LCMS Convention Workbook St. Louis, Missouri — 2023, Page 207

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THEOLOGICAL DOCUMENTS­­—COMMISSION ON THEOLOGY AND CHURCH RELATIONS
place as He joins us to the Son and through the Son to the Father in the experience of redemption. Thus, to speak of
chastity within the context of our sanctification as Christians, we are bound to begin on the foundation of trinitarian
theology — that is, with the Triune God “in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins” (COL. 1:14).
Whereas the culture around us is increasingly secularized, non-religious, and hostile toward the traditional
Christian understanding of sexuality, Christians by contrast view sexuality from a decidedly theological perspective.
We are not permitted to treat marriage and sexuality as merely capricious human choices subject to our individual
whims, to our emotional or physical gratification, or to social expectations. On the contrary, our sexuality is determined by the will of the God who made us, who saves us, and who sets us apart in His church for loving service to
Him and neighbor.

In such humble awe we also confess “one God” (Nicene Creed). The early church faced explicit denials of the
unity of the Godhead both from the pagan religions that dominated their world and from heretical dualistic movements claiming a place within the church. Heresies such as the so-called Gnostic movement denied both the biblical
teaching about God (in its tendency to see both a good God and an evil creator force or demiurge) and its teachings
about humanity.56
A more contemporary overt denial of the First Article’s confession of God the Father and His creating work is
atheism.57 But a more common denial is somewhat more subtle. With the unfortunate rupture between science and
theology that is increasingly dominant in the West, a form of “naturalism” has developed that either consigns God to
the margins of science or denies His work altogether. It features a world view that may be called “scientism.”58 Based
on the great strides in external well-being that science and technology have provided, this perspective draws the false
conclusion that human endeavor is the ultimate hope for all humanity and, indeed, for Earth itself. Human reason is
viewed as the magisterial lord and arbiter of all truth, of right and wrong, and of life’s meaning.

Cursed is the person who trusts in mankind.
He makes human flesh his strength,
and his heart turns from the Lord.
He will be like a juniper in the Arabah;
he cannot see when good comes
but dwells in the parched places in the wilderness,
in a salt land where no one lives.
Jeremiah 17:5–6 (CSB)
The foundation for any authentically Christian understanding of human sexuality must begin with the First Article.
As we confess the one God who created all things, we confess our own creation. “I believe that God has made me and
all creatures; that He has given me my body and soul, eyes, ears, and all my members, my reason and all my senses,
and still takes care of them.”50 A Christian cannot speak of humanity or any aspect of human life — including human
sexuality — apart from God. To know ourselves, we have to know God.
Although we have hints of God’s existence and nature in creation, our comprehension is muddled at best
(ROM. 1:19–32; 2:13–16). Human reason can never discover God’s true being and attributes.51 Rather, for us to know God
He must reveal Himself to us. Only then can we confess the faith that saves and only then do we know what it means
to be His creature or to understand any aspect of human personhood, including our sexuality. The creeds echo God’s
self-revelation, as Luther says:
For in all three articles God himself has revealed and opened to us the most profound depths of his fatherly heart
and his pure, unutterable love. For this very purpose he created us, so that he might redeem us and make us holy,
and, moreover, having granted and bestowed upon us everything in heaven and on earth, he has also given us his

