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Lutheran Central |
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Opinions & Views on the Benke case |
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I'm stunned. I've always considered Don Matzat a champion of orthodoxy. I have a difficult time believing he wrote the screed that appears under his name at Lutheran Central about the Benke case! Here we have a situation in which a Lutheran pastor agreed to participate in a worship service (it was nothing else; that was the very term used by those who organized it) predicated on the assumption, first, that Moslems, Hindus, Buddhists, Jews and Christians all pray to the same deity, and, secondly, that this generic deity doesn't care whether or not prayers addressed to him/her/it are offered by those who believe in Jesus or not. How can such a travesty *not* be syncretistic? For President Benke to have participated in such a service without explicitly addressing that underlying assumption was a tacit endorsement of it. On the other hand, does anybody seriously believe that his participation would have been welcome had he clearly and unambiguously confessed that Jesus and Jesus alone is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, and that no one comes to the Father but by Him? I cannot imagine how anyone with the slightest concern precisely for proclaiming the Gospel could fail to see what a disaster for the Gospel President Benke's participation that worship service was. That a person of Don Matzat's stature could so completely miss the whole point is not only astounding to me, but very ominous. Orthodox Lutheranism and high-church "Evangelicalism" are on a collision course in the LCMS. They are utterly irreconcilable. I fear greatly that if such a large percentage of the LCMS laity and ministerium cannot see why President Benke's participation in the "Baal game" at Yankee Stadium was unacceptable for a Lutheran pastor, schism is virtually inevitable. President Benke did not "pray in the midst of" unbelievers. He led them in prayer to a generic deity. That was the assumption under which he was asked to pray- it always is, at such services- and it was clearly what the unbelievers in question understood him to be doing. Can there be any more compelling antithesis of a Christian witness? As for Wallace Schulz, he was placed in an impossible position. One does not "reconcile" in cases in which a blatant violation of synodically-approved guidelines and, more importantly, of one's basic duties as a Christian minister has taken place. One disciplines. Whatever the wording of the resolution, no reconciliation is possible without either President Benke's repentance, or a decision by the Synod as a whole to cravenly renounce its allegiance to the exclusive claims of Jesus. Despite the claims of Pastor Matzat and others who claim to know Dr. Schulz's heart, he, too, is very deserving of the prayers which have been solicited for others, and from which solicitations his name has been conspicuously absent. As for those who claim to be "embarrassed" by the opposition to Dr. Benke's participation in the Yankee Stadium affair, the Synod would be better off without them. The American religious culture is wishy-washy enough about the claims of Jesus without the Missouri Synod- long a conspicuous voice for integrity and faithfulness- harboring within itself a party which considers it more important to be "nice" than to be faithful. I left the ELCA ministerium a few years ago because I could no longer stomach precisely this kind of wishy-washiness. I never dreamed that it would be so conspicuous in Missouri! Robert E. Waters
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