The Antinomian Captivity of the Church

Until recently, I had only heard of one instance of excommunication in my 43 years as a Lutheran. I was only a child at the time, so my information was second-hand. But from what I remember, it was a very clear-cut matter. Two married members of the congregation were discovered to be having an affair with one-another. Rather than repent of their adultery, they both chose to divorce their faithful spouses and marry each other instead–a rather clear rebuke to any attempt at reconciliation or departure from the sinful desires they had embraced.

That is how I’ve always understood excommunication from Lutheran theology and practice: a matter of manifest sin plainly condemned by God’s Word and a persistent refusal to acknowledge that Word and repent. Church discipline, a formal attempt to win an errant brother back to Christ, is a rare sight among us–too rare, as I’ve written in the past. Not too rare because we need more excommunications, but too rare because we tend to let our conflicts fester into resentment. What’s more, we are often afraid to teach God’s Law at all on subjects where we abandoned it en masse lest we be compelled to the uncomfortable task of winning back brothers.

Sadly, things have changed since President Harrison’s letter last year calling for the excommunication of the “alt-right,” and not for the better. I warned at the time that this retaliation against those who blew the whistle on the Large Catechism with Annotations and Contemporary Application (LCACA) would lead to a witch-hunt. While I was disappointed, I was certainly not incorrect.

Ryan Turnipseed, the young man whose viral tweet quoted some of the more outrageous parts of LCACA, has been “officially” excommunicated from his former congregation. It’s hard to call such an act official when the supposed discipline was a Maoist struggle session in which he was told to disavow entire persons, or when the lesser ban wasn’t followed by any actual attempts to win a brother, or when he had already cut ties with the congregation a month before the excommunication, or when the process was carried out in such secrecy–even requiring agreements from the voting assembly that there would be no record or disclosure apart from the official minutes. Other pastors are already beginning to openly ask questions about how sketchy this all is. And praise be to God, another LCMS congregation has already welcomed Mr. Turnipseed into membership.

Mr. Turnipseed is not the only man who was caught up in this–only the most recent and outspoken about it. Others have made it public that they were excommunicated or simply driven from their churches. Still others have kept their “discipline” private. I myself was required to defend my criticism of LCACA before Synod officials, though to the credit of those particular men, it was not disciplinary, and they conducted themselves as Christians throughout.

We have some hard questions to ask ourselves as a Synod. To be sure, our leadership provoked this entire travesty from beginning to end. They put false teachings alongside our catechism; they acted as though those teachings were no big deal; they chose to retaliate against the whistleblowers rather than repent. But we cannot pass the entire matter off on them because they found fertile ground in the LCMS for their efforts. It was frightfully easy for them to turn the Office of the Keys into a weapon against the faithful. We certainly must ask ourselves who we’ve chosen as our leaders, but we must also ask why pastors and congregations have gone along with it so readily.

One of the most important reasons for our vulnerability is a perennial doctrinal failing in the LCMS often called “soft antinomianism.”

Despising God’s Law

I’ve written about this leaven before at length for those of you who want a full explanation. Here, suffice it to say that soft antinomianism does not outright deny the truth of God’s Law but does deny most of its relevance to the life of a Christian. Our Confessions recognize three ways God uses His Law: 1) curbing our outward sinfulness, 2) showing us that we’re sinners, and 3) guiding a Christian in a God-pleasing life. Soft antinomians wish to restrict the Holy Spirit to Second Use only. They need to reveal sinfulness to maintain their employment as absolvers. However, any attempt to teach God’s Law in a way that could actually alter someone’s behavior is met with suspicion of works righteousness.

This restriction they place on God’s Law has consequences for their preaching and teaching. They deliberately avoid teaching on specific sins, lest one who avoids them thinks themselves more righteous than one who hasn’t. All sins are equal in their sight to ensure no one thinks they’re better than their neighbor. They reduce sanctification to nothing more than getting used to justification. If a Christian makes any deliberate effort to avoid sin, they call it works righteousness. And whenever another Christian wants to learn the Law they neglect to teach, cries of “Pharisee!” quickly emerge from their lips.

