Touchstone: The ELCA: “Another Sodomite Sect”
August 13, 2007

The biographical notes on my Touchstone writings have for years noted my theological training at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago. I found this meant I was frequently mistaken for a Lutheran, which I am not, so in 2005 I wrote an explanatory note on this site which included these remarks:

. . . . because my own theological viewpoint is as opposed to the liberal Lutheranism of that school as it could possibly be, it is most unlikely that the Lutheran School of Theology, if it is paying attention at all, is pleased to have its name appear next to mine on the pages of a magazine like Touchstone--so here I do it the service of issuing a disclaimer on its behalf.

In another sense, however, I regard myself as a true son of that institution. People like me, who manage to squeak out of mainline academies, are, I often think, products and representatives of the prayers and gifts of the faithful who gave to those schools with the understanding that a considerably different gospel than moves groups like the ELCA and its flagship seminary was being taught there. It is not, after all, your grandfather's (well, at least your great-grandfather's) Lutheranism that is promulgated by the typical seminary of that synod, but something far more, shall we say, evolved. the rest