This will be my only post of the night; I need to sleep. I probably won't post tomorrow as I'll be travelling home and then have to rejoin my family at my parents' house because apparently my house has been occupied by a bat. Hopefully starting with Saturday I'll be able to piece together some other reports of what happened here.
Of course the big news for the day was the passage of the Genetics statement, and I spoke briefly against it. Here's a rough transcription of my notes for the speech:
Michael Cumings, Southwestern Minnesota Synod; I brought notes this time.
I'm on the fence with this statement, leaning against, and hopefully in explaining myself I can give you an example and illuminate for you what my Bishop, Jon Anderson, was talking about in our discussion of Social Statements, and how people were being too glib in declaring how wonderful they are.
I had two problems with the statement originally, one dealing with the immediate relevance of the document, which was swept away after having seen the excellent introduction to the statement on Tuesday--I want to thank Per Anderson, Linden Olson from my synod, and everyone else who participated; it convinced me that there is a wider benefit to speaking as a church about these issues.
My other problem is this. In the debate about inserting the word "evolution" into this document, there was an instructive comment: we as a church don't endorse scientific paradigms because scientific paradigms are perishable. Well at least in our Western context, ethical paradigms are even more perishable: the Roman Catholic Magisterium has had a pretty good run with Natural Law, but that's the exception. This report represents a tremendous amount of work, and the references reveal deep roots throughout our other Social Statements; the values represented are truly ELCA Lutheran values.
But ours is an evolving position, with evolving principles, and the science is evolving even more rapidly. Again, I'm convinced this document speaks to the current context. But what about 10 years into the future?
I'm afraid this document will be well obsolete by then, and since with rare exceptions, social statements tend to be overwhelmingly approved and then go through a one-way trap door to the cellar, to be ignored long afterward by everyone except by those crafting future statements. Even if we were inclined to review social statements, I question whether the possibility of a legislative review once in three years could provide the flexibility we'd need to speak in a relevant way about this topic.
If I vote in favor, it will be in the hope that our review of the way we do social statements will address the problem of making sure that our social statements are read and remain relevant over time.
I had problems with content too, but there was enough good in it to be valuable in the current context, so eventually I did vote for it (along with 90+% of the assembly). I figured that if it develops fatal flaws of obsolescence over time, that that's probably not today's problem, since there was a promise of review included with the document (which I was skeptical of, but I decided to believe those responsible for implementation this time. LIFT has made me more charitable toward the organization that way).
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