The Verdict of Scripture: ELCA Bound Conscience

They did not abandon Luther. They quoted him — and reversed the one thing he would not move.

The Church and the Christian Church • Part Three: The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America • By the Virginia Christian Alliance Editorial Board

The Big Three:

The ELCA did not defend its 2009 change by setting Scripture aside. It defended it by appealing to the Reformation — to Luther’s own doctrine of the bound conscience.
That argument, given its full strength, is the strongest case any of the seven mainline bodies has offered. It deserves an honest hearing before it is answered.
It fails at a single point, and the point is Luther’s own, quoted in the statement’s own endnotes: his conscience was captive to the words of God. Theirs was declared free to conclude otherwise.

The Case for the Change, at Full Strength

The receipts are entered and the redline is drawn. What remains is the question those two parts could not answer: whether the church was right. An argument is worth answering only in its best form. The ELCA’s is not the shallow claim that Scripture is outdated, nor a shrug that the culture has moved on. It is a theological argument built from the Reformation’s own timber, and it was made on the Assembly floor by serious men.

Dr. Timothy J. Wengert, a Luther scholar and member of the task force, explained the doctrine of “bound conscience” to the Assembly. Respect for the bound conscience of one’s neighbor, he said, is one of the great legacies of the early Lutheran reformers. He grounded it in two moments from Luther’s own life: Luther begging his accusers to show him from Scripture and clear reason where he was wrong, and Luther standing before Cardinal Cajetan at Augsburg, appealing that his superior not violate his conscience by dismissing what he held to be central to the faith. Wengert drew the conclusion plainly. Christians who hold opposing convictions on a moral question, each from their own reading of Scripture, reason, and tradition, must recognize and respect the bound conscience of the neighbor who disagrees.

R. Guy Erwin, a lay voting member who would later become the ELCA’s first openly gay bishop, put the case in its sharpest form. Speaking against an amendment that would have restored the older teaching of the ELCA’s predecessor churches, he argued that Luther “overturned centuries of powerful Christian tradition that saw all sexuality as wrong by insisting that clergy have the right to marry, by refusing to value celibacy or even sexual abstinence in itself as a purer or more Christian life.” He concluded: “Luther was the greatest sexual revolutionary in Christian history, and we carry forward his legacy even now.”

Put those together and the case is formidable. The Reformation was born when one man refused to let an institution bind his conscience. Luther broke a thousand years of settled tradition on celibacy and clerical marriage. To demand now that every Lutheran hold one view on a contested question — to bind the conscience of the dissenter — is to play Rome, not Wittenberg. The ELCA was not abandoning its heritage. It was extending it.

The Argument Answered by Its Own Witnesses

Take the argument seriously enough to follow it where it leads, and it comes apart in the hands of the men who made it.

Bishop Richard H. Graham made the sharpest version of the historical claim. Arguing against restoring the church’s older teaching, he cited the Confutatio — the Roman Catholic reply to the Augsburg Confession — which had warned that permitting pastors to marry would divide the church and plunge Christian people into chaos. “If our forebears had been deterred by those arguments,” Graham said, “none of us would be here.” He warned the Assembly not to betray its Reformation heritage.

The comparison has real force, and it fails on direction. When the Reformers permitted clerical marriage, they were not overturning Scripture; they were recovering it against a tradition that had gone beyond it. Rome forbade what the apostle plainly permitted — an overseer is to be “the husband of one wife” (1 Timothy 3:2, ESV) — and Paul had named the prohibition of marriage as a mark of departure from the faith (1 Timothy 4:1–3). The Reformers moved toward the text and away from the accumulated tradition. In 2009, the ELCA moved away from the text, and said so in its own minutes: its new conclusion “differs from the historic Christian tradition and the Lutheran Confessions.” Both are changes. They are not the same kind of change. One returns to the plumb line. The other departs from it and records the departure.

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The same reversal runs through the conscience argument itself, and here Wengert’s own illustration answers him. Consider the passage the doctrine of bound conscience actually rests on. Paul protects the tender conscience in matters of food and holy days — “One person esteems one day as better than another, while another esteems all days alike. Each one should be fully convinced in his own mind” (Romans 14:5, ESV). But the same apostle who wrote that chapter also wrote, of matters he did not treat as open, that the sexually immoral will not inherit the kingdom of God (1 Corinthians 6:9–10). Romans 14 shelters conscience in things indifferent. It was never a license to move a settled moral question into the category of things indifferent. The 2009 statement did precisely that, and the reclassification — not the compassion — is where it broke.

