July 2000 - The Synod

In July of 2000 the infamous general synod of the Lutheran Church of Australia (LCA) was held at Faith College in Tanunda (South Australia).

For some months before, we had joined with many other concerned Lutherans in planning the best possible approach to ‘preserve the doctrine of the church’. We believed it was our (the pastors) responsibility to uphold and defend the public doctrine of the church. We debated for months before about the best arguments to use.

Finally the time came. We packed up and drove to Adelaide, staying in a motel in North Adelaide, and I began to attend Pastor’s Conference. I had been encouraged to speak as part of the ‘men only’ case before the event. I decided not to speak publicly, however, after seeing sense in the advice of a mentor and friend who thought I had nothing unique to add to the debate and who wished to save me from the public backlash associated with speaking out on this issue.

Even though I had promised myself I would not speak publicly at pastors’ conference, I was listening very carefully. I heard almost two days of speakers, at about 4 minutes each, and can vividly remember many arguments presented even now.

People manipulated, threatened, pleaded, complained, promised good and bad things and boomed out emotive one-liners for hours. They used every political trick in the book to gain the votes of fellow pastors for their cause.

A few arguments went beyond cheap rhetorical tricks enough to be significant, so I’ll attempt to describe them (or at least their main points) here.

An old, well loved, respected and admired pastor insisted that we would need to call another ecumenical council in order to have enough authority, the authority of the church, to alter the church's doctrine on ordination. (This raised the question of how the Lutheran Church has the authority to do anything it has done, especially formulate ministry and doctrine at the time of the Reformation!)

The problems with this are myriad, so I won’t do into them here except to point out the main thoughts I had at the time.

He assumed that, if we gathered all parts of the ‘church’ (denominations) we would have the full authority of the “Church’ at hand. In other words the Lutheran Church is only part of the church.

First: It assumes that if one gathered the mainline institutional churches one would have the whole of Christendom in the gathering. For starters, this is not Lutheran doctrine. Lutheran doctrine insists simultaneously that the church is both visible and invisible. Invisible in that it cannot be bound to any particular structure or earthly authority but ‘visible’ in that it can be ‘seen’ wherever the Word is preached and the sacraments rightly administered. How could one gather such a church without having an authority to say who was in and who was out? In other words, it is useless to talk of the ‘authority of the church’ unless one also talks of an authority that decides who to include and who to exclude. Since a mere human authority could never be trusted to complete this task alone, such an authority can only be divine.

The alternative is for individuals (or collections of individuals) to decide the matter. Which leads to a sort of ‘relative truth’. Because, after all, who knows if someone is right or wrong? Who knows if the ‘truth’ one is personally convinced of is actually true? One can never know.

To think of the Lutheran pastorate as able to make this decision (as a group) is to assume that the Lutheran’s are the one true church and that they alone wield the authority that Christ gave to his church. This would be an extraordinary statement of faith if the Lutherans actually claimed it to be true, but they don’t. The Lutheran confessions, while claiming to be true expositions of the Word of God, allow the possibility that many people outside the walls of official ‘Lutheranism’ are Christians and should rightly be counted as part of the true church. But this begs the question; ‘Who?’ Who else should be considered as part of the true church, and what gives the Lutherans the sole authority to rule on which groups and individuals are in and which are out?

Another argument I remember was arguing that the onus was on the contra case to prove that we could not ordain women. He argued against this point of view using the analogy of infant baptism. Scripture does not, he argued, clearly command us to baptise infants. Yet we baptise infants. He argued that the reason we do so is that it does not contradict any Scripture, and it is consistent with the core of Scripture, that is ‘the gospel’(Lutherans distinguish between what they call ‘law’ and ‘gospel’), and it in fact witnesses to the gospel. In other words, it promotes our view of what is important in Scripture, and we can justify it by inference from Scripture, or (at least) nothing from Scripture explicitly prohibits it, and so we are free to do it.

It was at this point I realised I don’t think or argue like a Lutheran (at least, not this sort of Lutheran). As some of my fellows mustered their arguments and counter proofs that Scripture did indeed command against women’s ordination, I had to admit to myself that I baptise infants, confident it is God’s will because it is the unbroken practice and teaching of the church from Christ’s time until now, not because I happened to think, based on my own study, it was explicitly commanded in Scripture! Now, some Lutherans would agree with me on that score, but we’ll deal with that a little later. If we take this argument we can deny the resurrection of Christ, the doctrine of the Trinity, the two natures of Christ etc, so long as (we believe) we uphold the ‘gospel’.

When I explained those who found those arguments convincing that I based my understanding rather on the unbroken witness of the church, they pointed out that many women had been ordained in the church throughout the ages. When they gave examples I disputed this by pointing out that, in all of these cases, the offending group had already been declared heretics. It was at this point the rubber hit the road.

I was about to get my first major theological shock.