LCMS Convention Workbook St. Louis, Missouri — 1998, Page 331

Transcription machine transcription, uncorrected

⤓ Download .txt · copy text

THEOLOGICAL DOCUMENTS

Church also renamed its Board of Christian Charities the Board for Chris-
tian Social Action in 1948, although the ALC remained more resistant to
direct social action than did the ULCA.

In 1957, the ULCA published a symposium in three volumes, Christian
Social Responsibility, based on six years of work by 14 of its pastors, church
executives, and theology professors. The symposium contained an essay
by a young instructor at the ULCA seminary in Philadelphia, William H.
Lazareth, who would play a crucial role in shaping his church body's the-
ology of social ministry.” Lazareth’s contribution, “Christian Faith and
Culture,” was a careful exposition of the two-kingdom ethic that faithful-
ly reproduced the sometimes subtle nuances of Luther's thought.” But
Lazareth also sounded a theme that was relatively new to American
Lutherans, although quite familiar to the Reformed:

San corrupts social structures as well as individual hearts; so also must
they be judged and redeemed. We must strive to reconstruct our society
simultaneously from within—by transforming individual citizens—as well
as from without—by reforming institutional structures—so as to permit the
conversion of the unsaved and tu encourage the stewardship of the reborn.”

While Lazareth carefully developed this theme within Lutheran conceptu-
alities, it was still a significant shift in approach.

Another noteworthy shift in the traditional Lutheran approach can be
seen in the essay on “Christian Faith and the Political Order” by T. A.
Kantonen:

It is for the church to make clear what belongs to Caesar and what
belongs to God, to give Caesar what belongs to him but not what belongs
to God, to act as vigilant watchman and critic over the state to see that it
remains the state and nothing more, performing its true functions but not
transgressing, its limits... Although the church itself cannot legislate for
non-Christians, it has a vital stake in all legislation pertaining to human

” Four men who studied at both Philadelphia’s Lutheran Seminary and New York's
Union Seminary played key leadership roles in the ULCA: Harold Letts, Rufus Cornelsen,
George Foret, and William Lazareth. According to Klein and von Dehsen (39), Lazareth
“would become one of the most influential voices, first as a board member and later as the
staff director of the unit charged with drafting social statements.”

Let us say it dialectically with St. Paul and Luther in this way: although Christians,
as forgiven sinners, are free in faith from the religious fulfillment of the divine demands of
the law as a way of eternal salvation; they are simultaneously, as social citizens, responsible
in love for the ethical performance of the civil demands of the law as God's means for their
communal preservation (I Cor. 9:20). In short, the Christian ts free from the red light an the
chancel which presumes to direct traffic to God, but not from the red light on the street cor-
ner which directs traffic among men. It is with this latter, nonredemptive expression of
God's rule that we are here concerned.” William Lazareth, “Christan Faith and Culture,” in
Christian Social Responsibility, vol. 3, Life in Community, ed. Harold C. Letts (Philadelphia
Muhlenberg Press, 1957), 54

“Tid. 71

ies that created it had a history of developing national! church positions.
The “old” ALC (1930) had on occasion developed statements addressed to
members of the church to aid in the development of their own thinking
and as a basis for their individual actions as citizens. But, speaking direct-
ly to government or endorsing specific policy proposals was not part of the
Pattern.” Yet, the other three church bodies joining with the ALC had seri-
ous reservations about even this limited degree of social action. There was,
as a result, considerably more debate in the ALC than in the LCA over the
Propriety of social statements.

Even so, the ALC did gradually acquire its public voice. In the 27 years
of the ALC’s existence, there was a noticeable “shift from an early empha-
sis on social change through individual action to a later emphasis on the
need for the church collectively to work for change.”* According to
Charles Lutz, the last Director of the ALC’s Office of Church in Society, the
ALC’s statements can be characterized as “moderate” within the U.S. polit-
ical spectrum, with a “tilt” in the past decade toward the “progressive”
side. They clearly reflected, argued Lutz, a consensus of those serving on
the committees that proposed them, and even the conventions that adopt-
ed them.” Whether they also reflected the view point of the total member-
ship, he admitted, can be debated.

Lutz acknowledges that advocacy statements have more impact if thev
are supported by voters expressing that same view directly to their legis-
lators. And he cautions that “the church’s social witness is that part of the
church’s total work on which we as church members will most likely dis-
agree.”” The ambiguity of “church” is clearly evident here also, and one
wonders what exactly the “church’s social witness” is, when it may not
represent a consensus of the church’s members but only a particular con-
vention of the church.

With the formation of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America in
1988, a well-staffed Washington office was created that carried forward the

” Charles P. Lutz, Public Voice: Social Policy Development im the American Lutheran Church,
1960-1987 (ALC Standing Committee for Church in Society, 1987), 3.

“Ibid. 10.

* After 1970, the ALC had a system of ranking social statements: “comment and coun-
sel,” adopted by 51% of the delegates in order to stimulate the thought and action of church
members; “judgment and conviction.” adopted by 60% of the delegates in order to con-
tribute to societal debate; and “policy and practice,” adopted by two-thirds of delegates, in
order to determine ALC institutional behavior. Statements of judgment and conviction as
well as policy and practice were considered to be a speaking of the church body to the larg-
er society. Between 1973 and 1987, Presiding Bishop David Preus also spoke often to public
issues,

“Lutz, 10.

