LCMS Convention Workbook St. Louis, Missouri — 2023, Page 206

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THEOLOGICAL DOCUMENTS­­—COMMISSION ON THEOLOGY AND CHURCH RELATIONS
not a couple plans to marry.33 This decline of marriage is most certainly not the result of any commitment to forego
marriage in order to live celibately for the sake of the kingdom (MATT. 19:12).

C. HS 1981: THIRD AFFIRMATION
Regard marriage as a divine, lifelong institution, ordained by God for the good of man and woman
The third 1981 affirmation is plainly out-of-favor if not bluntly rejected both in popular opinion and legal
decisions, for several reasons. The notion that marriage is lifelong is given lip-service, but few would disagree with
a widely held, yet unspoken caveat: marriage is lifelong unless a couple agrees to divorce. There is widespread
acceptance of a moral standard for divorce akin to no-fault divorce laws. The idea that God gives marriage is still
held by many religious people, but even they may not agree that it is for man and woman, but now accept it is for
any two adults.
Christians must confess a certain complicity with current attitudes about divorce. As divorce became more widely
accepted in western society, significant numbers of Christians also chose to end their marriages.27 Congregations, in turn,
have increasingly included greater numbers of divorced and remarried members. Pastors are confronted with the
challenge of how to minister compassionately to the divorced without ignoring biblical teaching on the permanence
of marriage.28
Similarly, the West has seen dramatic growth in the acceptance of homosexual acts and same-sex marriage.29
Traditional biblical teaching about homosexual acts is doubted or denied by many self-identified Christians, just as it
is among the wider public.30

D. HS 1981: FOURTH AFFIRMATION
Respect marriage as the typical, though not necessary, expression of our creation as male and female
In recent decades western society has not only redefined marriage but has in large measure forsaken it. The percentage of married adults in the U.S. population, for example, has declined significantly over the decades. In 2010, the
University of Virginia’s National Marriage Project stated that unlike the best-educated, and generally wealthiest third
of the US population, the remaining two-thirds of US adults were engaged in a dramatic “retreat from marriage.” The
retreat, most evident among the poor and also the moderately educated economic middle group of Americans, was
marked by increasing numbers of adults who did not marry, who postponed marriage, who divorced or who were
deeply dissatisfied with their marriages.31
Moreover, in 2011, Pew Research published data indicating a precipitous drop in the percentage of married adults
from 1960 to 2010.32 In 2019, Pew followed with an extensive report on “Marriage and Cohabitation in the US,”
providing further data that shows a weakening of marriage in American society. More Americans have cohabited
than those who have married and nearly 70% of Americans view cohabitation as morally acceptable, whether or

The CTCR recognizes that there are certain regrettable circumstances in which divorce is bibically permissible. See Commission on Theology and Church Relations,
Divorce and Remarriage (St. Louis: Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod, 1987).

Decline in the percentage of married adults does not mean that people do not hope to be married. A growing
segment of the US population has rejected marriage, yet marriage remains a popular wish among far more people
even though it is postponed by many and never achieved by many others who hoped for it.35 This affects Christian
churches both in the case of individual Christians whose sense of personal morality is guided by social trends
rather than Scripture, and also for those unmarried Christians who are faithfully committed to living a chaste life
despite societal views. “The body is not meant for sexual immorality, but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body”
(1 COR. 6:13). The apostle’s teaching against sexual immorality (porneia) is a prohibition against all sexual activity
outside of marriage (see also MATT. 5:28; COL. 3:5; 1 THESS. 4:3–5; HEB. 13:4). This affirmation does no more than to affirm that
biblical teaching. Strikingly, however, this affirmation out of the seven is most widely rejected today, since nearly
90% of American adults have had sexual intercourse prior to marriage.36 Thus, the fifth affirmation flies in the face
of pervasive sexual behaviors and societal assumptions. Most Americans view restricting sexual acts to marriage as
an outdated moral standard and contrary to human nature.37 This evidently includes the majority of self-identified
Christians, including unmarried Christians who attend church on a weekly basis or more.38

