Words of the day:

"pastoral"
"conscience"
"may"
"but"

The scariest part of this report is Recommendation One, which reads as follows:

Because the God-given mission and communion we share is at least as important as
the issues about which faithful conscience-bound Lutherans find themselves so
decisively at odds, the Task Force for ELCA Studies on Sexuality recommends that
the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America concentrate on finding ways to live
together faithfully in the midst of our disagreements.

By approving it, the Churchwide Assembly would, in the words of the commentary, be "declaring that this issue does not have to be church dividing." This would be an absolute and clear victory for a revisionist position, making gay and lesbian rostered ministers and same-sex blessings just one of many ways of "living faithfully." Once a Churchwide Assembly decides that the issue does not have to be church-dividing, the "unity" of the church trumps right doctrine and practice any day.

More on this, I'm sure.

N.T. Wright on the Tsunami

Oh, he goes by "Tom Wright" often.
And no, I still haven't made it 1/4 way through Resurrection of the Son of God.

Darn Blogger

Ok, I just spent 30 minutes blogging about the article I just linked to below, only to have it all disappear when I tried to preview it. Before I lose my sense of God-given peace, I'm going to bed.

I'll try again later, maybe.

Pax Christi

Or, in the New Year...Century's staff converts to Orthodoxy?

In the New Year, A Protestant Devotion to Mary?

Link to the cover story of the December Christian Century.

It is an overview article, meant for introduction to the subject of "a Protestant Mariology" and at some points clearly written to ask questions and provoke discussion rather than to state unequivocally what ought to be done.

But it makes some good points, such as the following:

We might begin considering the place of Mary in devotion by noting some ways not to renew a discussion about her. We ought not speak as though all that matters about her is the virgin birth. This question, central in the fundamentalist-modernist controversy of the early 20th century, treats Mary herself as a side issue, a mere conduit for the one she bore. A second way not to proceed is to use Mary to say anew that which Protestants already say. For example, when Luther treated Mary he tended to depict her as a model for justification by grace alone—that is, as further evidence for what he already believed. If we are to attend to Mary anew, the effort should yield something fresh, something neglected in our own churches and lives.

Also worth noting is that Robert Jenson, in his Systematic Theology, comes out in favor of asking the saints for their intercession:

Jenson argues that death does not sever the bonds of the body of Christ—as even most Protestant eucharistic prayers makes clear. To ask for a departed saint’s prayer, then, is not in principle different from asking another Christian for her prayers. We hold that the saints are not simply gone but are ever alive to God, and so we ought also consider them to be available as intercessors, and powerful ones at that.

It would have been interesting to learn from this article what the official Lutheran-Roman Catholic dialogue came up with on the subject of Mary and the saints, not to mention the dialogues between Roman Catholics and other churches.

There is a two-page sidebar elsewhere on the site detailing an Hispanic Methodist pastor's negative response.