If You Hate Lutheranism So Much...

...then just leave. Change the church sign if it embarrasses you so much that we don't have pretty girls up front moaning like dogs in heat to the latest abortion of pop culture spewing out of your radio. If you don't want to take your cues from Scripture and the Confessions, but want to take them from whatever was the fad in evangelicalism 15 years ago, just stop being Lutherans. If you think preaching the Scriptures and teaching according to the Confessions is deadly and useless, then change your affiliation. If you change the sign from "St John's Evangelical Lutheran Church" to "East Grace Community Fellowship Center," no one's going to take your building or your pastor's job. We're not Episcopalians or Catholics that keep you in the denomination by controlling your assets. We're Lutherans. And you're apparently not.

So just leave.

Response to Patrick Chan

A lot of questions were posed to me here. I will now attempt to answer them all.


Very, yes but not in the scholastic sense, no, by definition, because that's where it starts, don't care for it, yes, it depends, some, yes, John Owen and John Gerstner plus a few guys I know personally, it's you, I just explained that, yes, that wasn't the point, certain modern FV guys who have roots in certain 17th-C thinkers, possibly both, more the latter, depends on what you mean by that...but probably yes, no, I didn't say "neglect," yes, they all relate to justification at their root, yes...but whose isn't?, because the Cross is our hope and comfort, I never said it was, probably, no, no, what about it?, that he's known only in Christ, they all point us to Christ and the Cross, yep, because it's not Scriptural, no, no, Calvinist preaching and literature, because he's a Calvinist, no, no, mostly what I glean from FV-type blogs, because it contradicts the command and institution of Christ, because Christ didn't institute the Gideons, he doesn't, because Christ so appointed him, no, because it's not legalism, because pastors administer them, the Gospel of Matthew, my Bible's not invisible, that's sort of the definition of the term...and Matthew, Matthew and John, I didn't say "mandate," because he fails to fulfill Christ's charge in Matthew 18:18 and Luke 10:16, no, then the pastor doesn't absolve him, no, no, because it contradicts Christ's command, I deny OSAS, read the WCF, pretty much, the former yes and the latter no, what about them?, yes, you forgot to mention faith, no, no, yes, no, yes, no, no, yes, yes, yes, no, no, yes, yes, confusion of definition, 42, the promise creates the believer, because Jesus didn't, most that I've heard, sometimes, no, yes, yes, don't know him, don't know him, yes, I'm no fan, no, yes and no, yes and no, yes and no, yes, there's no mail to heaven, he goes to hell, no, I'm not the preacher...and did you say "audience?", yes, no, yes, then you're missing out, no, it's not "contingent," yes, the usual, yes, no, yes, all, yes, you go to hell, no, did you say "transaction?", no, no, one in which the Gospel is preached and the sacraments are administered, Christ's word, the call, yes, Luke 23:35 and anywhere he's called "Christ," yes, in the verses I just mentioned, I didn't write that, I didn't write that, I didn't write that, I didn't write that, I don't know, I don't know, I didn't write that, no, no, huh?, huh?, huh?, I DIDN'T WRITE THAT, it's not...I was answering questions, yes, yes...Scripture.

That last litany of "I didn't write that" is due to Patrick mistakenly thinking that one of the comments on my response to Michael's question was something I wrote. If I missed a question, let me know.

Surnames, Confessions, and Geography

Although it was tongue-in-cheek, Patrick Chan suggested that I became Lutheran in part because of my German surname. I thought I would take a little time out to point out that one line of my family, the Sebalds, came from an intensely Catholic area of rural Bavaria. We're not exactly sure where the Strodtbeck side came from, but they appear to hail from the Wurttemberg area, which was Lutheran. However, the Selb side of my family most likely came from an area of Germany that was Reformed, judging by the fact that nearly all of them are in the Presbyterian church and as best as we can trace it, they came from East Germany which was mostly Reformed Brandenburg/Prussia.

The interesting thing about Germany is that unlike other European states, no one Reformation-era confession had dominance. There were Catholic, Lutheran, and Reformed principalities. The Lutheran Reformation largely took hold in the north, although the Calvinists made inroads all over, as you can see from this map:




The Rhine basically cuts down the left side of the red part of the map, although one could swim the Rhine and end up in Reformed or Roman Catholic territory. By 1610, however, the Rhineland was mostly Catholic except for the Wurttemberg area (link only):

http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/historical/ward_1912/germany_religious_1610.jpg

So to "swim the Rhine" is ambiguous at best. I suppose if you move from Catholicism to Lutheranism, you swim the Rhine, but if you move from Reformed Brandenburg to Lutheran territory, you'd swim the Elbe.

Tired Meme

And it won't die.

1. Identify a modern social problem, often one fairly unique to the USA and/or Western Europe after 1970.

2. Find something Luther said that can be contorted into bearing at least a passing resemblance to some aspect of the problem.

3. Blame the entirety of the problem on Luther.

Seriously.

Common Sense, Rationality

Can common sense or rationality even be categories in theology? For example, I find the idea that Jesus and the saints earned some kind of quantifiable stuff that's stored in a vast heavenly treasury out of which the pope grants indulgences to be patently absurd, a fiction whose silliness is on the order of the belief that some fellow used magical glasses to read golden tablets that were then whisked away by an angel. It's an idea whose absurdity to my mind cannot be rescued by any amount of reinterpretation of philosophizing. I feel like I shouldn't have to debate whether or not such a thing exists and such a power is wielded any more than I should have to debate whether or not clouds are made by the farts of invisible unicorns. I feel the exact same way about the belief that there's a mystical Virgin floating around in the sky with all kinds of magical powers, such as hearing millions of people simultaneously, appearing in tortillas and grilled cheese sandwiches, snatching scapular-bearers out of hell, and so on. Come to think of it, that talisman I just mentioned is pretty high on the absurdity list, too. Even if Karl Rahner or some high-profile philosopher convert to either the Greek or Latin medieval tradition says it all makes perfect sense if you think about it enough and describe it with enough obtuse, philosophical language, the absurdity of it all just never gets away from me.