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In all of this, the Creator God of Scripture is denied in favor of no god or some amorphous god of human imagination. And, since in every case the resulting belief is self-defined, the result is a god of self. It is a claim that in some
manner our entire life — from inner being to our bodies — belongs to us and we are accountable to no one. This
hubristic elevation of self may feed one’s ego, but the irony is that with the loss of the God of Scripture comes the loss
of any true sense of oneself and life in God’s creation — of “me and all creatures.”61
The creedal confession of faith in God is not mere theism, a belief in some sort of creator. We name the one
Creator God in the Creed. We speak first of the Father Almighty. To speak of almighty power follows directly from
acknowledging God as creator. But we also call God Father, which acknowledges a personal bond and love — indeed,
a tender love both for the Son and for all His adopted children. He is the Almighty and He is the Father.
We do not confess God as father in some metaphorical sense, but that God is “the God and father of our Lord
Jesus Christ” (1 PETER 1:3). This confession is no less than an echo of our Savior’s own language (JOHN 5:18). To confess the
Son is to confess the Father and, in so doing, to refuse a vague spirituality or insipid theism in favor of a bold sense
that the same God who is Spirit must also be confessed as Father, despite every gnostic objection, ancient or modern.
Such a confession flows directly from the genealogical origin of the Son in the Father by the Spirit.62 God is Father
because He eternally begets the Son by the Spirit.
The First Article of the Creed reflects what Christians have long held as the theological significance of the creation
narrative and what Luther time and again identified in his catechisms: God made us — our minds, our bodies, our
very sexuality — with design and purpose. He thus intends that it is honorable and good for all people that they use
their minds, their bodies, and their sexuality in accordance with that design and purpose. We receive our lives —
body and soul — from God alone. Every attempt to claim that we are “in charge” — that our lives are our own to do
with them what we wish — founders on the firm confession that we are God’s creatures. Therefore, to misuse, marginalize, belittle, or rationalize away the bodies, sexual identities and unions God has created is to raise doubts about
the God who has given us our physicality in the first place. And to misuse what God has made is little more than to
deny His work in creation.
The truth of God is not adequately confessed, however, if we stop at the First Article of the Creed. God is indeed
our Father but He is more. “I believe in God the Father Almighty … and in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord.”
There we broach the tension and mystery of the catholic faith and its “one God in Trinity and Trinity in Unity.”63

B. THE SECOND ARTICLE
He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by him all things were created, in heaven and on
earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities — all things were created through
him and for him. And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the
church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent. For in him all
the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in
heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.
Colossians 1:15–20
The creating work of the Triune God is very good (GEN. 1:31). God sees the goodness of His work. The man and
woman also see goodness at first. They see that their bodies are naked and they are unashamed, fully exposed in a
CTCR, In Christ All Things Hold Together, 61.

61

LSCwE, 16.

62

See James Bushur, “The Holy Trinity: The Genealogical Identity of the Church,” in Luther’s Large Catechism with Annotations, 307–11.

63

Athanasian Creed, LSB, 319–20, emphasis added.

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LC Creed, 63; KW 439.

53

LC Creed, 10; KW 432.

54

LC Creed, 13; KW 432.

55
Commission on Theology and Church Relations, Together with All Creatures: Caring for God’s Living Earth (St. Louis: The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod, 2010),
50–51.
56
The Greek word gnosis, Gnosticism’s root, is innocuous, and simply refers to knowledge. The term Gnosticism envelopes numerous individual teachers and systems
and cannot be easily traced to any one source, and scholars debate its origins. Some scholars show connections between Gnosticism and earlier Babylonian religion,
others connections to Egyptian teachings. However, it is certain that Gnosticism has significant Greek influences, although it would be an oversimplification to say
that Gnosticism is derived from Platonism. See Volker Henning Drecoll, “Martin Hengel and the Origins of Gnosticism” in Gnosticism, Platonism and the Late Ancient
World: Essays in Honour of John D. Turner, ed. Tuomas Rasimus, Kevin Corrigan, and John Douglas Turner, Nag Hammadi and Manichaean Studies (Leiden: Brill,
2013), 139–65, and also Jay Bregman, “Neoplatonizing Gnosticism and Gnosticizing Neoplatonism in the ‘American Baroque,’” 609–29, in the same work.

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blind to its error. “Like Prometheus stealing fire from the gods, modern man has attempted to sever one of God’s
greatest gifts, human reason, from its root in the divine reason. The result is a lack of humility, an overreaching pride
that supposes humans can solve their various problems by themselves.”60

60

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58
Commission on Theology and Church Relations, In Christ All Things Hold Together: The Intersection of Science and Christian Theology (St. Louis: The Lutheran
Church—Missouri Synod, 2015), esp. 1–12.

