AAARGH!

Lutheran Confessional Bloggers is a new Google Group. It's the first Google Group I've ever belonged to, although I belong to about thirty Yahoo groups- and run five or six of them.

In visiting the group just now, I happened to do a search for Google groups which operate under the category "Lutheran." In doing so, I came across a Google group whose hook is the question, "What does it mean to be a Lutheran?" No answers, mind you. Just questions.

Questions whose answers- such as they are- pretty much exclude anything remotely resembling substance or intellectual integrity.

Brain-dead, post-modern questions.

I read some of the posts, and nearly joined and got into it with the ELCAns there. Their slander of the Missouri Synod is not only extreme, but bizarre. I'd forgotten just how divorced from reality such willful ignorance could be- and how prevalent it is in the ELCA.

That ELCA folks could suggest that the distinction between Law and Gospel- a distinction which, at least as Lutheran theology has historically formulated it, has no place whatsoever in ELCA theology- is neglected in the LCMS in favor of biblical inerrancy is pretty much up there with the guy who murdered both his parents and then pleaded for the court's mercy on the ground that he was an orphan in the chutzpah department. Hardly anybody in the ELCA even understands the distinction betwen Law and Gospel- which is, of course, the very foundation of theology in the LCMS. You know. Walther, and The Proper Distinction, and all that.

In the ELCA, the Law is pretty much dismissed out of hand- except insofar as it can be cited to support a far Left political agenda, and even then it's apt to somehow be called "Gospel." "Gospel," on the other hand, is a word which, in the ELCA, is generally a term for a vague, disembodied, theoretical sort of entity bearing no particular relationship to Scripture or even to theology, but somehow giving mystical, antinomian sanction to whatever abomination its user happens, personally, to favor at the moment. Sort of the Mystical Smoking Head of Spong.

But talking to them is futile. I tried for twenty years. Been there. Done that. They don't listen. They don't want to listen. And they tend to react to both theological substance and simple logic with either condescension or resentment.

No.

No, no. no, no, no.

I will not again get myself into a situation in which I am arguing with those who have willfully turned off their brains and their consciences.

I simply will not waste my time, or raise my blood pressure. Instead, I shall merely wipe the electronic dust off my cyber-feet against them.

All over again.

"What does it mean to be a Lutheran?" The entire rational of the ELCA is that it doesn't mean a thing. Which seems to be the whole point of that Google group, for that matter.