F. HS 1981: SIXTH AFFIRMATION

33
Pew Research Center, “Marriage and Cohabitation in the US,” Juliana Horowitz, Nikki Graf, and Gretchen Livingston, Social Trends, Washington, DC, November 6,
2019, https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2019/11/PSDT_11.06.19_marriage_cohabitation_FULL.final_.pdf.
34
Evidence from the social sciences indicates that cohabiting couples who later married “reported lower marital satisfaction, dedication, and confidence as well as more
negative communication and greater proneness for divorce” than those who did not. Galena K. Rhoades, Scott M. Stanley, and Howard J. Markman, “The Pre-engagement Cohabitation Effect: A Replication and Extension of Previous Findings,” Journal of Family Psychology 23, no. 1 (Feb. 2009), doi: 10.1037/a0014358. The CTCR
briefly discusses cohabitation among older adults in Marriage Between Church and State (St. Louis: The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod, 2021).
35

29
It is important to distinguish homosexual desire from homosexual behavior. The first, while a result of original sin in an individual, is not inherently a willful sin
(yet must be resisted nonetheless as contradictory to God’s will). Homosexual acts are sins of the will. See also “Homosexual Rebellion” on page 24.

Pew Research Center, “Most Christian Groups Grow More Accepting of Homosexuality,” Caryle Murphy, FactTank, December 18, 2015, https://www.pewresearch.org/
fact-tank/2015/12/18/most-u-s-christian-groups-grow-more-accepting-of-homosexuality/.
30

31
W. Bradford Wilcox, ed., When Marriage Disappears: The New Middle America (Charlottesville, VA: The National Marriage Project and Institute on American Values,
2010), ix-xi.

See Pew Research Center, “Barely Half of U.S. Adults Are Married—A Record Low,” D’vera Cohn, Jeffrey S. Passel, Wendy Wang, and Gretchen Livingston, Social
Trends, Washington, DC, December 14, 2011, https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2011/12/14/barely-half-of-u-s-adults-are-married-a-record-low/. See also, Pew Research
Center, “8 Facts about Love and Marriage in America,” A. W. Geiger and Gretchen Livingston, FactTank, Washington, DC, February 13, 2019, https://www.pewresearch.
org/fact-tank/2019/02/13/8-facts-about-love-and-marriage/. Note the decline, especially, of married young adults (aged 18–34), which dropped from 59% in 1978 to 29%
in 2018: US Department of Commerce, Economics and Statistics Administration, US Census Bureau, “Percent Married Among 18-to 34-Year-Olds: 1978 and 2018,”
https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2018/comm/percent-married.html.
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Affirm God’s will that sexual intercourse be engaged in only between a man and woman committed to a complete and
lifelong sharing of their lives with one another in a marriage covenant not to be broken

To some extent, this affirmation is still widely accepted. First, mutual love between a husband and wife is assumed
in contemporary society (although a confused, overly-romanticized understanding of love is also apparent). Second,

28

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E. HS 1981: FIFTH AFFIRMATION

Affirm that the mutual love of husband and wife, while possessing God-given meaning in and of itself, is by divine
blessing ordered toward the birth of a child

27
Institute for Family Studies, World Family Map 2019: Mapping Family Change and Child Well-Being Outcomes, https://ifstudies.org/ifs-admin/resources/reports/worldfamilymap-2019-051819final.pdf. Also, Bradley E. Wright, “What God Has Joined Together: Religion and the Risk of Divorce,” Institute for Family Studies, August 20,
2015, https://ifstudies.org/blog/what-god-has-joined-together-religion-and-the-risk-of-divorce. See also Ed Stetzer, “Marriage, Divorce, and the Church: What Do the Stats
Say, and Can Marriage Be Happy?” Christianity Today blog (February 14, 2014), at https://churchleaders.com/pastors/pastor-articles/297689-marriage-divorce-churchstats-say-can-marriage-happy.html.

