This is nutty even for the ELCA

Intellectual dishonesty is almost a requrement to be an ELCA theologian. Dishonesty as to one's ordination oath is almost a given. After all, what person honestly committed to authority of Scripture and of the Lutheran Confessions could serve in a denomination whose respect for the authority of either is as transparently bogus as the ELCA's?

But never before have I thought it possible that even at an ELCA college a professor could be crazy enough to suggest that Jesus was a Muslim.

It would be more rational to suggest that He was a cantalope. And even that Scripture is OK with gay sex. After all, Mohammed was born some 600 years after the ministry of Jesus!

Yet the head of the religion department of Luther College in Decorah, Robert F. Shedlinger, has published a book making precisely that absurd claim. His tortured logic: Jesus did not found a religion, but a "social justice movement." And Jesus is therefore a better fit for Islam than Christianity!

I know that this is hard to believe. And yes, it's even harder to believe that any college- or any denomination- with any claim to being Christian could allow a person who takes Prof. Shedlinger's position to teach its students. Hopefully he's not a member of the ELCA clergy roster; his position would be about as egregious a violation of his ordination oath as can be imagined.

Yet believe it or not, here it is:



Luther College has issued a statemetn supporting Shedlinger's "scholarship."

Why, as a former ELCA pastor, am I not surprised?