The Radical Lutheranism from which these practices derive is a false teaching which draws souls away from Christ. Many of our leaders and theologians embrace Gerhard Forde, which has created a spiritually toxic environment in many sanctuaries and classrooms. But when you consider how church discipline and excommunication would need to work in a soft antinomian environment, the atrocious treatment of Ryan Turnipseed begins to make much more sense.

Church Discipline Under Antinomianism

When God’s Law has been deliberately ignored, obfuscated, and excluded from our sense of moral judgment, church discipline becomes dangerous rather than helpful. The only judgments that could draw someone into church discipline are not from the Law, but from what cannot be excised from fallen human nature: our propensity for taking personal offense. Every child knows it’s wrong when someone steals his toy or calls him a name; and he will loudly object to it. But if the child is not disciplined by his parents, he will never know the difference between another child stealing his toy and mom taking it away because it’s time for dinner. Both will offend him. Neither would he know the difference between being made fun of and being scolded. One need only look at our culture today to see this infantile dynamic at work.

As in our godless society at large, this puerile impulse is all a soft antinomian has left once he finishes training himself to ignore God’s Law. But his own personal offense and his uncultivated empathy over personal offense felt by the likeminded are still sufficient to drive him into action. He will still pursue retribution according to popular custom. In the modern church, that means having a sit-down to talk about why he’s “deeply concerned” about whatever triggered the feelings of offense.

Once those wheels have been set in motion, there’s little to hinder them because the brakes have been removed. After all, how exactly is one to recognize manifest–open, clear, and unambiguous–sin as compared to any other kind without the Law? Surely every man in Corinth was guilty of having committed adultery in his heart by lusting at some point; but Paul commanded them to expel only the man who was sleeping with his step-mother. How is a soft antinomian going to make such a distinction?

According to our sinful natures, literally every action we take involves some measure of sin, so any action at all could qualify us for excommunication. Soft antinomians consider raping children to be no more serious than being mildly discourteous, so considering severity is of no help to their discernment. And since recognizing one action as more unambiguously sinful than another would be an exercise in self-righteous judgment by their standards, that isn’t an option either. Without instruction in and understanding of the specifics of God’s Law, there’s nothing to distinguish manifest sin from A) actions that are only debatably sinful or B) the thousand peccadilloes each Christian commits every day that do not require formal church discipline. The only pertinent factor is whether someone felt sufficiently offended to make an accusation and whether the leaders sufficiently empathize with it.

But what’s left to convict someone in their eyes? Only impenitence. Once the accusation is made, if the accused does not react obsequiously enough to salve bruised egos, he will be considered impenitent. After all, shouldn’t he have just apologized and backed down if a brother in Christ was offended? And if he refuses, doesn’t that mean he self-righteously believes he’s kept God’s Law perfectly? Clearly, he must be impenitent! Soft antinomians will then latch onto the fact that any impenitent sin can separate us from God, and use that as a license to keep escalating the “discipline” because they don’t know how else to stop. Lacking any sense of proportion, they make themselves tyrants rather than peacemakers.

The Case Against Ryan Turnipseed

When we view the case against Ryan Turnipseed in this light, it begins to make more sense. Consider the nebulous and poorly-defined charges against him. There were no clear accusations of manifest sins such as adultery, murder, or other open wickedness. Indeed, specific accusations based on clear Scripture were conspicuously absent from the proceedings. What did come up repeatedly, however, was guilt-by-association, tone, and impenitence.

The guilt-by-association came from the fact that he recorded a livestream on the subject of LCACA with a small group of Lutherans that included Corey Mahler and Woe. These two hosts of the Stone Choir podcast hold political beliefs which are about as far right as one can possibly get. And whatever else you may say about those beliefs, the majority of modern Americans would certainly find many of them offensive–foremost among them, their alternate takes on WWII history.