HUMAN SEXUALITY

As with divorce, society’s devaluation of marriage has impacted the church. While the percentage of Christians
who cohabit before marriage is not readily available, many pastors find that the majority of young couples planning
marriage in the church are already living together. In addition, pastors regularly encounter older, retired couples
who choose to live together without marriage in order to avoid loss of spousal benefits from the pensions and Social
Security of previous spouses. The obvious implication of the phenomenon of cohabitation in the church is that, even
among those who confess the faith, many no longer hold marriage in high regard as “the typical … expression of our
creation as male and female.”34

6

Wilcox, When Marriage Disappears, 27.

36
About 90% of Americans have had sexual intercourse prior to marriage. In “Key Statistics from the National Survey of Family Growth,” a survey conducted
by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the results indicate that between 2002 and 2015, the percentage of women ages 15–44 who had
premarital intercourse rose from 84.9% to 88.8% while the percentage of men the same age who had premarital intercourse declined slightly from 91.3% to 89.9%.
See https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nsfg/key_statistics/p.htm.
37
Roper compared attitudes about sex outside of marriage between the years 1972 and 2014, finding that while 49% of respondents thought that it was only sometimes
or never wrong in 1972, by 2014 73% felt it was only sometimes or never wrong. Roper Center, “Going All the Way: Public Opinion and Premarital Sex,” Cornell
University, July 7, 2017, https://ropercenter.cornell.edu/blog/going-all-way-public-opinion-and-premarital-sex.
38
David J. Ayers notes that Evangelicals, for example, have consistently taught the importance of chastity and the importance that sexual activity should be reserved for
marriage. “Yet most self-identified Evangelicals engage in premarital sex. And doing so has become increasingly morally acceptable among them, regardless of what
their churches teach.” He shows that, although Evangelicals are slightly less likely to engage in premarital sex than other Christian groups, such as Mainline or Black
Protestants or Roman Catholics, a clear majority of Evangelicals is not sexually chaste. See “Sex and the Single Evangelical,” Institute for Family Studies, August 14,
2019, https://ifstudies.org/blog/sex-and-the-single-evangelical.

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most people of child-bearing age desire children and marriage is still generally preferred as a better setting for childbearing than cohabitation.39

virgins, the second in those who are continent, the third in the case of wedlock. Yet in all it is glorious, with all
its degrees.45

Nevertheless, the biblical foundation expressed in the sixth affirmation has been undermined by popular opinion.
Of course, the decline of marriage in the West, as noted earlier, means that a widely held societal perspective sees
no necessary correlation between marriage and child birth, especially among working class and impoverished
Americans.40 Moreover, the desire for children is itself in question. On the one hand, some feminist perspectives view
the idea that any woman should want to be a mother as “unhealthy” because they see it leading to “a loss of self, the
terrifying reality that their lives had been subsumed into the needs of their child.”41 On the other hand, some couples
(married or not, man-woman, or same-sex) have a strong desire to produce a child — too often viewed as project
rather than as a gift of God.42

If a report from 1981 often sounds somewhat quaint to our ears today, how much more peculiar, if not bizarre, are
the foregoing words from Cyprian of Carthage (c. 200–258) about chastity. The word chastity and its adjectival form,
chaste, have become largely foreign even to Christians. At the risk of obscuring our report, however, we will employ the
terms, since we believe it is important to recover the concept of chastity for the church to communicate an authentically
biblical approach to human sexuality. Chastity has a depth of meaning that goes beyond a narrowly conceived application to sexual moral codes. As Cyprian’s words indicate, chastity, within the Christian tradition, is not a grim, sour-faced
propriety or Victorian attitude. Rather, it is a particular sort of tranquil beauty and glorious purity.

