Wednesday, October 5, 2011

Wait, wait: what did I see?

Thanks to Fr. Curtis for posting all this fascinating SCOTUS hearing of an LCMS case. But back up a minte; just looky here at something he put up with only a little parenthetical note:

JUSTICE ["Follow the Money"] GINSBURG: Well, it was certainly for some purposes, I mean, if every teacher who teaches religion and math and a lot of other things said, I'm a minister and I'm entitled to the parsonage allowance on my income tax return, certainly that's something that a government agent would review.

See there? I knew it! I have been warning them for years that this whole commissioned minister business was nothing but a subterfuge. The tax man cometh!

10 comments:

  1. I've never heard any other reason for calling the teachers "ministers" than being able to take advantage of the housing allowance tax breaks, so it really is astonishing that the courts just figured this out.

    How did this whole housing allowance benefit for the clergy come about in the first place?

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  2. K,

    If you get online you'll find some history about it in the Logia archives, I think. And when you do, post it here for the rest of us who are too lazy to look right now.

    +HRC

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  3. K,

    And yes, this is what makes the LMCS amicus brief so creepy. They try to make it sound like we've been calling woman day school teachers "commissioned ministers" for centuries. It's really icky. In my humble opinion, of course. The best construction is that this is lawyers writing theology...

    +HRC

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  4. A prominent layman in our parish who is pretty well versed in these things claims that the designation of teachers as ministers goes back about a hundred years, to give schoolteachers a break in the price of a rail pass to attend conventions. Then, as we all know, in the 1980s came the designation change in the Annual.

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  5. And on clergy breaks for things like rail passes, or physicians' bills, well, that goes back even further, I think. It's been a sort of professional courtesy, perhaps from the understanding that a clergyman is well trained but not as well paid as his training would suggest.

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  6. Fr. Eckardt,

    Sure, Walther had not problem calling teachers ministers in an "auxililary office" - but only the MEN! Walther was at least consistent: ministers can only be men. Teachers are part of the ministry, so of course women can't be teachers in this sense.

    Now, I think Walther is mistaken when it comes to the day school teacher. The classic Lutherans, when they taught about "teachers" were thinking about professors of theology like Melanchthon. They wanted to carve out some way in which such men were really in the ministry, sort of. But Walther tried to do this with day school teachers, which is just kind of silly. Day school teachers are derived from the Office of Parent, not Pastor.

    But at least Walther was consistent! Today the MO has "women ministers" in our day schools. That's obviously wrong, duplicitous, or both.

    +HRC

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  7. From "Ministry in Missouri Until 1962" by John C. Wohlrabe, Jr. pages 12 and 13: "With respect to the doctrine of the ministry as it relates to the office of teacher in the church, one cannot say that there was a uniform position during the formative years of the Missouri Synod, nor in the years that followed. ... However, the generally accepted and officially adopted position was that the office of teacher in the church, with all its functions and responsibilities (teaching the children both the Word of God and secular subjects), was a divine office. It was a part or branch of the public office of the ministry, which was held in its entirety by the pastor of a congregation. The teacher was a colleague of the pastor because they shared in the same office. The pastor was given supervisory responsibility over the teacher. Although the teacher was not given the right to vote in synodical conventions, he was not considered a layman. He was an advisory member of the Synod and a member of the clergy. Yet, he was not a holder of the full public office of the ministry."

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  8. Isn't it true that most (all?) of the teachers at Walther's time were also ordained?

    Pr. Timothy Winterstein

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  9. Recalling from my training at the premier teachers college in Nebraska, the push to designate male day-school teachers as ministers of religion was based in WW2; ministers of religion were exempt from the draft. The synod sought that designation from the IRS so that parochial schools wouldn't be unduly burdened with a classroom absent a teacher.

    The move to include women as commissioned ministers of religion came later, in the 1960s if I recall correctly.

    This is one area where Seward spend far too much time and focus trying to validate the call for the teacher. The top professors could not answer the basic question "what is the difference between a called parochial school teacher and a Lutheran teacher in a public school setting?" The LCMS has got to recover the teaching of vocation at all levels.

    If further substantiation is desired of what I've said, I'll have to check my texts from those teacher training classes.

    Jon Bonine
    Seward-2004 BS-Ed, LTD
    CSL 2008 MDiv

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  10. @northprairiepastor In the beginning they were called/ordained, and were counted as essentially assistant pastors. But then they had a shortage of such men, and began to "hire" (not "call") women to be schoolteachers.

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