[1] Four years after its inception, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America issued its first teaching document, The Church in Society: A Lutheran Perspective at its second Churchwide Assembly in 1991.[1] This statement, which passed by a two-thirds majority, signified that the newly constituted ELCA would “commit itself to serve God and neighbor in its life and work as an institution,” which comes through the deliberative process of developing “social statements through participatory processes of study and theological reflection that will guide the life of this church as an institution and inform the conscience of its members in the spirit of Christian liberty.”[2] The genesis of the other social statements the ELCA has developed since 1991 stem from The Church in Society: A Lutheran Perspective.
[2] Two of the ELCA predecessor bodies (Lutheran Church in America, hereafter LCA, and the American Lutheran Church, hereafter ALC) had statements regarding various topics, though not one like The Church in Society: A Lutheran Perspective. James Childs, former Professor of Ethics at Trinity Lutheran Seminary, revisits the The Church in Society: A Lutheran Perspective, and how the church’s engagement has changed over the years since the social statement was first adopted. Dr. Childs wrote the first book in a new series, ReEngaging ELCA Social Teaching on The Church in Society, through Fortress Press. The publisher’s goal is adapting the teachings of the church for a popular audience; however, the series is also beneficial to rostered leaders and lay people alike because not even the most seasoned pastor in the ELCA knows all of these teachings.
[3] In an era of hyper-polarization, there is concern among pastors about engaging in honest conversation on the state of the world without seeming partisan.[3] In his opening chapter, Childs gets to the heart of the matter: The church, both the Lutheran church and the universal church, are confronted with a changing landscape of an endless news cycle that ignores the middle ground to favor extreme positions and with the need to keep the peace. At the same time, there are questions on how the church is to engage the world. He rightly notes that “Lutherans have not always agreed that engaging social concerns should be an integral part of our mission.”[4]
[4] The most confusing concept within Lutheran theology, that has largely been used and abused, has been Luther’s twofold nature of the kingdom of God. That is more colloquially known as the doctrine of the two kingdoms. For Luther, as Childs rightly notes, there was a confusion between the bishop-princes, who operated with both the spiritual realm and the temporal realm. What’s surprising in Childs’ brief history is that he largely ignores the role Saint Augustine’s development of the two-kingdom doctrine influenced Luther. Both Luther and Augustine built off the work of Saint Paul’s brief mention of government in his Epistle to the Romans.[5]
[5] Childs brings to the light the internal tension within later Lutherans on the best way for the church to engage with the world. Notably, he quotes Christian Ernst Luthardt, who later shaped how Lutherans engaged with the world. In his essay, Luthardt writes,
To begin with, the Gospel has absolutely nothing
to do with outward existence but only with eternal life,
not with external orders and institutions which could
come into conflict with the secular orders but only with
the heart and its relationship to God, the grace of God,
the forgiveness of sins, etc…Thus Christ’s servants,
the preachers, likewise have no reason to espouse
these secular matters but are only to preach grace
and forgiveness of sins in the name of Christ. As
for secular concerns, “The jurists may advise
and help here on how this should function.[6]
Childs rightly notes that while this shaped the narrative back in the 19th Century, later Lutherans like Gustaf Wingren, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Helmut Thieckle countered the dualistic interpretation of Luther’s two kingdoms and the respective challenge to Nazism, which co-opted and distorted Christianity for its own ends.[7] During this time, Luther’s teachings and the Augsburg Confession were becoming more prominent in theological conversations.
[6] Baked within Lutheran theology is the notion of paradox and prolepsis. First, the Christian is freed from the powers of sin, death, the devil, and anything that draws us away from God, and through that new freedom in Christ, freedom to serve the neighbor. Second, Luther also focused on the already and not yet view of God’s kingdom, which later Lutherans adopted and ignored. Childs rightly calls this the age of anticipation, and that “the church is a people of anticipation.”[8]
[7] Childs cautions against taking an absolutist stance on issues, instead, implying the need for thoughtful deliberation and reflection. He goes as far as calling absolutist stances “demonic,” because they have “elevated their finite understanding to the level of infinite.”[9] He writes that this understanding clearly violates the Protestant Principle, first defined by Paul Tillich, who wrote that “the distance between God and humanity is that the absolute belongs to God alone, and that only God justifies, not humans.”[10]
[8] Throughout the rest of Part 1, Childs traces the different components found within the social statement: role of the government, sustaining baptismal vocation, and a community of moral deliberation. As a church, the social statements do not arise out of a vacuum or emerge merely from the whims of the hierarchy within the ELCA. The social statements adopted by the ELCA reflect the diversity of views within the ELCA, guided by “Scripture, the Creeds, and the Confessions, and the tradition of Christian teaching [that] inform the process of discernment.”[11] The ELCA, responding to the changing world, invites conversation on different topics to not necessarily arrive at an absolute position, rather, to begin the conversation of moral deliberation.
