Seminary Response to SCOTUS Marriage Ruling

Sanctity of Marriage Ruling
June 26, 2015

Dear Friends,

By now, you have undoubtedly been reading and hearing much about today's Supreme Court ruling on marriage. While we continue to study what legal affects this decision may have on the congregations and institutions of our Synod, we do know that it is a disappointment to members of The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod (LCMS) and Christians who hold to the biblical definition of marriage as the union of one man and one woman.

I am sure you have and will continue to be asked questions about this decision. To help prepare you to answer, Dr. Peter Scaer, associate professor of Exegetical Theology at Concordia Theological Seminary, Fort Wayne (CTSFW), has compiled some talking points concerning the decision. Peter is an outspoken supporter of marriage and the family and a leader within our community and the church-at-large. Some of his suggested guides for discussion include:

The Supreme Court decision changes nothing about our Christian faith. We believe that there is still a higher court and that Christ will be our final Judge. As Christians, we obey the government (Romans 13), but we recognize that our greatest allegiance is to God and His Word, and that in matters of conscience, “We must obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29).
We therefore will continue to support one man one woman marriage, as it is taught in Genesis 1 and 2, and as it is taught by Christ Himself (Matthew 19:1-9 and Mark 10:1-12).
True loves calls us to speak the truth so that all may know the forgiveness and love of Christ. We cannot celebrate that which God calls sin (Romans 1:18-32; 1 Corinthians 6:9). By doing so, we leave people in their sin, and apart from Christ.
The Church will continue to be a place of healing and forgiveness, restoration and mercy. As our Lord has said, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. I have not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance” (Luke 5:31-32).
A complete list of these suggested talking points can be found here. I encourage you to read through them and share them as you deem appropriate with the members of your congregation so they, too, will be prepared to address this issue.

While we are disappointed in this decision, we find comfort in the knowledge that our God holds the deeds of all in His strong hands. We are strengthened by His unfailing presence and will move forward to share the message of the life-saving Gospel to a world that is so desperately in need of that simple and unchanging message.

I can leave you with no better words than this exhortation from St. Paul to the young pastor, Timothy. “I charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and by his appearing and his kingdom: preach the word; be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, and exhort, with complete patience and teaching. For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths. As for you, always be sober-minded, endure suffering, do the work of an evangelist, fulfill your ministry” (2 Timothy 4:1-5, ESV).

With you, in Christ's service,
Lawrence R. Rast Jr.
President

Synod President Responds to SCOTUS Marriage Ruling

God is our refuge and strength,
   a very present help in trouble.
Therefore we will not fear though the earth gives way,
   though the mountains be moved into the heart of the sea,
though its waters roar and foam,
   though the mountains tremble at its swelling. Selah

There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God,
   the holy habitation of the Most High.
God is in the midst of her; she shall not be moved;
   God will help her when morning dawns.
The nations rage, the kingdoms totter;
   he utters his voice, the earth melts.
The LORD of hosts is with us;
   the God of Jacob is our fortress (Psalm 46:1–7).

A one-person majority of the U.S. Supreme Court got it wrong – again. Some 40 years ago, a similarly activist court legalized the killing of children in the womb. That decision has to date left a wake of some 55 million Americans dead. Today, the Court has imposed same-sex marriage upon the whole nation in a similar fashion. Five justices cannot determine natural or divine law. Now shall come the time of testing for Christians faithful to the Scriptures and the divine institution of marriage (Matthew 19:3–6), and indeed, a time of testing much more intense than what followed Roe v. Wade.

Like Roe v. Wade, this decision will be followed by a rash of lawsuits. Through coercive litigation, governments and popular culture continue to make the central post-modern value of sexual freedom override “the free exercise of religion” enshrined in the Bill of Rights.

The ramifications of this decision are seismic. Proponents will seek to drive Christians and Christian institutions out of education at all levels; they will press laws to force faithful Christian institutions and individuals to violate consciences in work practices and myriad other ways. We will have much more to say about this.

During some of the darkest days of Germany, a faithful Lutheran presciently described how governments lose their claim to legitimate authority according to Romans 13.

The Caesar cult in its manifold forms, the deification of the state, is one great form of the defection from the [true] idea of the state. There are also other possibilities of such defection. The government can forget and neglect its tasks. When it no longer distinguishes between right and wrong, when its courts are no longer governed by the strict desire for justice, but by special interests, when government no longer has the courage to exercise its law, fails to exercise its duties, undermines its own legal order, when it weakens through its family law parental authority and the estate of marriage, then it ceases to be governing authority.

Raising such a question can lead to heavy conflicts of conscience. But it is fundamentally conceivable, and it has time and again become reality in history, that a governing authority has ceased to be governing authority. In such a case there may indeed exist a submission to a superior power. But the duty of obedience against this power no longer exists. [Hermann Sasse, “What Is the State?”(1932)]

As faithful Christians, we shall continue to be obedient to just laws. We affirm the human rights of all individuals and the inherent and equal value of all people. We respect the divinely given dignity of all people, no matter their sexual preference. We recognize that, under the exacting and demanding laws of God, we are indeed sinners in thought, word and deed, just as are all (Romans 3:9ff.). We confess that the “blood of Jesus Christ, God’s Son, cleanses us from all our sins” (1 John 1:7). We confess that God’s divine law of marriage and the entire Ten Commandments apply to all, and that so also the life-giving sacrifice of Christ on the cross is for all. It is a “righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe” (Romans 3:22).

However, even as we struggle as a church to come to a unified response to this blatant rejection of the entire history of humankind and its practice of marriage, “We shall obey God rather than man” (Acts 5:29). Christians will now begin to learn what it means to be in a state of solemn conscientious objection against the state. We will resist its imposition of falsehood upon us, even as we continue to reach out to those who continue to be harmed by the ethic of radical sexual freedom, detached from God’s blessing of marriage. And we will stand shoulder to shoulder with Christians, churches and people of good will who are resolute on this issue.

God help us. Amen.

Pastor Matthew C. Harrison