But what was curious about how Mr. Turnipseed’s former pastor and elders pursued the issue is that they didn’t focus on whether or not he shared any particular belief. After all, as with any two people on Earth, there is both common ground and divergence. They did not ask him to deny any creed or retract any statements he himself had made. Instead, it all came down to his being “offensively” associated with “offensive” individuals.

Accordingly, they condemned him for “platforming” them at all (i.e. having public interactions with them on the internet.) Leaning on President Harrison’s letter, they condemned him for being too cozy with the “alt-right” despite admitting they were unable to even define “alt-right.” They instructed him to disavow their entire persons as his means of repentance. In all of this, they were unable to provide any Scriptural warrant for such a bizarre demand, and so Mr. Turnipseed naturally refused.

Along with guilt-by-association came the equally nebulous matter of “tone.” In the letter placing him under the minor ban, his pastor & elders decreed that he had not “clothed [him]self with humility” and was therefore “intentionally dividing the church.” They likewise decided that “many of [his] social media posts… were not made in love.”

Tone is a favorite accusation of soft antinomians and woke-scolds alike because it’s so subjective. It is certainly true that Christians are called to love and humility, but it’s also true that none of us achieve perfect love or perfect humility in this life. Everyone is guilty, and so anyone can be accused. There is no need for “impious” contemplation on whether a failure to love is mild or severe. They need not consult Scripture to consider whether a harsh tone could be a reasonable judgment call in pursuit of love. After all, men like Luther, Paul, Elijah, and Christ Himself often spoke sharply out of love for their flocks. No, our soft antinomians leave themselves with a very simple if/then that avoids any need for cultivating moral wisdom: If the accusation is rejected, then it’s ipso facto a refusal to repent.

This failure is compounded by our culture’s propensity for reducing virtues like love and humility down to mere “niceness.” Whereas love doggedly pursues the true good of another and humility unflinchingly reminds us not to think others are beneath our concern, niceness is simply the urge to keep everything on an even keel and avoid upsetting anyone. Among those who dabble in this confusion, anyone feeling offense is therefore a victim of hatred and pride. And on that same line of malformed reasoning, anyone who actually tries to defend their choice of words is an impenitent sinner self-righteously putting himself outside of the faith.

So although no clear Scriptural absolutes were violated, repentance was demanded of Ryan Turnipseed all the same. And here we get to the accusers having nothing left but impenitence to sanction the process. They told him that he “scorned God’s established authority” by not obeying his pastor and elders when they told him to repent of a sin they had utterly failed to establish from God’s Law. In reality, all he had done was ask his accusers to justify their accusations against him and attempt to defend his own actions. In minds polluted by soft antinomianism, however, such endeavors would put one firmly in the realm of impenitence.

And this is why there can be no internal brakes to any church discipline that has been thus corrupted. Any system that parses accusations in a fair and just way must incorporate opportunities to reasonably determine whether or not the accused is truly guilty of a crime. There must be due process to make sure this is accomplished impartially. For that, you must weigh evidence of wrongdoing according to specific laws in a well-ordered and reasonable manner. Soft antinomians reject such “legalisms” in favor of the sure and certain knowledge that coram deo, we’re all guilty anyway. And while British sketch comedy has famously asked the question “are we the baddies,” such self-reflection is alien to any who were instructed to avoid specifics of the Law.

The Mechanics of Going Woke

It strikes many as absurd that the LCMS, well-known as a very conservative church body, could be going woke. Though there are certainly leftists in our ranks, a great many of our leaders–even ones afflicted with soft antinomianism–would be considered right-wing by most Americans. Many of them even despise the woke left. And yet, here we have behavior that has far more in common with communist revolutionaries than with men of God. How can this be?