G. HS 1981: SEVENTH AFFIRMATION
Affirm that this union of mutual love is the only proper context for human procreation
This affirmation follows directly from the fifth affirmation and builds on the sixth. The preceding comments on
the level of disagreement with those affirmations mean that this final affirmation is also widely rejected today. Indeed,
the percentage of children born outside of marriage is increasing in much of the developed world.43 This phenomenon is marked, especially in secular society. Given the prevalence of unmarried sexual activity among Christian
adherents, as noted above, it follows that many of them could not honestly affirm the final 1981 assertion.44
To state it clearly again: the 1981 version of Human Sexuality, which has been commended repeatedly by the
Synod in convention over the years, provides a biblically faithful, theologically clear, confessionally Lutheran, and
ethically robust treatment of this crucial topic that concerns every human life. The present report wholeheartedly
acknowledges its significance and affirms its premises and conclusions. At the same time, the culture addressed in
1981 is significantly different in terms of sexual ethics from the culture of the present. That in turn means how the
1981 report is read and applied — let alone misunderstood and responded to — will invariably be different. The
new challenges that have emerged in the last four decades necessitate a different, yet ultimately complementary
approach. In what follows, the present report shall establish an understanding of human sexuality founded upon a
fundamentally theological basis of creation, fall, redemption and sanctification. For Lutherans, this approach revolves
around our creedal understanding of the Holy Trinity as the God who creates, redeems and sanctifies. In light of that
Trinitarian foundation, this report will then propose an ethic for human sexuality in the twenty-first century that
finds its starting point in the Small Catechism’s call for a “chaste and decent life” — a life that affirms what God has
made, how we are to live chastely and decently in accordance with that creation, and how this chastity and decency
apply to all Christians, married and single alike.

In this updated report we intend to uplift the first part of Luther’s explanation of the Sixth Commandment. There
we read, according to an earlier translation of Luther: “We should fear and love God so that we lead a chaste and
decent life in word and deed. …”46 It is noteworthy that among Luther’s explanations of the Second through Tenth
Commandments, the explanation to the Sixth is unique. Every other explanation lists certain sins, behavior that we
should not do according to that commandment, then continues with positive good works that are in keeping with the
commandment. The Sixth Commandment’s explanation omits any list of sins but focuses instead on leading a chaste
life and then on love and honor between husband and wife.
We understand this call to a “chaste and decent” (or, “sexually pure and decent”) life to be for every one of the
baptized. The chaste life enjoined by the Sixth Commandment is not an alternative to marriage, as if one is either
chaste or married, but it is distinct from loving and honoring one’s spouse in marriage. In the whole course of a
Christian life, whether or not one ever marries, he or she is called to ongoing chastity.47
Chastity is God’s gracious will and intention for us because, in a profound way, it is simply a matter of holiness —
of sanctification — of the new life that is ours in Christ as it pertains to our embodiment as male and female.48 It is in
this sense that it is used in the Lutheran Confessions. Note, for example Luther’s words from the Large Catechism on
the Sixth Commandment:
But inasmuch as there is such a shameless mess and cesspool of all sorts of immorality and indecency among us,
this commandment is also directed against every form of unchastity, no matter what it is called. Not only is the
outward act forbidden, but also every kind of cause, provocation, and means, so that your heart, your lips, and
your entire body may be chaste and afford no occasion, aid, or encouragement to unchastity.49
Christian chastity of heart, lips and body is unthinkable apart from the Holy Spirit who alone can sanctify. What
may well be unthinkable for fallen man or woman is the very thing that God would have us, His new creatures, to
consider and strive for: “I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living
sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship” (ROM. 12:1).
Life as a living sacrifice is an embodied life in Christ Jesus, the true Man. The sanctifying work of the Spirit takes

II. HS 2023 FOUNDATIONS: CREATURELY LIFE, EMBODIED LOVE
Chastity is the dignity of the body, the ornament of morality, the sacredness of the sexes, the bond of modesty,
the source of purity, the peacefulness of home, the crown of concord. … But chastity maintains the first rank in

45

39
See Pew Research Center, “Birth Rates Lag in Europe and the U.S., but the Desire for Kids Does Not,” Gretchen Livingston, FactTank, Washington, DC, April 11,
2014, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/04/11/birth-rates-lag-in-europe-and-the-u-s-but-the-desire-for-kids-does-not/. See also Richard V. Reeves and Eleanor
Krause, “Cohabiting Parents Differ from Married Ones in Three Big Ways,” Brookings Institute Report, April 5:2017, https://www.brookings.edu/research/cohabiting-parents-differ-from-married-ones-in-three-big-ways/ and Robert Putnam, Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015).
40

Wilcox, When Marriage Disappears and Reeves and Krause, Cohabiting Parents Differ.

