Hey, where's my frontier?

Before me is a fascinating book, Moving Frontiers. It is a collection of primary documents of the Missouri Synod.

Here is a brief entry:

Texas has a babe governor. This is Looney Toons. END COMMUNICATION.

OK, OK.

Texas has a woman governor. The Associated Press announces from Austin under date of January 20 [1925]: "On this day a woman assumes the gubernatorial seat of Texas, which heretofore has been occupied only by men." There are other things which offer even more definite proof that even before its end the world has completely lost all common sense. (Franz Pieper, "Kirchlich-Zietgeschichtliches: Texas hat einen weiblichen Gouverneur," Lehre und Wehre, LXXI (Feb. 1925), 61.)

Huh.

You're next.

Every time has its assumptions, and clearly the quote is making an assumption. It assumes that all reasonable people will be able to see exactly what is wrong with a woman being elected governor.

Let's be honest. We can't see it. Tons of us were pulling for Sarah Palin and liking Nikki Haley and hoping for Carly Fiorina. What we see is exactly what's wrong with thinking there's anything wrong with a woman being elected governor. The times, they have a-changed.

So why did they think that way?

They had a different status quo. This is not to endorse a romantic love of the past, but an historical respect. Here are the reasons as well as I am able to see them, which is likely still not that well.

At that time, 

1. it made no economic sense for married women to be publicly employed in the same way that men were; that is, as a primary, external household income rather than a supplemental, internal one. Who would care for her children if she were publicly employed? Who would pay for that care if she were not of substantial means?

2. it made no practical sense. Women are generally less reliable employees because they prioritize being reliably available to family members and even friends, for which we are all grateful when we find ourselves in need of a reliably available family member or friend.

3. it made no social sense (which is of staggeringly less consequence in material terms; ie, the only terms that amount to much meaningful in the lived human experiment). Men are the heads of households (at the time, this was still generally accepted outside the church). The state is society's household. Synthesize.

4. it made no spiritual sense. God is our Father, and the government shall be upon HIS shoulders. No accident of pronominalism there.

Human existence will bear a tremendous amount of stress and experimentation, but reality will always prevail. So we'll see, or our descendants will. 

We can only be offended by what our forebears thought if we believe them to have been either quite stupid, or malicious. I just plain don't believe that. I think they were people like we are: analytical, sympathetic, and repentant. Because I think that, I think it is very important that we try to understand the ways they thought that were radically different from our status quo. In 1925, a woman governor was as nonsensical to our great-grandfathers in the faith as gay marriage was in the general population only 30 years ago, or allowing boys to use girls' locker rooms remains for the fleeting moment.

Were traditional households so intolerable to women that the world as we have it today, where sexual perversion is ascending to absolute social power, is preferable?  Did we have one perfect decade (the 90s) when everything was just right; when married women could be CEOs but we could all get behind the secular Defense of Marriage Act, and it got inexplicably messed up from there? Or maybe it was just a year, 1972, when everyone had advanced as far as they could after getting the comeuppance they needed from The Feminine Mystique but abortion was still illegal. It's clear that things have gone too far, which is why we must remember that it all started with things we now consider non-negotiable, but that our forebears believed to be fundamentally wrongheaded.

There are all kinds of ways of running a society. Let's also notice that Dr. Pieper doesn't say it's a sin for a woman to be governor. He says it is proof that the world has lost all common sense.

It's said that a gentleman is someone who knows how to play the accordion but doesn't. I disagree, because I love accordions. But I think there's a case to be made that a lady is someone who could govern Texas but doesn't.

Lutheran Summer Conferences rated by potato salad

5. Issues, Etc. Making the Case conference. This conference features boxed lunches from Panera. You know what that means. No potato salad. But what the conference lacks in potato salad it makes up in everything else. You should just forget the potato salad for once and go.

4. Preus Family Reunion. I don't know if this conference has potato salad. It seems like it would, BUT you are not invited unless you are a member of the Preus family. BUT a plurality of Synod is members of the Preus family, so you might be one. If a member of the Preus family could report back about potato salad, then we'd know.

