A friend (David Lott) recently commemorated Lutheran dogmatician Carl Braaten with the following post:
RIP, Carl Braaten. He was one of the last of a generation of Lutheran theologians who will be remembered for their rigor in interpreting the tradition—and, unfortunately, for too many of them, for their resistance to and disparagement of queer people in the life and ministry of the church. I worked with him on several books at Fortress Press, and rarely got more than a response of formal, benign disregard from him. But I nevertheless respected his scholarship and discipline; as a systematic theologian, he was the real deal and should be remembered as such.
When some chimed in emphasizing how painful Braaten’s disdain of the queer community was, David continued:
But he was also perhaps the final embodiment of a formidable Lutheran systematics tradition that doesn't really exist anymore. While it still has its acolytes, who are largely marginalized in the church now, by the late '90s it was collapsing under its own weight and rigidity. Under the guidance of folks like Christine Helmer, it's being renewed with a far more international and inclusive vision and an engagement with constructive approaches.
I have tremendous respect for David. A longtime editor with our denominational publishing house who is also openly gay, he is trying here in these posts to hold together what is increasingly difficult to hold together: respect for the theological tradition, dogmatic theology in particular, with also defense of the important contribution LBTQIA+ advocacy has had for Christian witness.
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A I think it almost goes without saying that the influence and reach of Christian dogmatics (and systematic theology) is greatly diminished.
This has happened in one generation. Just three generations ago theologians like Karl Barth were featured on the cover of Time magazine. Even recently you could hear of Barack Obama reading Niebuhr.
When I started seminary, the Braaten/Jenson two volume Christian Dogmatics was a staple of the curriculum. Its authors were indeed two of the most interesting white male theologians of my grandparents generation.
And both of them were homophobic. I can still remember a pastor-theologian event in Canada around 2006 where I was a participant. I was thrilled to hear lectures from Robert Jenson, only then to be crushed because at the dinner conversation, Jenson shifted from an intelligent and lovely discourse on Trinitarian theology into a bizarre screed against same-sex attraction.
Braaten and Jenson’s theology was rigorous, broad, and intense. They made a claim to universality that is seldom made any longer, since most theologians today (at least those in the post-liberal tradition) make their claims from a named and claimed perspective.
Theology is feminist theology, African-American theology, queer theology.
It was the last (and now discredited) privilege of theologians like Braaten to be able to act as if they were “just doing theology.”
I studied theologians like Braaten and Jenson closely. None of them, as far as I can tell, needed the gender and sexual orientation essentialism they adopted. In fact at least some of their work would seem to intrinsically bump up against theologies that essentialize marriage, gender, attraction, etc.
It’s apparent to me now that their views on gender and sex were largely inherited, visceral, ill-informed, and bigoted.
In David’s thread, I asked him, “I wonder why it was so many of them were so decidedly anti-lgbtqia. Do you think it is baked into the theology itself?”
David responded:
I think it was less a matter of the theology itself and more an issue of maintaining the patriarchal attitude of being guardians and safe keepers of a tradition. Bringing women into that old boy's club (or at least into pastoral ministry) was a big enough leap (and they often felt betrayed by those who didn't obey the anti-queer rules).
My question still remains: is the anti-queerness inherent to the theology, or an unreflected distortion of it? The question matters, because in the same way any reading of Heidegger is always qualified by the issue of support of the Nazis, so also we can rightly question “rigorous interpretation of the tradition” if that rigor gets things so entirely wrong at crucial points.
At the very least, theologians like Braaten who strove so carefully to pass the tradition forward to the next generation ruined many opportunities to do so by their unreflective perpetuation of basic bigotry.
This then impacts not only our reading of Braaten and Jenson, but in fact impacts our reading of all “systematic” theologians, even and including the Lutheran confessions. If such rigorous systematic work can include such major blemishes, we can ask like we do of fruit, “Is that a bruise, or is it rotten to the core?”
Another theologian, Phil Snider, chimed in on the same thread, and offered the following:
I’m reminded of a similar post I saw earlier this week from JL Pearl, only with a different outcome that I wish was more normative. Sharing Justin’s words here upon the death of Enrique Dussel:<<Sad to learn that liberation philosophy lost Enrique Dussel yesterday. A true giant in the field.
