Morpheus to Neo:
This is your last chance. After this, there is no going back. You take the blue pill and the story ends. You wake in your bed and you believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill and you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. Remember that all I am offering is the truth. Nothing more.
The conclusions and recommendations made in Human Sexuality: Gift and Trust, a proposed social statement by the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, should come as no surprise.
The foundations for them were already being laid by the Twentieth-Century Project, which I define as the efforts of twentieth-century theologians to salvage the perceived essence of Christianity in the face of Darwinism and new, scientific discoveries that on the surface appeared to descredit key elements of the faith.
For Protestantism, the Twentieth-Century Project resorted to: reductionism (brainiac definition here; lay-friendly here), which would suggest that the whole of Christianity can be reduced to its chief parts; appeals to theologians (notably Luther, Calvin) as the final authorities for contemporary theological discourse; and to theologizing in systematic categories, rather than offering biblical propositions to support an argument.
Thus, faced with a perceived threat of new epistemologies, some theologians “reduced” Christianity either to the biblical fundamentals of faith (fundamentalism), or the discernment of religous truth (modernism). (Yes, fundamentalism and liberalism are the twin daughters of reductionism.)
So, dear reader, you can take either the blue pill and believe whatever you want to believe, or you can take the red pill and come back soon to Bioethike to see how deep the problem of “sexuality” in the Lutheran Church goes.
Knock, knock, Neo.