LSCwE, 16.

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There is little room for one Creator God in this view of the world. Yet, such a worldview certainly has a god —
something “to which we … look for all good and in which we … find refuge in all need.”59 It trusts science and technology for protection, longevity and happiness. It is oblivious to nature’s testimony to the true God’s orderly work and
blind to His beauty. As it does so, it not only worships as a supreme entity the sum of human creativity and intellect,
it effectively also makes each person into a little god who is lord of his own values and “truth.” Like all idolatry, it is

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Contemporary denials of the one God and His creation may be crass or subtle. Atheism is one of the fastest growing “religious” perspectives in the US today, with
the number of people claiming atheism more than doubling as a percentage of the American population since 2009 (Pew Research Center, “10 Facts About Atheists,”
Michael Lipka, FactTank, December 6, 2019, http://pewrsr.ch/1VwtROy). The so-called “new atheists” are overtly hostile toward every religion, but especially toward
Christianity. While the more recent “newer atheism” sees some pragmatic value in religion, all atheism denies any supreme Being and, of course, any notion of one
God as Creator and Lord. The reader may be interested in the brief, but cogent evaluations of “New Atheism” and “Newer Atheists” available on CTCR’s website at
https://www.lcms.org/about/leadership/commission-on-theology-and-church-relations/documents/religious-organizations-and-movements.

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FC SD 5, 22; KW 585. See also Commission on Theology and Church Relations, The Natural Knowledge of God in Christian Confession and Christian Witness
(St. Louis: The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod, 2013).

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In both the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds we talk about “the nature, will, acts, and work of God the Father.”53 This is
personal: “I hold and believe that I am God’s creature.”54 To speak as a creature is to see ourselves against the spectacle
of God’s creative work that surrounds and sustains us in the magnitude of heaven and the microcosm of earth’s
tiniest organism.

Yet, the creedal confession bids us not only to humble fear, but also to grateful wonder and praise. The Psalter
abounds in the Creator’s praise as it marvels at God’s glory (PSALM 8), at heaven’s beauty and splendor (PSALM 19), and
then, even more, that God deigns to reveal Himself in words. So David teaches that the Lord’s ownership of creation
should lead us to seek to know Him personally, to “seek the face of the God of Jacob” (PSALM 24:6).

A. THE FIRST ARTICLE

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Son and his Holy Spirit, through whom he brings us to himself. For, as explained above, we could never come to
recognize the Father’s favor and grace were it not for the Lord Christ, who is a mirror of the Father’s heart.52

To be a creature is to be part of, not the master of God’s created world. To confess God’s creation is inevitably also
to confess our sin against Him and His creation, including the hubris that sees creation as ours to do with as we will
and our tyranny over other creatures, turning everything and everyone into objects and commodities.55 As creatures,
we therefore stand under God and His judgment in “the fear of the Lord.”

In the present section, then, we will see that how we are created, redeemed and sanctified has implications for
how we live spiritually, mentally, physically, even sexually. We cannot separate our sexual identity, views or ethics
from who God has made us in creation, what Christ has promised to redeem from sin through His suffering, death,
and resurrection, and how the Holy Spirit sanctifies us to live chaste and decent lives in our thoughts and behavior.
Reflection upon the theology of the First Article of the Creed reveals that God has made us and everything that
belongs to us physically with divine intent and purpose. Reflection upon the theology of the Second Article shows
how that pristine creation of God has been damaged by sin yet redeemed in the person and work of Jesus Christ.
Reflection upon the theology of the Third Article, finally, underscores how the Christian life, by the power of the
Holy Spirit, seeks to conform itself to the image of Jesus Christ in word and deed, and that entails the pursuit of
sexual purity through chastity and decency.

50

207

LC Ten Commandments, 2; KW 386.

