Lutheran Tailspin

From the AP, news of a decision that would make even Luther recoil:

MINNEAPOLIS – Leaders of the nation's largest Lutheran church voted Friday to allow sexually active gays and lesbians in committed relationships to serve as clergy.

Gays and lesbians are currently allowed to serve as ministers in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America only if they remain celibate. The proposal to change that passed with 68 percent approval.

At 4.7 million members and about 10,000 congregations in the United States, the ELCA is one of the largest U.S. Christian denominations yet to take a more gay-friendly stance on clergy.

The final decision on whether to hire gay clergy in committed relationships will lie with individual congregations.

The Rev. Katrina Foster, a pastor in the Metropolitan New York Synod, pointed out that the church has ordained woman and divorced people in violation of a literal interpretation of scripture.

"We can learn not to define ourselves by negation," Foster said. "By not only saying what we are against, which always seems to be the same — against gay people. We should be against poverty. I wish we were as zealous about that."

Is being "against" an act coterminous with being "against" the person?

"Not to define ourselves by negation," counsels Foster. But didn't she just conclude by "defining" herself via a negation, i.e., against poverty? I find the selective application of just what negative we should allow ourselves to be defined by in this or that instance quite interesting. Doesn't Foster "define" herself against the negative of murder? Surely she is "defined" against the negative of capital punishment, war, against not recycling, against the second amendment, against driving an SUV, against not saving the polar bears, against voting Republican, against intellectual depth. You'd expect this kind of hackneyed, feel-good spiritual babble from a canting politician in the mold of Obama and other relativists of the day, but from an alleged spiritual authority, not so much.

The reverendess would benefit from the oft-repeated adage by Pope John Paul II that, "Behind every 'No' in the moral life is an even greater 'Yes.'

And, I might add, that behind every second-rate, deviant theologian lies a scandalous betrayal of the true Christian message.