The Nihil Rule

The recent WELS Lutheran Leadership Conference featured a woman, Dr. Joan Prince, as the keynote speaker paired with Rev. Dr. Ken Fisher. This post is not about Dr. Prince's bona fides, but rather about the theology of the role of men and women in the church. The Bible provides both positive examples and negative rebukes of a woman's role with respect to her family and the church. Positive examples include: Titus 2:3-5  Older women likewise are to be reverent in behavior, not slanderers or slaves to much wine. They are to teach what is good, 4  and so train the young women to love their husbands and children, 5  to be self-controlled, pure, working at home, kind, and submissive to their own husbands, that the word of God may not be reviled. 2 Tim 1:5  I am reminded of your sincere faith, a faith that dwelt first in your grandmother Lois and your mother Eunice and now, I am sure, dwells in you as well.  1 Tim 2:15  Yet she will be saved through childbearing...

  This was the prayer of the church for the opening worship service at the WELS Lutheran Leadership Conference. The opening day was also the observation of MLK Day in the US. More woke. Let's translate from the Woke: unwilling to walk on the path of our brothers and sisters - Allyship taken up with our own tradition - Perhaps the slide below sheds some light? (Dr. Fisher, keynote speaker at the conference) Whether it is a racial reference (white culture prevents sharing the Gospel with non-whites) or a liturgical one (that is, the old stodgy liturgy is not missional) our heritage somehow impedes the Holy Spirit... unwittingly - Unconscious Bias make us lights that expose racism  - Anti-racists ; that is, being colorblind is not good enough. The same Rev. Dr. Fisher presided as liturgist a service at Wisconsin Lutheran High School where the pastor  delivered a sermon linking Matthew 5:14-16 to the need to be antiracist .  I think the ultimate litmus test of the ide...

  These cards were handed out during a panel discussion at the WELS Lutheran Leadership conference. Let's translate from woke to english: “Isolate Race” means you speak “As a white male, I feel…" “Social Construction and Multiple Perspectives” means standpoint epistemology  “Working Definition” means you can call things whatever you like as opposed to rigid definitions like “nationality” and “ethnicity” “Whiteness” – to quote Robin DeAngelo “it’s not a question of if racism occurred, but how did race manifest itself in this situation.” These cards come from a consultancy named Courageous Conversations, run by a man named Glenn Singleton. He also wrote a book by the same name. Formerly he ran the for-profit Pacific Educational Group , a "left-leaning educational consulting firm formed by Glenn Singleton in the 1990s that contracts with K-12 school districts in 20 states across the United States to provide consulting and training services around racial equity and critical r...

“He who cannot distinguish between a cow and a horse ought never to discuss questions of farming. He who cannot distinguish between evangelical and Roman Christianity better than that he believes that a man who makes the sign of the cross or bends his knees or makes confession must be a Roman Catholic, that man ought never to discuss matters that pertain to Christianity” (Bo Giertz, Messages for the Church in Times of Crisis , p. 14)

CW:Hymnal, the new WELS hymnal, skips from hymn 665 to 667. There is no hymn 666.  Best construction: Cute.  Worst construction: Superstitious. the LCMS rushes in where the WELS fears to tread.

" The virus is a mirror. It shows what society we live in. We live in a survival society that is ultimately based on fear of death. Today survival is absolute, as if we were in a permanent state of war. All the forces of life are being used to prolong life. A society of survival loses all sense of the good life. Enjoyment is also sacrificed for health that is raised to an end in itself. The rigor of the no-smoking paradigm testifies to the hysteria of survival. The more life is one of survival, the more fear you have of death. The pandemic brings death, which we have carefully suppressed and outsourced, visible again. The constant presence of death in mass media makes people nervous. The hysteria of survival makes society so inhumane. Your neighbor is a potential virus carrier to stay away from. Older people have to die alone in their nursing homes because nobody is allowed to visit them because of the risk of infection. Is prolonging life by a few months better than dying alone? ...

  The WELS uses a novel version of the Nicene Creed. Take that back, it's not novel, it's the version the ELCA uses. So while our brothers in the LCMS and ELS say "Who for us men and for our salvation, came down from heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the virgin Mary, and was made man" The WELS join arms with ELCA priestesses and say "For us and for our salvation, he came down from heaven, was incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary, and became truly human" Also interesting to note: The LCMS capitalizes "He" in the creed, the WELS leaves it lower case. The LCMS has a lower case "virgin" Mary, the WELS and upper case "Virgin" Mary...  The WELS attempts to rationalize this , poorly, as one might expect when one invokes the magisterial use of reason. Rev. Earle Treptow makes the specious claim that the modern parishioner can't understand that "us men" is humanity and not just males. So they propo...