In the February 22, 2024 post, I promised this. There I posted the 1993 essay mailed to me at that time, and probably most conservative Lutherans. The booklet was titled “A second opinion after ‘The Church and Human Sexuality” (The ELCA’s ‘study’ on sexuality). The actual essay inside was titled The Bible and Sexual Boundaries. It was by Professor Craig R. Koester of Luther Seminary, St. Paul. Did you see the pottage for which the Order of Creation birthright was sold if not profaned?
It’s towards the end. There it’s explained that the Order of Creation is more malleable in regard to the rolls given to men and women but not their sexuality. This is the Threshold Argument. The Order of Creation applies in the home but stops at the threshold. Or it applies to the home and church and stops at those thresholds, but it doesn’t apply in the world. There everyman does what is right in his own eyes as there is no king in Israel or anywhere else to speak authoritatively on this. Except for roughly 5,500 years of history, creation, and oh yeah, the Creator too. It can hardly be an Order of Creation if it doesn’t apply to all creation. Yes, sinful men muck it up; yes, sinful men pervert the Order, but abuse doesn’t vitiate use or legitimacy.
Koester maintains, “The Scriptures consistently rule out homosexual relations but offer a range of perspectives on the role of women in the faith community. A church’s decision to expand leadership roles of women cannot be invoked as a precedent for endorsing committed sexual relationship between people of the same gender. These issues are not of the same order” (388). Genesis 1:27 (NASB77)says otherwise: “And God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.” This is the Order of Creation Paul references in 2 Timothy 2 to prove women are not to teach or have authority over them. Here we also find they are made male and female.
They (sexuality and leadership roles) do in fact belong to the same order. Ergo, had not churches recognized the malleability of the Order of Creation in regard to the Church’s preaching, teaching, acolyting, and ruling, it would have had a firmer base from which to refute those who see the Order of Sex as a choice.
Confessional Lutherans know this and have been trying to confess the truth in the face of a culture that has embraced feminism from the get-go. But we’re failing. A fine confessional Lutheran pastor, who has girl acolytes, told me that female acolytes supported a transgender understanding. He said this of his own accord without my saying anything on the subject. Women voters, women exercising authority over men do the same thing. And in the end these compromises will be to the detriment of women, children, and society. We already convinced a good number of women that is better for them to be the mother of a dead child than a living one and better to be a man than a woman. There are even uglier things than this on the way.
In closing, don’t miss Koster’s feeble appeal to Luther. “He [Luther that is] concluded that silence [of women] might help maintain harmony in worship, but remarked that if ‘the Lord were to raise up a woman for us to listen to, we would allow her to rule like Huldah’” (Ibid).
First, I think it is unacceptable to use Luther to prove your point by citing his Table Talk. Would you want your dinnertime conversation, as recorded by someone else, used as proof of what you believed, taught, and confessed?
Two, this appeal is like Jastram’s 2004 essay which gave away the whole farm as far as the Order of Creation goes. In the essay – the only one in this issue of Concordia Theological Quarterly – he too appeals to Luther: “One wonders how Luther would have spoken if he had lived in a country ruled by a queen” (CTQ, 68-1, 75). Jastram evidently didn’t know that women only become queens in Christian monarchies when there was no suitable male king, and he doesn’t remember that Luther always recognized that in a case of necessity – Luther’s case was an all-women island – a woman can and should be chosen as pastor.
Here’s a rule of thumb: When you see the world stampeding one direction, the Christian knows to go the opposite. When whole farms are being given away, don’t sell yours. If you do, you’ll not only get way too little, you’ll lose even more.