This hits particularly close to home today, insofar as I just published an article in which I engage with Dussel's turn on the issue of gay rights. On this point, he is an exemplar of a figure willing to hear out his critics and adjust his views. Here is what I wrote in that article:
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[...] Here, a longer citation of Enrique Dussel may be particularly helpful. As noted above, Dussel’s early work represented a particularly intense manifestation of a homophobic logic grounded on a theory of alterity. However, beginning in the 1990s, Dussel came to see the limitations of this perspective, such that by 2000 he could fully reverse his position and unambiguously reject his prior view, writing:
"I mistakenly interpreted as perverse ‘the love of the Same for the Same,’ homo-sexuality, radical feminism, and abortion as a negation of the Other (filicide). I did not take note that the Other (la Otra) is the alterity of the personhood of the Other (or el Otro [male Other]) in homosexuality, and not only ‘the same’ sex. I did not take note that radical feminist movements, which espoused lesbianism, would also organize in the South and, furthermore, that the radical feminism of the North had virtues that in the South we had yet to discover. In fact, this is what made possible the criticism of the radical feminism from the North, the love of the same by the same, together with the support for the ‘liberation of women,’ love of the alterity of the Other”." (Dussel 2000, p. 265)
Here, Dussel offers two lessons for the theorist concerned with both maintaining the alterity of sexual difference and avoiding a rigid binary system of normative sexuality. First, Dussel performatively enacts his concern for alterity by genuinely taking on the critiques which were levelled at him by his feminist and queer critics. For him, the other is not an abstract structural form within his ontological and epistemological system, but real living individuals, with their own projects, ideas, and perspectives. By engaging with these others in good faith, he found his own conceptions of gender and sexuality genuinely transformed. Second, in this transformation of his thought, he unlocks precisely the linchpin absent from Falque’s phenomenology of eros. The love of “the same for the same” is not a rejection of sexual difference, because it exists in relation to the total personhood of the sexual other. In writing, “I did not take note that the Other (la Otra) is the alterity of the personhood of the Other (or el Otro [male Other]) in homosexuality, and not only ‘the same’ sex”, Dussel recognizes that possessing the same sex as one’s partner does not preclude an embrace of erotic alterity, because, in the words of Jacques Derrida, “every other is wholly other (tout autre est tout autre)” (Derrida 1997, p. 232).>>
Fundamentally, the question would be: does Lutheran “orthodoxy” have an Enrique Dussel? If yes, let’s take a look at how they moved? If no, then our doubts about the value of Lutheran orthodoxy for contemporary theological discourse become even more crucial.
Perhaps in some instances ressourcement is not possible. It is a respectable position to say, “I honor that they made their attempts, but I’m not going back there to work on recovering what can be salvaged. I’m better off doing a new thing.”
This also becomes the fundamental struggle many of us have when invited to read the confessions. We wonder at what distance, and over how much time, that which was useful then has now been revealed to be too distant, too constrained to the times, to mired in its own mess, to serve as resource for the present.
It’s hard enough these days to read, period. To read while reading out the wheat from the chaff seems intimidatingly burdensome.
In raising all this, I’m not saying the verdict is in. I appreciate David’s even-handed method of remembering while challenging. I’m just saying, sometimes it’s just time to be done and move on.
And so far, although I read the confessions far less often than I should, unlike my reading of Braaten (which I’m just done with) I still think there is something to the confessions.
And I’m entirely fascinated with the commitment to keep trying to do rigorous theology now, today. That’s a worthy challenge. And we should not allow the bad example of bigoted systematicians to dissuade us from trying. The challenge would be to s simply do better, and also recognize new attempts today may read entirely different than those, and for good reason.
As a a truly confessional Lutheran I have to say, your writing is completely wrong. Biblically wrong. Theology is the study and knowledge of God, it has nothing to do with invented philosophies or ideologies. God is unchanging and so is His word. His word condemns homossexuality (Levitucus 18:22, 1 Tim 1:10). His word expresses equality in value to men and women, but not equality in roles or authority (Titus 2:5, 1 Peter 3:5). I was once a feminist, I once considered myself a "bisexual". I was lost, but was found. If you deny His words, you deny Him.
It seems as if the systematic theologies and theologians that you describe couldn't see the forest for the trees. As if they were so enamored with bark that they assumed that the bark and epiphytes were all there was of the entire forest ecosystem. So, stretching the analogy further, my response is that any modern theology that does not consider eco-theology and climate change at its core is doomed to miss the point of this age. Any church that is not explicitly and actively engaged in fighting coal and oil and gas companies for what they are doing to pollute "the least of these" for short-term profits has missed a core part of what Jesus was about. These churches are taking an unsustainable path to their own detriment. A theological universe that does not start from a point 14.5 billion years ago and understand that God is bigger than 14.5 billion light years across has condemned itself to being forgotten without trace. God will share our pain, but we will bear the shame of missing an opportunity of many lifetimes. Humans have lived in recorded societies for a mere 6,000 years of these 14,500,000,000 years. We walk among the first beings on earth to be able to preserve or destroy entire societies and billions of people. This is truly an awesome responsibility and opportunity. I believe in universal salvation, because "Here I stand; I can do no other." God help us all.