Tid ., 25.

<

welfare, in such issues as clearing slums, feeding the hungry, settling

refugees, protecting children, Providing for the sick and the aged, con-

serving health, and promoting peace.”

Here Kantonen writes of the “church” ambiguously, so that it is not
clear whether the church’s “vital stake” as well as its role as “watchman
and critic” was to be fulfilled individually by Christians through their
vocations and political associations or corporately by church bodies
through their national conventions and executive staff.

It is quite clear that the symposium on Christian Social Responsibility
was designed to lay a foundation for direct social action by the ULCA. This
was explicit in Lazareth’s booklet A Theology of Politics (1960), in which he
spoke of the church or one of its official agencies proclaiming the general
norms and guidelines of Christian political ethics in order to provide judg-
ment and guidance for those responsible under God for the peace, justice,
and freedom of the world. Although Lazareth did not intend for this to
involve partisan politics, his work did ensure that the ways and means for
the corporate expression of social concern were well-rooted in the Luther-
an Church in America (LCA) already at its formation in 1962."

During the 1960s, the national mood favored social reform to a degree
not seen since the administration of Franklin Roosevelt during the Great
Depression. The Civil Rights Movement and the War on Poverty, followed
later in the decade by the Vietnam War, were the major social concerns. In
February 1966, the LCA’s Board of Social Ministry adopted a brief state-
ment drafted by Lazareth, “Social Ministry: Biblical and Theological Per-
spectives.” In it, Lazareth went even further than he had in 1960 to speak
of the “imperative for Christians, both privately and corporately, as citi-
zens and churchmen, to join hands with all men of good will in working
together for the comunon good of humanity.” With the same ambiguous
use of “church” as that of Kantonen, Lazareth wrote explicitly of institu-
tiona! advocacy: “In an age of corporate decision-making, the public wit-
ness of official representatives of the church can be particularly effective in
expressing and reinforcing the ethical judgments of the Christian commu-
nity.” This argument presumed, on reasonable grounds, that the church
could devise a satisfactory mechanism of producing corporate pdgments,
that institutional advocacy was a successful political tool, and that this was
necessitated by our “age of corporate decision-making” —all of which has
in fact been a matter of considerable debate.”

The American Lutheran Church of 1960 also had a process of policy

levelopment on social issues—although only one of the four merging bod-

“Taito Almar Kantonen, “Christian Faith and the Political Order,” in Chrastian Social!
Responsibility, 143,

"Cf. Klein and von Dehsen, 39.

* Mid. 62-71

advocacy of the ALC and the LCA even more intensively. According to the
June 1993 issue of The Lutheran, published by the ELCA, the following
political concerns were being actively addressed by the ELCA’s Lutheran
Office of Government Affairs: the Religious Freedom Restoration Act,
expansion of the earned income credit, balanced budget amendments,
American Indian Religious Freedom Act amendment, aid to Nicaragua,
Violence Against Women Act of 1993, the Mickey Leland Childhood
Hunger Relief Act of 1993, the Every Fifth Child Act, Civil Rights Amend-
ments Act for Gay and Lesbian Civil Rights, opposing the death penalty,
and expanding the definition of conscientious objection to inclyde objec-
tion to specific wars.” Clearly, this advocacy had moved a long way from
Lazareth’s vision of teaching the state basic ethical principles.”

Social ininistry in the Missouri Synod was similar to that in other
American Lutheran church bodies in that Missouri first concentrated on
social welfare rather than social action. Support for the Social Gospe! was
never strong in the Missouri Synod, yet already in the 1930s there was a
“growing number of Associated Lutheran Charities adherents who were
clamoring for a more vital fusion between Lutheran theology and Luther-
an action on the American scene.”'™ The theological basis for this new
vision of social ministry was provided by seminary professor Richard
Caemmerer, beginning with a paper presented in 1938:

In his paper on Lutheran social action, Caemmerer called for a fresh appre-

ciation of justifying grace that always motivates the individual toa new life

expressed in a love for the next man, Christian and non-Christian alike.

Neither the New Testament itself nor the Reformation era provides the

contemporary church with a blueprint for social action. But Caemmerer

discerned the need for a revamping and revitalizing of the training of min-
isters and teachers in the Lutheran church who will see the proclamation

of the Gospel in the context of modern human need, and will hold forth

that Gospel as the power which sways men in the church to live as Christ

lived in the world.”

“Debra Ulingworth Greene, “LOGA Gives Lutherans Voice in D.C.” The Lutheran 6,
nw. 6 June 1993): 36.

“Even David W. Preus, the last bishop of The American Lutheran Church, has publicly
called on the ELCA to “close Lutheran lobbying offices at national and state legislatures.”
Well known for his personal involvement in social justice issues, Preus nevertheless wrote:
“Synod and churchwide assemblies appear more interested in aiming church legislative
majorities on contentious pubtic issues than in providing theological resources to help mem-
bers do their own wrestling with those issues. In its legislative mode the national church is
seen as accepting ‘the world’s’ agenda (social issues).” David W. Preus, “What Is to Be Done?
ELCA Responses,” Lutheran Forum 28, no. 3 (August 1994): 17-19.

““F Dean Lueking, A Century of Caring: The Welfare Ministry among Missouri Sunod
Lutherans 1868-1968 (St. Louis: LCMS Board of Social Ministry, 1968), 55.

 Teid., 56.

48

331