Leading Lutheran scholar: ELCA’s liberal drift causing ‘brain drain’ from denomination
By John H. Adams, The Layman Online, August 9, 2005
The drift into liberalism is causing a “brain drain” from the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, Carl E. Braaten, one of the denomination’s leading scholars and writers, says in a letter to the ELCA’s presiding bishop, Mark S. Hansen.
Braaten, professor emeritus of systematic theology at the Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago, wrote Hansen in July, preceding by three weeks Tuesday’s opening of the Ninth Biennial Assembly of the ELCA in Orlando, Fla. One of the major issues facing the assembly is a report calling for acceptance of homosexual ministers who are in “committed” relationships with people of the same gender.
Braaten expressed his deep love for Lutheranism, but also his great displeasure about the direction of the denomination. He used strong words, including “heresy,” “pious piffle,” and “empty body” and warned that the denomination was on a “trajectory that leads to rank antinomianism.”
It was a letter that expressed the alarm shared by orthodox Christians about the liberal drift in their own Protestant denominations, including the Presbyterian Church (USA), the Episcopal Church (USA) and the United Church of Christ.
The son of missionary parents, Brattan taught at the Lutheran School of Theology from 1962 to 1991. He began his letter to Hansen by naming numerous Lutheran scholars who had left the ELCA, many becoming Roman Catholics or joining Orthodox communions.
“All of these colleagues have given candid explanations of their decisions to their families, colleagues, and friends,” he said. “While the individuals involved have provided a variety of reasons, there is one thread that runs throughout the stories they tell. It is not merely the pull of Orthodoxy or Catholicism that enchants them, but also the push from the ELCA, as they witness with alarm the drift of their church into the morass of what some have called Liberal Protestantism.”
Brattan said his departed colleagues were “convinced that the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America has become just another liberal protestant denomination. Hence, they have decided that they can no longer be a part of that. Especially, they say, they are not willing to raise their children in a church that they believe has lost its moorings in the great tradition of evangelical (small e) and catholic (small c) orthodoxy (small o), which was at the heart of Luther’s reformatory teaching and the Lutheran Confessional Writings. They are saying that the Roman Catholic Church is now more hospitable to confessional Lutheran teaching than the church in which they were baptized and confirmed. Can this possibly be true?”
“Through theological study and ecumenical engagement I thought I had learned something about what it means to be Lutheran,” he said. “I have written many books and articles, preached and published many sermons – leaving a long paper trail – over a period of five decades, explaining what it means to be Lutheran. There is nothing in all of those communications that accommodates liberal protestantism, which Karl Barth called a ‘heresy,’ an assessment with which I fully agree.”
Today’s Lutheranism is not what he learned from his parents, missionary teachers and scholars, Bratten said, naming Nygren, Aulen, Bring, Pinomaa, Schlink, P. Brunner, Bonhoeffer, Pannenberg, Piepkorn, Quanbeck, Preus, and Lindbeck. The faith he learned and taught “is now being marginalized to the point of near extinction.”
“As Erik Petersen said about 19th century German Protestantism, all that is left of the Reformation heritage is the aroma from an empty bottle,” he said. “A lot of the pious piffle remains, but then, so was Adolf von Harnack a pious man. All the heretics of the ancient church were pious men. Our pastors and laity are being deceived by a lot of pietistic aroma, but the bottle is empty.”
He declared that “what is happening is nothing less than a tragedy. The ELCA is driving out the best and the brightest theologians of our day, not because it is too Lutheran, but because it has become putatively just another liberal protestant denomination.”
In his younger days, Bratten and Robert Jenson began and edited a journal called the Dialog. In 1991, they resigned from Dialog to found a new journal, Pro Ecclesia, a Journal of Catholic and Evangelical Theology.
In the meantime, Bratten said Dialog has become the “voice of a liberal protestant version of Lutheranism” … “a function of the California ethos of religion and morality, nothing seriously Lutheran about it anymore, except the aroma of an empty bottle” … “the very opposite of what we intended. The journal now expresses its belief that to be prophetic is to become the mouthpiece of the denominational bureaucracy, that is, to attack the few dissenting voices in the ELCA.”
He warned Hansen against departing from the Scripture. “My friend Wolfhart Pannenberg has stated that a church that cannot take the Scriptures seriously is no longer a church that belongs to Jesus Christ. That is not an original statement of his or mine, but one said by every orthodox theologian in the Great Tradition, including Athanasius and Augustine, as well as Martin Luther and John Calvin.”
Bratten asked – without answering – whether the Lutheran situation could be remedied. “Have we reached the point of no return? Are we now hopelessly mired in what Karl Barth identified as Kulturprotestantismus?”
He concluded his letter by leaving the judgment on the ELCA to a higher authority. “One day we will have to answer before the judgment seat of God as to what we have done for and against the Church of Jesus Christ. There will be no one by our side to help us find the words to use in response. All of us will have many things for which to repent and to implore God’s forgiveness. And we will all cry out, ‘Lord, have mercy!'”
Bratten serves as executive director of the Center for Catholic and Evangelical Theology. He has written and edited scores of books, including: The Last Things: Biblical and Theological Perspectives of Eschatology; The Strange New Word of the Gospel: Re-Evangelizing in the Postmodern World; Jews and Christians: People of God; Apostolic Imperative; Catholicity of the Reformation; The Gospel or Neopaganism?; Marks of the Body of Christ; Mother Church – Ecclesiology; Sin, Death & the Devil; Union with Christ – Luther; and The Whole Counsel of God.