LCMS Convention Proceedings St. Louis, Missouri — 2016, Page 129

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So for the Early Church, most of the arguments centered on the nature of God. They were about Christology and trinitarian theology. So it’s Arius’s errors
that give us Athanasius’s refinements. It’s Nestorius’s
blunders that give us Cyril’s insights. That’s how we
develop the rich trinitarian and Christological theologies from the Early Church.
A thousand years later, what are the debates taking
place in the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation? They’re all about the nature of the Church and
the nature of salvation. It’s ecclesiology, soteriology,
justification, sanctification. And as a result of those
debates, we got richer theologies, regardless of which
side of those debates we may lie.
Today’s debates don’t primarily center on Christology
and trinitarian theology, the nature of justification
or sanctification. They focus on the nature of man.
They focus on anthropology. Now the reason that we
see so many of our neighbors hate the church, it’s not
because of our ministry to the poor. It’s not because
we visit the sick, clothe the naked, feed the hungry.
It’s not because we believe in a trinitarian God. The
reason so many of our enemies hate the Church right
now is because of three anthropological truths articulated in the very first pages of the Bible: that we are
made in the image and likeness of God, that we’re
created male and female, and that male and female
are created for each other. Those three beliefs. It’s
abortion, euthanasia, cloning, marriage, transgender
debates. That we’re created in the image and likeness of God, created male and female, and male and
female created for each other. That’s where we see all
the cultural disagreement.
So what it’s going to require is a response on the substance of what we believe. Now we can’t simply pivot
to religious liberty, although it would be important
that we defend religious liberty as well. But the question is: Will our average neighbor think that we are
like the pro-lifers or like the racists?
My average classmate at Princeton thinks I’m wrong
about abortion, but they don’t think I’m stupid and
they don’t think I’m evil. They understand where I’m
coming from. They can say, “We think Ryan’s wrong,
but we understand why he believes that.” And therefore, they’re more likely to respect my freedom to not
have to pay for or perform an abortion. My average

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classmate at Princeton still does not understand why
I believe what I believe about marriage. They think
the Westboro Baptist Church speaks for me. If you’re
a secular liberal, you’ve never gone to church, you’ve
never read the Bible; all you know about Christianity
and same-sex marriage is “God hates fags.” That’s the
phrase on the signs that the Westboro Baptist Church
holds up when it pickets funerals of military members. If that’s all you know about Christian beliefs on
same-sex marriage, what are you likely to say? You’re
likely to say, these people are crazy. These people
are evil, and these people are dangerous. And these
people have to be stopped. We have to shut down their
schools, shut down their charities, shut down their
businesses. The reason that, by and large, you can be a
pro-lifer in America and run a hospital, run a school,
run a business, is that we can agree to disagree on the
abortion issue. We’re not seeing that on the same-sex
marriage issue because too many people don’t even
understand why we believe what we believe.
So I just want to suggest that where we are going to
have to defend ourselves will be both a theology and a
philosophy of the body. As John Paul II points out in
his famous book on the theology of the body, we need
to do both the philosophy and theology. We need to
engage the social sciences and the hard sciences. We
have to look at the sociology of marriage, the psychiatry and psychology of gender identity. We have to
show there is a unity of truth here. There is no contradiction between what the best of reason and the
best of faith tell us about the human person. Because
what’s at stake here is whose understanding of human nature will prevail and then what will happen to
those who “dissent” from government orthodoxy.
Lastly, let me close by looping back to where I started. I started with the Moynihan Report, 50 years of
heterosexuals not living out the truth about marriage.
Our best defense of marriage and our best defense of
religious liberty, therefore, is going to be living out
the truth in our own lives. And for this, I want to cite
a very Lutheran-friendly pope, Benedict XVI. Benedict, a world-class theologian, a world-class intellectual, is famous for saying, “It’s not the arguments of
the intellectuals that win converts, it’s the holiness of
the saints and it’s the beauty of the artists.”
The reason why we lost this marriage debate in the
United States was because we failed to live out holy
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