedroom, distinguishing God-given love from lust as an inversion of Christ’s self-giving on the cross. He wrestles honestly with how a pastor keeps a clear conscience when pressed to marry such a couple, counseling that he stands in Christ’s stead to bless, err toward chastity, take a repentant couple at their word, and see marriage as a high gift where God Himself joins and blesses. Watch the lecture and read the transcript →
8. Wurm, Soul Care for Families with LGBTQ Members
Matthew Wurm speaks on soul care for families with members who identify as LGBTQ, beginning from his own parish experience and from Peter Jones’s account of a revived Gnosticism that despises the body and erases the distinction of the sexes. Through three stories—a college friend, an abused young man near suicide, a man freed after years of bondage—he presses the single point that only Jesus changes hearts, and that a person will not want to change until he loves Christ more than himself. He shows Jesus taking the initiative and controlling the conversation with compassion toward Zacchaeus, Matthew, and the prodigal’s father, and he argues from Hebrews 4 that Christ, tempted as we are yet without sin, comes in the flesh and meets us in Word and Sacrament, giving a place to belong in the body of Christ. He warns against leading with argument or condemnation, urging that objective truth—God’s good order of male and female, marriage, and chastity in the Sixth Commandment—be spoken winsomely and that people, not “issues,” be loved and listened to. He surveys the drift from reason to feeling that trains this generation to construct its own truth, points to Isaiah 56’s promise to the eunuchs who repent, and closes with practical counsel: be a safe person, listen much, eat together, start a support group, and always point to Jesus as the more excellent way. Watch the lecture and read the transcript →