[9] The ELCA currently has 14 social statements that tackle certain topics, and when The Church in Society was also adopted, there were two other statements adopted. Those two statements were Abortion and the Death Penalty. Childs applies the framework of Christian living and citizenship in the Church in Society to the later social statements, Sufficient, Sustainable Livelihood for All; Caring for Creation; and For Peace in God’s World.”[12] He reminds readers that the church at work in the world is not perfect, rather, they are “penultimate, fueled by the ultimate power of God’s reign, and they point to that ultimate as a witness to the gospel and the hope that is in us.”[13]
[10] While the entire book is worth reading for people to familiarize themselves of how the church engages in the world, the real chapter that church leaders, and particularly pastors, should dedicate time to is “Chapter 4: A Community of Moral Deliberation.”[14] This chapter succinctly explores the ‘so what?’ components of the social statement. It focuses mainly on the importance of dialogue in a society that has the lost the capacity for having the conversation. As a public, outward, facing institution, there are different ways the ELCA participates in the process of moral deliberation: Lutheran World Federation, social statements, and social messages.[15] The ELCA is a member church of the Lutheran World Federation, one of the global Lutheran bodies, and these church members engage in conversation and deliberation on a myriad of issues. Social statements address topics through a process of intentional reflection and moral deliberation, while social messages address a particular topic that builds upon existing teachings of the church. These latter teachings impress upon topics at certain moments in time.[16]
[11] Childs rightly approaches the challenges the church faces in a post-Christendom era, or when Christianity no longer holds the weight it did decades ago. Childs’ theology draws from the well of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who like Childs, wrote extensively on how the church engages with the world around them. Bonhoeffer’s theology underlies how Dr. Childs approaches the church’s engagement with the wider world, especially with the focus on dialoguing on tough topics, remaining steadfast in the faith of the gospel of Jesus Christ.
[1]Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. The Church in Society: A Lutheran Perspective. Hereafter CS in the document.
[2] CS, 7.
[3] The term partisan is more apt for situations about discussing certain policy, while political invites the conversation on negotiation. Politics is not confined to the halls of government, rather, we engage in politics daily because the church is in constant negotiation with the world.
[4] James M. Childs, Jr.. ReEngaging ELCA Social Teaching on The Church in Society. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2025). 5.
[5] Childs. ReEngaging ELCA Social Teaching on The Church in Society. 6.
[6] Christian Ernst Luthardt. Quoted in Karl H. Hertz’s Two Kingdoms and One World (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1976).
[7] Childs, ReEngaging ELCA Social Teaching on The Church in Society. 8-10.
[8] Childs. ReEngaging ELCA Social Teaching on The Church in Society. 18-23.
[9] Childs. ReEngaging ELCA Social Teaching on The Church in Society. 26-27.
[10] Paul Tillich. Systematic Theology. Vol. 3. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963). 177, 220-22.
[11] Childs. ReEngaging ELCA Social Teaching on The Church in Society. 33-36.
[12] Childs. ReEngaging ELCA Social Teaching on The Church in Society. 50-67.
[13] Childs. ReEngaging ELCA Social Teaching on The Church in Society. 67.
[14] Childs. “A Community of Moral Deliberation.” ReEngaging ELCA Social Teaching on The Church in Society. 69-83.
[15] Childs. ReEngaging ELCA Social Teaching on The Church in Society. 78-83.
[16] Childs. ReEngaging ELCA Social Teaching on The Church in Society. 81.
Pastor Thomas Johnston serves at St. James Lutheran Church, Rockwell, North Carolina. He enjoys exploring the relationships between faith, science, policy, and history. He is usually found with a book, coffee, and sometimes, his two cats join him.