My question is this...

Well, if you followed the aforementioned link to ALPB's Orlando updates, you would be aware that the Churchwide Assembly, by passing Recommendation Two on Sexuality, refused to get specific about what "faithful pastoral care" to all its members exactly means. One would think that this will become a hot issue at Synod Assemblies next year. They also rejected the hare-brained scheme of the Task Force and Church Council by a bare majority 50% to 49%. This has traditionalists sort of happy, but it's more a sigh-of-relief happy or dodged-a-bullet happy. "Progressives" or "revisionists" are either really hopping mad or "we'll get em next time." No one is satisfied, and this issue is not going away.

But my question is this:

If you studied sexuality in the American Roman Catholic Church for four years, took 1,000 bishops, priests, and laity, stuffed them into a big room in Orlando, and told them to decide these questions on homosexuality without recourse to a magisterium or a Pope, how much different would the results be?

I am tempted to believe that you would have gotten something very much the same as you got from the ELCA in Orlando.

This has the effect of making me feel better about my church "after all, we're not worse off than everyone else, we're just as bad off as everyone else!" But it seems to say that our chief issue in the mainline Protestant world is the issue of governance.

The only difference between the Roman Church and the Protestant Churches right now is the Pope and the Magisterium. It is there to "safeguard the deposit of the faith" from error and false teaching. Protestants, having been burnt once (sometimes literally) by the authorities when their interpretation of Scripture ran afoul of the prevailing winds within church governance, have dismissed these authorities out of hand, preferring with Luther "to acknowledge no fixed rules for the interpretation of the Word of God."

This leads to a situation in which a more-or-less representative group of the Church is told to decide these questions, as opposed to, in the Catholic tradition, members of the Church who are called to a specific purpose, that is "to transmit and protect the deposit of the faith." Those latter folks are going to act far more in accordance with the tradition rather than to let contemporary orthodoxies and pragmatic concerns dictate their stance.

Of course, with Luther, we take our stand on the idea that "Popes and Councils can err and have erred in the past." But the sword is certainly double-edged. We have no recourse, as non-Roman Catholics striving to live in conformity with Scripture and the apostolic teaching, to appeal to authoritative interpreters of Scripture. We have to choose our own authorities rather than having them in place for us. Of course, this gives us more freedom, which for some is the highest good. But it cuts both ways. For those of us who want to take our stand on the issue of blessing same-sex unions, or ordaining those people in them, our cherished freedom with regard to married clergy or ordaining women becomes the bane of our existence. Similarly, those who cherish the freedom of the Protestant world because it allows for change on the issue of homosexuality may also find the freedom undercutting orthodox action on abortion, names for God, etc.

What is all of this to say? The people of the Roman Catholic church hold various and diverse positions on the issues surrounding sexuality, or any other number of issues. But the Magisterium and the Pope grant what might be called a "safe space" for the voice of Scripture and the apostolic tradition to be proclaimed and lived. That safe space is much harder to define in our current Protestant situation. To create that safe space with integrity in a world that seems intent on abandoning the tradition for its own conceptions may be the task of the next twenty years.

Comments? Plaudits? Smack-downs?