The Hinge

Here is the whole matter in two sentences, and everything in this arc turns on them.

At Worms, Luther refused to recant and gave his reason. The 2009 social statement quotes it in its own endnotes: “Unless I am persuaded by the testimony of Scripture and by clear reason … I am conquered by the Scripture passages I have adduced and my conscience is captive to the words of God. I neither can nor desire to recant anything, when to do so against conscience would be neither safe nor wholesome.” Conquered by Scripture. Captive to the words of God. Not liberated from Scripture by conscience, but bound to Scripture against every authority that told him to yield — pope, emperor, council, and the weight of a thousand years.

At Minneapolis, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America invoked that same word, conscience, and bound it to something else entirely. It resolved that faithful people, reading the same Scripture, may reach opposite conclusions about what God has said, and that the church would hold both as valid. Luther’s conscience was captive to the Word against the church. The ELCA’s conscience was declared captive to itself, and Scripture became one voice in the room rather than the voice that binds.

That is not an extension of Luther. It is Luther inverted. He said his conscience was captive; the captor was the text. The statement that quotes him in its endnotes declares consciences free to reach opposite conclusions about what that text says — and calls the result his legacy.

What Luther Actually Required

The ELCA’s own witness named Luther’s standard without meeting it. Wengert told the Assembly that Luther begged his accusers to show him from Scripture and clear reason where he had erred. That is exactly right — it is Luther’s own phrase, preserved in the social statement’s endnotes — and it is the test the ELCA never submitted to.

For Luther, that phrase was not a debating posture; it was a rule of authority. He would not be moved by councils, by custom, or by the sincerity of those who disagreed. He would be moved by the text or not at all. So put the 2009 action to Luther’s test. Where in the 2009 record does the Assembly show, from Scripture and clear reason, that the historic reading of Genesis, of Christ’s words in Matthew 19 and Mark 10, of Romans 1, was wrong? It does not. It does something else. It states that faithful people disagree, and it declines to adjudicate. That is not a scriptural argument answered; it is a scriptural argument set aside.

Isaiah gives the standard in a single line: “To the teaching and to the testimony! If they will not speak according to this word, it is because they have no dawn” (Isaiah 8:20, ESV). And Paul told Timothy what a church looks like when the standard goes: a time would come when people “will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions” (2 Timothy 4:3, ESV). The mark is not that the church stops speaking of Scripture. It is that Scripture stops binding what the church says.

What Scripture Actually Says About the Question

The historic reading is not a tradition the church inherited and might revise. It is Christ’s own exegesis of Genesis, given in answer to a direct question.

Asked about marriage, Jesus did not appeal to custom or to the consensus of teachers. He went to the beginning: “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate” (Matthew 19:4–6, ESV). He grounded the definition of marriage in the creation of male and female — not in the culture of first-century Judea, not in the pastoral needs of the moment, but in what God made and what God said. This is the very passage Bishop Mauney’s amendment cited, and the very passage the 2009 Assembly declined to affirm as its teaching.

Paul says the same thing in a different key, treating the created order as legible and its abandonment as consequential (Romans 1:26–27). And he says something that must be said alongside it, because it is the reason any of this is written: after listing the sins that bar the kingdom, including sexual sin of every kind, he adds, “And such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God” (1 Corinthians 6:11, ESV). Such were some of you. The apostle does not describe a class of people beyond reach. He describes the church — people who were what they were, and were washed. That is not a lesser mercy than the one the ELCA sought to extend. It is a far greater one, because it does not require the Word to be bent in order to be kind.

The Only Door

The verdict of Scripture on the ELCA’s 2009 action is not that its people were unkind, or that its theologians were unlearned, or that its intentions were cruel. Wengert knew his Luther. Erwin knew his history. The verdict is narrower and heavier than that: the church took the word Luther used to bind himself to the text and used it to unbind itself from the text, and then called the result his legacy.

We do not write this to win. No argument on a page has ever raised the dead, and no reader was ever converted by a well-turned paragraph. Only the Holy Spirit convicts, and only the Holy Spirit gives a heart the strange courage to say the thing Luther said and mean it. That is what we ask for the ELCA and for every reader who has stood in one of her pews — not that they lose an argument, but that conscience be made captive again to the words of God.

The door out of a verdict like this has one name. Luther found it before he found anything else, when he read that the righteous shall live by faith and the whole world turned over. It is still there. It has not moved. Nothing in 2009 or since has touched it.

Next in the series: Part Four — Weighed and Found Wanting, where the scales are read, the second witness is called, and the record since 2009 is set beside the line.

For Further Study