Harrison, the president of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, the US's largest fundamentalist (you are) religious body, is trying to thread his theological and denominational camel's body through the eye of the Charlie Kirk needle with his official statement on Kirk's killing.
I had originally titled this post that he had backed off slightly from being a full wingnut, but a follow-up piece in an official publication of the denomination shows that's not true. I'll get to that below.
It says it's about 15 years in the president's seat. Most of it backs off his previous nuttery and actually talks about assisting immigrants.
That said, besides the Charlie Kirk paeans that ignore his racism, etc., let's unpack something else.
That's Harrison officially stating that on one thing, he's unchanged, and that he's a Samuel Huntington type cultural Christianist. This:
I think it’s vital to retain Western Christian influenced culture and its wonderful blessings. But we Lutherans do not exist to “Christianize the state.” Our Augsburg Confession says the state and church are not to be “mixed.” I worry, frankly, about Muslim immigration and the orthodox Muslim denial of the two kingdoms. But some evangelicals have the same dogma! A great many of the decisions of the nature of state and law, are left to sanctified individual choice and action, biblically informed.
Is the proof.
First, you DO want to "Christianize the state," just more indirectly.
Second, not all Muslims are "orthodox" Muslims.
Third? Most of what does make Merikkka in particular, and the West in general, actually, non-snarkily good, has nothing to do with Christian, or Christian-influenced culture. Locke, Hume, Montaigne, Voltaire and others who influenced the American constitutional structure, the American political science structure and related, weren't "Christian-influenced." Locke was probably a U/unitarian or Deist. Hume was a secularist, non-theist, atheist, etc. Montaigne may have been a Catholic, but his essays on the tripartate division of government were in no way influenced by that. Voltaire was a deist.
On other non-Charlie Kirk stuff, he references the wingnuts squared to his right, who think that officially breathing the air of other Christians in official Christian events is akin to heresy:
As I pulled into the gas station this a.m., I turned on the radio. There were interviews with children whose fathers were firemen, killed in 9/11. Oh my, I thought. Another anniversary of that horrid day. I remember it all too well. Within a week I was at ground zero. The LCMS provided a million dollars for the victims’ center in Manhattan. The controversy in the LCMS which ensued nearly broke my heart. Thank God we’ve moved beyond it and our approach to such situations constructed in the wake, has very largely kept us out of further internal controversy.
Have fun with that.
Beyond that, he, in talking about Kirk's death:
Yesterday was the tragic murder of Charlie Kirk. A confessing Christian murdered for political speech. I beheld the news in shock, bouncing between the reports of sorrow and vitriol, putting the worst possible construction on sound bites. ... A few on our far edges say untoward things about race, failing to take into account the beautiful message of the N.T. that “God is no respecter of persons.” (Acts 10) And that repeatedly in the N.T. we see lists of early Christians which include multiple ethnicities from around the Mediterranean world. There is no N.T. argument against the freedom to marry among ethnicities, much less any such distinctions in the church. Jesus said, “Go therefore to all ETHNAE.”
Ignores Kirk's own racism.
Maybe he doesn't know that much about Kirk in general. Maybe fear of the even further right wingnuts pushed him to say something. Maybe he's just a lying hypocrite.
Hence my "backs off slightly."
He's still a hypocrite, perhaps a lying hypocrite, and hoisting himself by his own petard.
Sadly, this is in my own family of semi-origin. A cousin, a former LCMS parochial school teacher, ran Kirk up the flagpole and saluted him. I'm not going to bother to quote her, but without naming her by name, I called out on Fuckbook, in a general way, Lutheran family and friends for glorifying Kirk, a "racist wingnut." I also told them to read Matthew 7:3-5 if they thought this secularist needed praying for. Per Jesus himself, elsewhere? "A word to the wise."
==
The wise don't include Harrison, who, since I first started writing this, in the Reporter, the official LCMS newspaper, runs Kirk up the flagpole and salutes him. Time for a takedown.
This:
Pundits have crafted lists of Mr. Kirk’s statements, which allegedly justify his murder. But no speech of any human being justifies his or her murder.
Is a lie. Actual pundits have listed Kirk's wingnuttery, but without attempting to justify his murder. I said that if he had named named, it could have been slanderous. Even without that, I told him to look at Matthew 7:3-5 and tell himself the Sixth Commandment rather than shouting it at others.
This:
Marxism, which is pervasive on many university campuses, praises anarchy and violence because violence is the means to throw the status quo into chaos and overthrow allegedly repressive regimes. As an atheistic paradigm of human social existence, Marxism views all law and ethics as utilitarian, indeed merely a human construct — including sexual identity itself, which has always been (Rom. 1) and is again, with an intensity never seen before, the frontier of “freedom” from Divine design. Hermann Sasse, the friend of the LCMS and great Lutheran who lived through the Hitler years in Germany, was the first publicly to reject the Aryan Paragraph of the Nazi party platform. He blew the whistle on real fascism and racism.
Is a mix of stereotyping, strawmanning, handwaving and dogwhistling. The "real fascism and racism" is an attempt to pretend that Kirk wasn't that.
This:
Charlie Kirk was such a Christian. I am such a Christian. And I know thousands more. ... “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven.” (Matt. 5:43–45) Charlie’s debate videos are a marvelous example of this.
Is whitewashing. And gaslighting. And other things.
Harrison likes to blather about the Sixth Commandment, all while ignoring the Eighth Commandment, in all of this, too.
==
Harrison also ignores Romans 8 about submitting unto the governing authorities!
Harrison claims not to meddle in church-state issues and to respect the Lutheran doctrine of the "two kingdoms."
BUT? He officially glorifies in Charlie Kirk an official 2020 election denier. And, AFAIK, while he may have disciplined (or may not have disciplined) a semi-retired Illinois LCMS pastor for participating in an interdenominational event, he has done NOTHING (AFAIK) about said pastor trying to overturn Georgia's 2020 election results.
Romans 13, along with the Eighth Commandment, Matthew Harrison.
No comments:
Post a Comment