Pictures of potato salad always look gross. 
Use a plain potato instead.

3. Redeemer Family Retreat. I don't know if this conference has potato salad. There is a potluck so you might get some, but since everybody at the conference is on vacation it will probably be in a tub from the store. So not that great of potato salad, but a conference you should totally go to.

2. Gottesdienst St. Louis. The Gemütlichkeit potato salad is very, very good, except for needing more salt. If you help clean up the kitchen, you might get to take home some leftovers and then spend the whole next day eating salted potato salad. This conference was yesterday, so unless you were there, you missed it. Make sure you get there next year to eat this very good potato salad (bring or look for salt).

1. Concordia Catechetical Academy Symposium. The Augsburger Barbecue is the best Lutheran conference potato salad out there. It's the kind that isn't yellow (which doesn't necessarily make a potato salad good, but does make this the best Lutheran summer conference potato salad). I have hurt myself with this potato salad before. We haven't been to this conference in several years but the main thing that makes me want to go back there besides holy things is the potato salad.

NB: the key to having good potato salad may be giving the meal at which it is served a culturally relevant name. If we hear from a Preus we will know for sure.

Dear LadyLike: What about remaining single?

Dear LadyLike,

What do you say to a young woman who doesn't want to get married? Is this biblical? Or is it sinful? Related to this: Is there room for single adult women in the life and work of the (LCMS) church? I would really appreciate any thoughts and counsel you have on this topic. 

Dear Lady,

"I say therefore to the unmarried and widows, it is good for them if they abide even as I." 1 Cor. 7:8

1 Corinthians 7 is the go-to passage about the reasons for getting married or not getting married. The bottom line is that most people find that it is not good for them to be alone and make their way through life better if they are married. But some people do not have an inclination to marry built into them. There's nothing wrong with that.

"There is difference also between a wife and a virgin. The unmarried woman careth for the things of the Lord, that she may be holy both in body and in spirit: but she that is married careth for the things of the world, how she may please her husband." (vs. 34)

Remaining celibate is placing one's care in the things of the Lord rather than the things of the world. That is a noble and blessed way of life. It is an act of trust and an investment in one's own spiritual well-being, and a testimony to the intrinsic value of each individual life. A secondary benefit of this is that a person who does not need to be available to an immediate family can be more available to the church.

The form that a single person's service to the church takes is wide open. Other Christian traditions have a system for celibate people to formally devote their entire lives to the church. Lutherans pretty much don't have a thing for that. Loehe's deaconesses were virgins or widows (and left deaconess work if they married), but that is no longer the case.

If this is a deficiency in Lutheranism (and I think it is in some ways, as the lack of formal recognition or position may imply that single people lack a place in the life of the church), it is made up in the Lutheran theology of vocation. A single woman doesn't have to be a nun to serve the church, or even a deaconess, teacher, or managing editor of The Lutheran Witness. She could be a butcher, baker, or candlestick maker. A Christian geologist has at least as much to offer the church as a Minister of Religion-Commissioned. A person who works in a non-church-work field has a non-church-work income from which to tithe, a much better situation for engaging non-Christians than people who work in a church building all day, and evenings and weekends on which to come to church and volunteer. And if a single lady is better at cleaning gutters than she is at teaching Sunday School, that aptitude is no less valuable or welcome. Churches have gutters too.

You just plain don't have to get married if you don't want to. There are a number of costs and disciplines built into that decision. The long term benefit is having forgone the icon and its built-in distractions for the sake of preparing for the real thing: eternal union with the true Bridegroom.

Gertrud von le Fort's book The Eternal Woman includes a profound treatment of the station of virginity. I recommend it for anyone interested in the topic. I also recommend the thoughtful posts of Heather Judd at Sister, Daughter, Mother, Wife.

Thanks very much for this question. LadyLike



UPDATE: After posting, I received this valuable correspondence from a reader who gave me permission to reprint it.

