A Sad Walk Through An ELCA Seminary

10/30/2013

(I received this the other day. It's written by Pastor Tom Brock) -

Today I walked through my old alma mater, Luther Theological Seminary in St Paul, Mn. It is known as probably the most conservative of the ELCA seminaries. You wouldn’t know it from the number of gay/lesbian bumper stickers in the parking lot. Upon entering the main building a sign was up promoting a new book at Luther’s Bookstore, “Pastrix” by ELCA Pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber. She was a favorite speaker at the ELCA Youth Assembly and a few months ago spoke at the historic Central Lutheran Church in downtown Minneapolis—using the “f” word in her speech. I flipped through her new book and she repeatedly uses the “f” word, referring to the 12 disciples as a “bunch of “f” ups”. Former ELCA Head Bishop Mark Hanson praises the book on the dustcover. Even more disturbing is that Bolz-Weber in a sermon on Christ the King Sunday denied that Christ died in our place to pay for our sins. To quote:

And just to be clear: The cross is not about God as divine child abuser sadly sending his little boy off to be killed because we were bad and well, somebody had to pay.

Can someone deny the things of “first importance” as Paul puts it in I Corinthians 15:3, and still be a Christian? Yet she is a favorite speaker at ELCA events.

This attack on Christ’s substitutionary atonement is also going on at the ELCA’s Wartburg Seminary. Professor of New Testament David Lull wrote this:

" . . .I can’t get past the idea that God had a thirst for innocent blood that had to be quenched, or that God’s justice required a death-penalty for sinners until Jesus’ death satisfied God’s wrath. Even if Bible passages can be made to support these ideas, I can’t get past the idea that God had been unforgiving before Jesus died. That’s not the God I find in the Bible."

“Even if” the Bible teaches it, Professor Lull rejects it.

So now the day has come that the ELCA allows pastors and professors to deny the central teaching of the Christian faith: that sinless Jesus Christ died in our place to pay for our sins so that we could receive the forgiveness of God.

Like I said, a very sad day walking through Luther Seminary.

11 Comments

Didaskalos link

10/30/2013 09:52:02 pm

Thank God for steadfast shepherds like Lutheran pastor Tom Brock who, unlike their faithless ELCA counterparts, are faithful to preach and teach God's Word.

Pastor Brock writes on his website [ pastorsstudy.org ]:

". . . On October 20th, I will preach on Minneapolis TV a program entitled “God’s Three-fold Cure for America” (you can watch it on our website at pastorsstudy.org soon). In it I state that in my 60 years of life I have never seen America go downhill so fast as I have this past year. Then I preach on the three-fold cure from 2 Chronicles 7:14:

1. God’s people (the Church!) must humble itself
2. The Church must pray
3. We must turn from wickedness

Then, and only then, does 2 Chronicles promise God will heal our land.

Frankly, I see little at the moment that shows America is turning around. So I urge you: Would you please stop right now and take some time and pray for America? Please pray through the above list and pray that God would somehow step in and bring America (and the Church!) back to our senses. . . .

May the Lord grant us Christians grace in these trying times to be vocal, not compromise, and to follow the Word and not the world, all to the glory of our Heavenly Father."

In Jesus our Savior,
Pastor Tom Brock

Chuck Braun

10/31/2013 12:32:05 am

If these liberal theologians and pastors no longer believed Lutheran Biblical Christianity, why couldn't they at least be honest and leave the ELCA for Unitarian Universalism, their true "faith"? Do they not see that the false doctrines they are putting into the minds of the congregations which they serve, are alarming to them and serve only to weaken their faith in the Scriptures which their leaders ostensibly swore to uphold? I guess fancy robes, fat paychecks and promotion of vulgarized apostasy are more important than the flocks which they are leading away from Jesus Christ to their doctrines of demons.

Do these people have no fear of God, Whose Son they will stand before at the Last Day? And having abused "the least of these My brethren", the people with whose souls they were entrusted, with whom will they be counted among? The sheep or the goats? As leaders of the Church, they will be held to a higher degree of accountability. Have these people no fear of eternal punishment?

It is not my position to claim where they will spend eternity, but it is my earnest prayer that they would return to the Lord their God, for He is slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. But they are far from God; we need to pray for their repentance.

Quite often I let my righteous anger bleed over into hostility at the ELCA. But as there are still doubtlessly tens of thousands of ELCA members who truly trust Christ as their Savior and believe that He died and rose again for them, we must consider them our brothers and sisters in Christ, "the least of these", and lovingly confront them with the great spiritual peril which these false teachers are putting them in, rather than ridiculing and mocking them, lest we become "goats" ourselves.

Keith Wilson

10/31/2013 04:39:59 am

It is irrelevant why such a profligate group would not go associate with a "church" more in line with their beliefs/unbeliefs. These profligate unbelievers are parasites, feed off of any remaining moral capital that the Lutheran Church still might have. When the carcass is picked dry, they will move on to another body of believers to infest and feed off their heritage.

Gretchen Long

11/1/2013 09:50:52 am

I agree!