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pure innocence (GEN. 2:25).
Then God’s good work is spoiled (GEN. 3). Even as God “saw” what was good, so the fall from goodness into sin and
disobedience starts with seeing and it is seen immediately. Just as God said, with disobedience the eyes of man and
woman are opened (GEN. 3:5). From hearts that turn away from the Word comes a corrupted vision that delights in the
sight of food that has been forbidden (GEN. 3:6). Our first parents’ visual longing leads them into sin. And, immediately,
their eyes are opened to what is not good. With their eyes they see themselves, even their very bodies, to be shameful
in their exposure (GEN. 3:7).
They see their nakedness and must hide it. They immediately seek to cover their nakedness in the presence of one
another. Why this relational shame of a husband and his wife? We need not wait long for an answer. They seek to
hide their nakedness, because that physical exposure indicates a far deeper vulnerability — vulnerability before their
Creator. Their eyes are now opened to see “like God” sees (GEN. 3:5). They see their shame. They are not only naked and
ashamed, but also afraid: “I was afraid because I was naked, and I hid myself ” (GEN. 3:10). The shame in one another’s
presence reveals a sin at work in them that will persist in all their descendants. They objectify one another sexually,
whereas, before they had sinned, their nakedness simply reflected the goodness of their creation as male and female
and the delight that this sexual difference entails (GEN. 1:27, 31; 2:23). Now they no longer see God’s good creation in one
another, but seeing mere physicality, they judge one another and themselves by some human standard of what ought
to be.64
The connection between nakedness and shame — and between sin and fear — is inextricable. What was good,
very good, has been spoiled with an unstoppable rot. The rot is now as evident and visible as their nakedness, as
odorous as the stench of man’s sweat, and as audible as the cries of a woman in childbirth. But it is in Adam’s rightful
fear of judgment that we see how truly deep is sin’s putrid mark. The embodied creature made in the image and likeness of God now bears the leprosy of a decay that flows out from sin’s sclerosis of heart and soul to infect bodily parts
that serve iniquity and Satan instead of righteousness. Their bodies now proclaim the message of their consciences.
They are no longer “very good.” They are not good at all.

1. Sexual activity as illustrative of rebellion and disobedience
Ironically, sinful humanity is not only marked by the shame of our first parents, but it is also capable of a seemingly
impermeable rebellious shamelessness that seeks to deny any legitimate judgment against our wrongdoing (JER. 6:15).
Yet, the evidence for sin’s evil cannot forever be denied (ROM. 1:19). The law written on the heart will still testify with
a whispered warning to the conscience about right and wrong, the accountability humanity cannot avoid, and the
search for excuses among their own internal accusations (ROM. 2:15). Therefore, human creatures cannot hide their sin.
Not only consciences, but bodies reveal it with “unpresentable parts” that demand modesty (1 COR. 12:23). Although the
very notion of “unpresentable parts” might seem quaint to many and even horribly inhibited by others, even a decadent society normally hides its pornography and sexual vices, seeking at least to protect its children from them. So it
is that the Word of God gives particular — although by no means exclusive — attention to our sexual embodiment in
teaching us about sin.
That shamelessness can easily be illustrated in human sexual activity. So our Lord forthrightly points to the sexual
lust that motivates all sexual sin (MATT. 5:27–32; 19:1–9). Likewise, Paul identifies the suppression of God’s created intent
and His righteousness with the behavior that foolishly idolizes the creature over the Creator and cites the example
of those who “exchange natural sexual relations for unnatural ones” (ROM. 1:26, CSB). Paul also illustrates the foolishness
of sin’s rebellious self-destructiveness with sexual immorality (fornication) since it is sin against one’s own body
(1 COR. 6:18). So it is that our bodily activity often bespeaks the unrighteousness of the fallen man and woman (MATT. 15:19).

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It is here where we already see the problem of pornography, whereby the body becomes only an object for self-pleasure, not a visible person intended to reflect God’s
goodness. Sexual acts are divorced from any personal connection not only between the actors, but even more for viewers.

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2023 Convention Workbook

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