Single Christians serve the Church and their neighbors--and I would emphasize, they don't live for themselves.  In our secular culture, you stay single (or get divorced) in order to live for yourself.  (Or if you do get married, you avoid having children, or too many children, in order to keep more of the pie for yourself.)  Both single and married people should understand this, that in whatever state one is called, one is to serve, and we are not to judge one another in this matter.  It is not right for a person to avoid marriage simply so one can have the whole pie.  St. Paul makes it clear that the single person should care for the things of the Lord, in contradistinction to the things of the world--even if one is cleaning gutters, or making tents, for a living.  But we Lutherans should do more to honor and value the vocation of celibacy, as well as make it clear what this calling is for.  Hopefully the tide is beginning to turn in that direction. 

That lesbian hymn

Well, girls, it's that time again, the time when we all stand in church and sing how it's totally no biggie if this world takes our wife. Maybe it just felt silly once, but these days it's almost kind of weird, no?

We good Lutheran females are used to it, though! We've been reciting for years how we shouldn't covet our neighbor's wife. I guess neighbors' husbands are fair game for coveting, huh? ;)

But, OK, what does this mean, this language we find in our Bible and catechism and hymnal? Our time tells us it is exclusionary, a relic of a past the present can only see as cruel. But this is silliness. The children of Israel and the children of Wittenberg knew as well as we do that husbands are as off-limits as wives, and that a woman can't have a wife to lose. What does this mean for the Tenth Commandment, "A Mighty Fortress," and all the other formulations we've been trained to hear as discriminatory?

A few things.

1. The truth stands outside of subjective human experience, so the commandments and our hymns do too. They are not about us, they are about the truth. If we can expect someone without a donkey to confess the Tenth Commandment, or someone with no children to sing hymn 656* stanza four, we can confess and sing right along with him even if the particulars do not match our situation either.

2. Wives are valuable. Why covet something that isn't? Why care if something worthless gets taken away from you? This confession is a wall of NO to the idea that women were an ancient/medieval/Modern/everytime until the 19th Amendment version of paper plates, either in terms of their importance to the household economy (where they rank first in #10) or their esoteric worth (as comparable to life or reputation in st. 4). It is wives, not husbands, who were so valued as to receive explicit attention in Scripture and the derivative catechesis and hymnody.

Lutheran ladies sing about their wives.

3. Humanity is oriented in a certain direction. Christ is our head, and the body sees through his eyes. What does he see? The Church coming down out of heaven as a bride beautifully dressed for himself. This vision is encouragement to each member of the Body to remember that she is fit for such pure glory by the blood of the Lamb. Here on earth, the husband is the head, and the family sees through his eyes. What does he see? His bride. She figures so prominently in his personal piety as to appear in his commandments and hymns. Her gain in that prominence (for they are her commandments and hymns, too) is encouragement toward worthiness of the honor. The view is no accident. We cannot switch out wives for husbands in commandment ten or stanza four, because our eyes are in our Head. That is just the truth. It has nothing to do with any one person's sex, or his past, current, or desired marital status. So we all sing it.

Sing out, ladies. We've all got a place in the whole life of the Church. It is given to each of us to sing every truth of God, wherever life has landed us in relation to it.

Pontifex Minimus, or The Ecumenism Of Being Ladylike

Lutheranism is a tricky spot on the Christian map. We don't really like being called Protestants, but if we could get along with the Bishop of Rome we wouldn't be having this sentence.

So one thing we can do is feel alienated, misunderstood, ill-defined, and grumpy. Or we can be happy about the unique position we're in to understand the people on either side of us a little better, and maybe even do a little bridge building in a small-p pontifical way.

This is why, although Christendom is full of books about females who are totally OK with being females in the way that humanity has understood that until the last ten minutes of human history, LadyLike is out there. Part of it is that it's nice for anyone to be able to read a book that, for her, comes without asterisks. If I read a book written by someone from a different corner of Christianity, I know there will be some ideas that I don't share, or a framework of thought different from the one my mind uses.

Anyone from outside the Lutheran tradition will find that LadyLike has some asterisks for her. I hope it can offer her something helpful anyway by representing a Lutheran perspective on a shared belief: that male and female He created them; that she is a helper fit for him; that between them is a distinction with a difference that is more than a necessity of biology or an accident of history.