Well, if you consider the ideological left and how Critical Theory actually functions, the same mechanisms are at work–only for different reasons. In general, the left tends to abandon the morals and values of the past for the sake of progress. Critical Theory replaces all of that with a narrative of liberation from oppressors. The flavor of that narrative changes according to the style of the times (haves vs. have-nots, men vs women, whites vs. people of color, chaste vs perverts, etc.) but it’s always a simple matter of good guys vs bad guys. And rather than laws or principles, wrongdoing is identified by that same puerile impulse of whether the good guys feel offended by the bad guys. Those who sufficiently prostrate themselves before the good guys may be saved, but anyone else must be destroyed.

Soft antinomianism parallels this dynamic. The morals and values of the past are still abandoned, but for the sake of the Gospel rather than progress. While their goal is to replace the Law with nothing at all, they still cannot expunge human nature, and so offense remains. It’s just not tied to any of God’s commands anymore. That offense is not determined specifically by narratives of oppression as in Critical Theory, but it is determined by broader cultural narratives. They refuse to treasure God’s Law, and so there’s nothing left to feed their consciences apart from whatever they pick up from the world. And in the end, it likewise comes down to good guys vs. bad guys–with the former being the offended and the latter being those who will not “repent” enough to assuage them.

Yes, they will pick up conservative culture-war beliefs because those are out there in spades just as liberal ones are. But soft antinomians will never discipline actual manifest sins defined by Scripture like fornication, divorce, or abortion because those sins are culturally normal–they spark no outrage anymore. In sharp contrast, they will treat the Postwar Consensus as sacrosanct because that’s what virtually every American, right or left, has been trained in from their infancy. Deviations from that will offend them more than anything else. And when offense occurs, they will act the same way as the woke left because they’ve surrendered to the same childlike impulses. They’ve expunged any objective standard by which their actions could be governed. All they really needed to get started was institutional permission, which President Harrison’s letter amply provided.

Where We Go From Here

The LCMS is my home. I was raised and confirmed in her congregations. I was educated in her schools and in her seminaries. I’ve been supported and encouraged in good times and bad by her faithful members and pastors. Throughout it all, I’ve always found our Confessions to be a faithful and true witness to Biblical Truth. I am aghast at what is now going on in my home, and it needs to stop.

Soft antinomianism has left the LCMS with a culture in which the Law is habitually neglected because it is viewed with suspicion by so many of our leaders and theologians. It is only natural that practices like church discipline which touch heavily on the Law would be corrupted as a result. But if we have a void of God’s Word–or at least parts of it–our only option is to fill it, so that the whole counsel of God can be taught among us once more.

Praise be to God, the Word still remains whatever happens to our Synod. We are blessed with the means to read God’s Word for ourselves quite easily. And we are not left without a great cloud of witnesses to help us learn and understand it. The Lutheran Confessions are free online and available in pretty much any LCMS church library. Many great works of Christendom are likewise attainable for anyone at libraries or on Amazon. There are still solid Lutheran thinkers who work hard to apply this treasury of wisdom to life in the modern west; though sometimes you may find them making podcasts and blogs rather than being published by our failing institutions. And yes, there are still many faithful pastors and teachers among us. If you have any at your congregation, treat them as more precious than gold because they most certainly are.

Then, as God teaches us how to love, we must put it into practice. That includes loving brothers like Ryan Turnipseed who are being attacked by our Synod. Though our leadership loves to chant “best construction” to silence their critics, we would do well to remember what comes right before that in Luther’s Small Catechism: “defend [your neighbor], speak well of him.” If you see a brother being mugged in the street, you don’t worry about whether calling for help would damage the mugger’s reputation or wait to get the mugger’s side of the story before giving aid. Neither should we do so when we observe our brothers being subjected to a retaliatory witch-hunt by abusive clergymen.

Soft antinomianism will not stop itself because it cannot. That leaves the task to those of us know better. May God save His Church by filling us with His Word and bringing us to a real repentance so that we may be enlivened once again by His infinite grace.