Jack Richards

11/1/2013 03:51:29 am

This, above all else, was the guiding force and drive for me to forsake the denomination that ordained me in 1977. Little could I have guessed that warm June morning that the Christ I promised to follow and proclaim...and "woe to me, if I did not preach it," would move to this cesspool of notions and heresies.
Rev. Jack Richards
Everett, WA

All Saints Day 2013

The Rev. Dr. Mark D. Isaacs link

11/1/2013 11:32:40 am

Don't give these people your money. Don't go to their "churches." Get up and walk out and find a Church that preaches the Gospel. At this point it is not the ELCA leadership, it is the people of God that ignores and denies the fact that this entire denomination has gone apostate. <<WHAT WOULD LUTHER DO?? WHAT WOULD YOUR LUTHERAN ANCESTORS DO?

Didaskalos

11/2/2013 11:52:44 pm

Martin Luther would do what Dan is doing on this forum: "Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them."

And Luther, characteristically, would not mince words with clerical wolves who are grievously and unconscionably leading sheep astray:

". . . Here then we have these two, the faith and the Gospel, that these and nothing else are to be preached throughout Christendom. Let us now see who are to be the preachers and who the learners. The preachers are to be angels, that is, God's messengers, who are to lead a heavenly life, are to be constantly engaged with God's Word that they under no circumstances preach the doctrines of men. It is a most incongruous thing thing to be God's messenger and not to further God's message. Angelus means a messenger, and Luke calls him God's messenger (Angelus Domini). The message also is of more importance than the messenger's life. If he leads a wicked life, he only injures himself, but if he brings a false message in the place of God's message, he leads astray and injures every one that hears him, and causes idolatry among the people in that they accept lies for the truth, honor men instead of God, and pray to the devil instead of God.

"There is no more terrible plague, misfortune or cause for distress upon earth than a preacher who does not preach God's Word; of whom, alas, the world today is full, and yet they think they are pious and do good when indeed their whole work is nothing but murdering souls, blaspheming God and setting up idolatry, so that it would be much better for them if they were robbers, murderers, and the worst scoundrels, for then they would know that they are doing wickedly. But now they go along under spiritual names and show . . . and are at the same time ravening wolves in sheeps' clothing, and it would be well if no one ever heard their preaching."

-- Martin Luther: Christmas Day Sermon [Lenker, J. N., ed., Sermons of Martin Luther, Volume 1: Sermons on Gospel Texts for Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany, Baker Books, pp. 153-4]

Robert Hopkins

11/2/2013 10:34:32 am

The problem is that when people read something like this, they think that all Lutherans believe like this. I can tell you that the Seminary that I attend has not, and would not teach or endorse anything like what was written here.

11/3/2013 11:17:19 pm

When I look at the ELCA church which my wife and I left before becoming LCMS members, I saw the top two households who provide 90% of the funding for that church were both theologially liberal, despite their advanced age. And when the Lord's Prayer was printed in the bulletin with the words "Our Father and Mother who is within us", my wife, myself and perhaps four other people refused to pray the blasphemy. The rest went right on along with the printed words. Hmm, are they praying to one being or two?

Most of the Scandinavians left ten years ago for Evangelical churches, while I hadn't yet discovered the apostasy. The Germans there are mostly ex-LCMS folks who thought it unfair for the LCMS to practice close Communion or to not ordain women as anything more than deaconesses.

Even at my urging the parishioners who seemed least liberal, by means of letters I mailed to them, to consider disaffiliation with the ELCA, only one couple left the congregation. The rest were silent and didn't even discuss the subject with me. A grand total of five have left for the LCMS since 2009's CWA decision. Apparently the rest of my former congregation must be comfortable with the ELCA and their stand against the sanctity of unborn life, their condoning of a sin which should be confessed rather than blessed, and their denial of Jesus as the risen Christ, but as a nice dead radical rabbi who was a social justice advocate.

It seems odd, that a social reform movement's members would lie by claiming their leader as a resurrected Second Person of the Trinity, then give their lives defending His divinity. Why could one not still bend the knee to Caesar and be an advocate for social reform without assigning Godhood to Jesus?

In any case, those who remain at our old ELCA church are the nicest people. How they can, in good conscience, remain tied to a hierarchy which is hostile to the Christ Whom it claims to serve? Either they don't want to risk splitting the members against each other, they don't think the false doctrine will hurt them, or they actually agree with the lies they are being fed, if not through the pastor, but the Synod itself.

On the other hand, they are supporting non-ELCA missionaries who actually evangelize, none of the new pastor's sermons posted online are currently presenting any heresy I can detect. The six days of Creation were still on a bulletin board in the Sunday School room last time I visited.

"The Lutheran" proudly trumpeted the story of an LCMS church near San Francisco which reaffiliated with the ELCA. Well, there are three ELCA churches I know of who reaffiliated with the LCMS. Now that's a miracle!

Paul Raymond

11/4/2013 03:49:40 pm

Thank God for your site. I just discovered it through Robert Gagnon. I will look for you on facebook.

11/8/2013 07:54:30 am

While I hear where you're coming from, I don't hear a rejection of Christ's work on the cross from either person, but rather they are repeating questions raised critiquing St Anselm's atonement theory. Gerhard Forde makes the same critiques of St. Anselm's in "caught in the act."

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A Sad Walk Through An ELCA Seminary

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