Women, as a subject and as a population, are quite ecumenical. Christians who hold to a biblical paradigm for men and women in family, church, and society have that as a powerful bond of peace even when they disagree about many other things. 

I don't agree with the Roman Catholic church's designation of Mary as the co-Redemptrix, but I gained a much better understanding and even appreciation of that teaching from reading The Eternal Woman by Gertrud von le Fort. Broadly defined Evangelicalism is neither a theology or a piety where I can hang my hat (or headcovering), but Elisabeth Elliot's invincible grace and gentle wisdom in Let Me Be a Woman make for one of the best treatments of Christian femininity I have ever read. I learn from both Simcha Fisher (a Roman Catholic) and Aimee Byrd (Presbyterian, PCA). I'm really, really glad they're out there.

Outside of some CTCR documents, whose significance in the universe remains unclear, confessional Lutherans have been skittery about putting up much in the way of, "This is what we think about chicks" (although Dr. Biermann at the St. Louis seminary is handling it menschfully). It is very humbling to have been the people who got a chance to say that, in a small and kind of silly way, with LadyLike. I thank all ladies from other Christian traditions who are willing to read a book with some asterisks attached for the sake of the different facet of unity to which it may contribute. And I hope it will be a real help and comfort to women in my own tradition who can never get enough solid statements of how we understand our place in humanity on the basis of the Lord's revelation to His people in His holy Word.

Piety by Pinterest: Morning Prayers

I did not go looking for this so as to be reactionary, but having bumped into it honestly, I reacted. 

Let's start with the control group. Here is Martin Luther's morning prayer:

"I thank you, my heavenly Father, through Jesus Christ Your dear Son, that You have kept me this night from all harm and danger, and I pray that You would keep me this day also from sin and every evil, that all my doings and life may please You. For into Your hands I commend myself, my body and soul, and all things. Let Your holy angel be with me, that the evil foe may have no power over me. Amen"

The essence of this prayer is asking and thanking God for his protection against danger, recognizing that sin is the greatest danger. Its posture is total vulnerability and dependence. Its goal is to make it through the day safe in God's grace.

Here is Bill Hybels' morning prayer:

"God, this is a new day. I freshly commit myself to the role you have invited me to play, as you are building your church in this world. I am awestruck again today that you include me in this grand life-giving, world-transforming endeavor. So today I joyfully offer you my love, my heart, my talents, my energy, my creativity, my faithfulness, my resources, and my gratitude. I commit all of myself to the role you have assigned me in the building of your church so that it may thrive in this world. And I will 'bring it' today. I will bring my best. You deserve it. Your church deserves it. It is the Hope of the World."

The essence of this prayer is asking God to capitalize on the pray-er as much as possible. It sounds like the only danger this person faces is missing out on some speck of greatness she may have forgotten to put on her calendar. Its goal is to make it through the day having earned every gold medal there was to be had, for Jesus.

This second pray-er is playing for Team Church, so that's good. The prayer's optimism is not inconsistent with the hope that we have in Jesus and expecting good from God in every situation. But the difference between the two prayers is that the first proceeds from the theology of the cross; a position of complete humility: Nothing in my hand I bring/Simply to Thy cross I cling. All the first pray-er has to offer is her sin. The second wants to make sure the Lord knows that he's welcome to cash in on all those big MYs. 

But My creativity is not something I'd feel comfortable talking up to the Creator. I am not inclined to offer God my faithfulness or my best when He has explicitly told us  that all that belongs in the dumpster where it won't stink up the house. Considerations like these don't put me in the mood to start my day by telling Herr Gott allmächtig that I'm going to "bring it".

Luther's prayer is one I could pray no matter what my circumstances. Waking up alive is the only qualification for offering that prayer. The second prayer is one I would have a hard time praying on a day when I am sick or grieving or only have such un-transformative tasks ahead of me as the basic maintenance of order to which my lowly duties amount.

Well, here it is morning. Gloria patri!