The Virgin Birth and the ELCA

​It’s almost Christmas and time for the regular attack from ELCA leaders on what Scripture tells us about Christ’s birth.
 
Emily Scott is an ELCA pastor at St. Lydia's, a Dinner Church in Brooklyn, NY and was a main speaker at the 2015 ELCA National Youth Gathering. In a recent blog, Pastor Scott encourages her readers to take a fresh look at the Mother of Jesus.
Here is some of what she wrote:
 
“We might also notice that the word often translated 'virgin' in the bible,
 
in fact only means, 'young girl.'
 
A maid. A girl who is not yet married.
 
In the next 2,000 years, the church will get really obsessed
 
with Mary’s vagina.
 
They will claim that not only was she a virgin when Jesus was conceived,
 
but that she remained a virgin the rest of her life.
 
Because how could the son of GOD be born
 
from something so ordinary
 
and unruly
 
and uncontrollable
 
as a woman’s vagina.
 
So in order to make this story make sense for the men who told it,
 
they sanitized away Mary’s sexuality.
 
They neutered her.” (see here)
 
Seriously? We are to take ELCA Pastor Scott's, and likely many mainline pastors, word for it when it goes against God’s Word and thousands of Christian scholars, teachers and translators? See what they say about Pastor Scott’s claims here and here.
 
Pastor Scott then goes on a craze-filled, inappropriate rant about Mary’s private parts while also attacking men and the church. That should tell you a little about her mindset. 
 
Then we have ELCA pastor Clint Schnekloth sharing his half-baked opinion about the Christmas account, which he states, as if it is fact, “I am reminded that there is a good deal of myth in the birth narratives of the Christ.” (see here)

Michael Rinehart is the bishop of the ELCA's Texas Louisiana Gulf Coast Synod. Just this week he cast doubt on the truth of the virgin birth in his blog, writing, "Of course the first person to doubt the virgin birth was Joseph himself. This is why he decided to divorce her, quietly. An angel visits him in a dream, and in the end he decides not to divorce Mary, and to adopt her child as his own.Whatever the world may think about a literal virgin birth, no one questions that Jesus was adopted, and Joseph was an adoptive parent." (see here)

Don’t forget that a few years ago the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, in their official website, argued against the virgin birth. (see here)
 
See more ELCA attacks on the virgin birth here. (scroll down the page)

Our friend, Pastor Tom Brock wrote about the virgin birth problem within the ELCA in January of 2016 when he penned this, “I graduated from Luther Seminary back in 1979. I would guesstimate that back then only a few professors denied the Virgin Birth of Christ. Some years ago I asked a faculty member at Luther ‘Do you think half of the professors at Luther still believe in the Virgin Birth?’ The response: ‘Oh no, way less than half.’" (see here) 
 
ELCA members should ask their pastors what they believe about the virgin birth.