42

Joseph Chamie, “Out-of-Wedlock Births Rise Worldwide,” YaleGlobal Online, Yale University, March 16, 2017, https://yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/out-wedlock-birthsrise-worldwide. See also Elizabeth Wildsmith, Jennifer Manlove, Elizabeth Cook, “Dramatic Increase in the Proportion of Births Outside of Marriage in the United
States from 1990 to 2016,” Child Trends, August 8, 2018, https://www.childtrends.org/publications/dramatic-increase-in-percentage-of-births-outside-marriage-amongwhites-hispanics-and-women-with-higher-education-levels

49
LC Ten Commandments, 202; KW 414. See also Ap IV 132, KW 141; Ap VII-VIII 31, KW 179; VII-VIII 36, KW 181; XX 15, KW 237; and LC Ten Commandments,
211–16, KW 415; 313, KW 428.

Sadly, it is also possible that there are Christians who find childbirth outside of marriage to be unacceptable, but avoid it by means of abortion, not chastity.

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2023 Convention Workbook

For a more detailed discussion of chastity, see section III.C on page 28.

48
Like marriage, chastity is a “good” for all people, whether or not they are Christian. Outward adherence to a “chaste and decent” way of life brings real blessings
to unbelievers and to society as a whole simply because it reflects the good and gracious will of our Creator as expressed in His “moral law.” We do not discount or
dispute such “civil righteousness,” which is “subject to reason” and “somehow within our ability” even among unredeemed people (Ap II 12; KW 114). However,
within the scope of this report, such issues are not directly relevant because our discussion rein is limited to marriage and chastity from a Christian point of view.
So, while it is an outward good wherever it appears, chastity for the Christian flows out of the “clean heart” and “right spirit” which is the work of the Holy Spirit alone
(PSALM 51:10–12).

See Meilaender, “The Child as a Gift of God,” https://resources.lcms.org/reading-study/ctcr-paper-the-child-as-a-gift-of-god.

43

44

46
Explaining “You shall not commit adultery,” Luther’s original German reads: “Wir sollen Gott fürchten und lieben, dass wir keusch und züchtig leben in Worten und
Werken, und ein jeglicher sein Gemahl lieben und ehren.” The language of “chaste and decent” comes from the translation of Luther’s explanation to the Sixth Commandment first authorized by the Evangelical Lutheran Synodical Conference of North America in its 1912 handbook, A Short Exposition of Dr. Martin Luther’s Small
Catechism (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House) and then again in A Short Explanation of Dr. Martin Luther’s Small Catechism: A Handbook of Christian Doctrine
(St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1943). In two subsequent editions of the Small Catechism with additional explanations, a 1986 translation of Luther has used
the term “sexually pure” in place of “chaste.” The LCMS continues to use the term “sexually pure” rather than “chaste” in its catechetics, for understandable reasons.
See Luther’s Small Catechism with Explanation (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1991) and Luther’s Small Catechism with Explanation (St. Louis: Concordia
Publishing House, 2017).
47

41
Jessica Valenti, “Not Wanting Kids Is Entirely Normal: Why the Ingrained Expectation that Women Should Desire to Become Parents Is Unhealthy,” The Atlantic
(September 19, 2012), https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/09/not-wanting-kids-is-entirely-normal/262367/.

Cyprian of Carthage, “Of the Discipline and Advantage of Chastity,” § 3, 4, ANF 5:587–92; online at https://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/anf05.html.

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