The Ardennes of the First Article
We are living in clown world. Or “Scuzzworld,” as Daniel Henninger pointed out in the WSJ back in 2014. He was addressing then the ‘twerking’ scandals of that day. Presciently he wrote:
“The postmodernists who can explain away anything would reassure us that this is all hardly different than the traveling freak shows of the 19th century, when simple curiosity made people pay to enter the tent and see P. T. Barnum’s “monkey man.” But that misses the new reality. The freak show left town for a year. Now it’s our daily bread.” . . . “We’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto. We’re in ScuzzWorld.””
This simply demonstrates that the preaching of the Gospel in it’s narrow sense simply makes no sense in our day. It’s a non-sequitur. It has no meaning. It has no meaning in the world. And since we are living in the world and breathing its poisoned air, it is beginning to have no meaning to us. Jesus said that the student is not above his teacher, but that when he is fully trained, he will be like his teacher (Luke 6:40). I think the polls have closed. We are like our teacher, and our teacher has not been God.
This brings up something that a friend of mine (Fr. Daniel Hinton) has recently convinced me of. As Lutherans, we cannot preach as though the greatest threat to face our people is the pope. The devil assaulted the Second Article of the Creed during the Reformation. He assaulted the Third Article of the Creed in the Post-Reformation Era, which obviously affects the Second Article, but it is not the same attack.
In our day, the devil is assaulting the First Article of the Creed. Men and women, male and female, sodomy, homo-eroticism, transgenderism, etc. Chief of which is the created order. All of this is up for grabs in our culture. Of course this touches upon the Second Article, but it is not the same attack. And we can’t delude ourselves into thinking it is.
To use a WWII illustration: We Lutherans have an impregnable Maginot Line around the Second Article, but the enemy is assaulting the Ardennes of “God made me and all creatures.” Part of this confession is the ontological argument in 1 Timothy 2:13, “For Adam was formed first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor.”
In the midst of this, CPH helps our adversary out by publishing books by women. These books go through doctrinal review, so in some sense, the Synod conceives of these things as authoritative teaching. I’m not commenting on how good or bad the books are. I’m sure some of them are very good coming from pious Christian women. What I want us to consider is this: What are we confessing just by publishing these things when everything else in the culture is undermining the created order? Are we going to make a retread of the higher-critical arguments that it’s not teaching? Or what does the teaching consist of? Or to whom is the teaching directed? Are we clarifying the male/female orders of creation framework, or just simply muddying the waters? The created order is being undermined in the world, and we’re defending the devil’s undermining of it by paying lip service to 1 Tim 2:13 but doing what we want to do. May it not be so.
We have a real battle to fight. And we need to fight it together. We need to get our eyes focused on the fact that if the First Article falls so will the Second and the Third.
We are still in the battle for the Bible. We are still in the Battle for the Dictionary. We will always be. We need to recover a robust theology of the orders of creation before we can even begin thinking about what is appropriate and what is not. We have failed to give our church a framework for understanding their duties in the world as those who are not conformed to this world but transformed by the renewal of our minds to bring everything captive to the will of God. We are great at pointing out what is wrong with a particular thing in this world. We can state that it is wrong and we can tell you why that thing is wrong.
But we haven’t given the necessary, positive, and appropriate corollary to those wrongs. We haven’t built the framework for our lives as they are concretely lived out as redeemed and sanctified men and women in the creation, a creation that will be renewed and a creation that as those redeemed and sanctified have a renewed relationship with.
We have to get after this work. We have to be able to state positively what God’s vision of life as male and female are in the creation. We can’t simply keep responding to specifics. We have to lay out the general teaching and then deal with the specifics. This is our sin of omission. We have failed to do it. We must do it again. It can be done. For all things are possible with God.
HT: Fr. Daniel Hinton