The problem, of course, is that I believe God was made man, died on a cross for the sins of the world, and rose again from the dead for our justification. I'm not sure that fits with anyone's picture of common sense. And in fact, in my opinion whole systems of theology have been invented primarily to reduce the scandal of this by mitigating its harshness and reinterpreting the words. I believe that bread and wine is Jesus' body and blood because he said so, but on the other hand I find the proposition that the bread I can see, taste and touch does not actually exist to be patently absurd.

There's the additional problem that common sense is subjective. I think it's silly, but someone else doesn't. Nearly every religion has a whole subculture devoted to proving the most far-fetched of its beliefs are indeed the most rational thing a person could possibly believe. You can find people with uncommon eloquence and breadth of knowledge rigorously defending mystical omniauditory virgins, many-armed goddesses, magical tablet-translating glasses, 7-year tribulations of insects with literal iron jaws, illusory heavenly bodies created just to fool scientists, emanations of Sophia, a good God that predestines people to hell, paintings that allow you to communicate with the dead, and heavenly books being delivered through the babblings of some nomadic warlord.

I don't really have anywhere I'm going with this, because I don't see a way out of the dilemma. It seems to me as though if you can't write off the resurrection of Jesus as absurd, then nothing can be written off as absurd. At the very least, a brief investigation will reveal that even the most educated of people can believe anything. There is literally nothing that people won't believe, regardless of education. Even the leader of the Heaven's Gate UFO cult got his BA in philosophy.

But when you think about it, Jesus never called people out for absurdity of belief. When people said about a man born blind, "Who sinned, this man or his parents?" I would have said "Guys, sheesh, nobody. That's just a ridiculous question--a brief survey of reality would show that birth defects are no respecters of persons." But obviously, that's nothing like how Jesus responded. So maybe when you get to the end of it, that's part of the Cross. When you believe in Jesus, you lose your right to call people's religious beliefs foolish, no matter how absurd they may be...which may be a good thing, because if you call someone's beliefs absurd, you might as well call the person an idiot, and calling people idiots isn't much a prelude to conversion. I'll be some of you were quite offended at what I called absurd in my opening paragraphs and even put on an extra scapular just to spite me. So anyway, losing your right to call out absurdity doesn't justify those beliefs, make them equal with the truth, or even make them less absurd. I think maybe you just lose your right to make that call, at least when dealing with other people. I'm not sure I'm entirely comfortable with that. I don't think I can take all my common sense out back and just shoot it in the head, not when it comes to making judgments for myself.

Is it wrong to think obesity is gross? I mean I literally feel slightly sick when I see someone who weighs around 400 lbs, the kind of person with giant folds of fat covering their elbows and a belly swinging around their knees. It's gross, and there's no reason for it.

Critique and Conversion

I wonder if any Protestants who convert to Rome or the East have considered that one of the things that makes them so attractive might actually be due to that those traditions forbid the exact kind of critique that led those Protestants out of their original traditions in the first place. This is perhaps more true of Rome than the East, but it's true enough in both cases. Whatever tradition you might be in, whether Lutheran, Reformed, Baptist, etc, your tradition was born of critique of someone's existing tradition and ecclesiastical structure. Hence, to be a Protestant (I'm feeling gregarious today, so Lutherans are Protestants) is to be swimming in a sea of critique. In the LCMS, we don't just critique the ELCA and the Reformed, but also our own Synodical President, reports issued by the Commission on Theology and Church Relations, and so on.

The pattern of conversion to Rome typically begins with intense critique of one's own tradition and discovering its flaws. This produces epistemological uncertainty, and Rome promises to fix this with infallibility, Tradition, and so forth. But the way Rome actually prevents this kind of uncertainty is simply forbidding critique as disloyalty to the Church and Christ himself. I don't think converts are entirely unaware of this; they often find it appealing and radically commit themselves to subduing any tendency of their minds to criticize what comes to them from their own tradition...the exact same tendency that led them out of their original traditions in the first place! There are a number of high-profile converts out there that were quite open in doing exactly that.

But the irony remains. If critique itself and contradicting your church leaders is so evil, where do you get off criticizing your current tradition or disobeying your current church leaders? You can argue that because your tradition was historically born of critique, it's obviously the wrong one, but are the historical origins of Rome or the East equally unassailable? That's a question you can't answer if you've already decided that critique of Rome (or the East--how do you know which one is infallible and beyond criticism? You make your choice again via criticism) is a sin. In your acceptance of Rome's ideology, you've committed yourself to reading history in a purely defensive way, whether consciously or subconsciously.

So it's completely self-contradictory: I've criticized my tradition, discovered its historical weaknesses and inherent flaws, especially its birth in criticism, thus I have decided for myself that both criticism and making decisions for one's self are sins. Because of its flaws, I'm leaving my tradition for a new tradition, one that tells me that leaving it because of its flaws is a sin. Having discovered that the historical origins of my own tradition are hardly pure, I'm going to a tradition that demands I always interpret history in a way that vindicates it or else face the charge of disloyalty.

That Was Awesome, But...

...did it have lava? Rats? I think not. Nothing tops the original.



And for kickers, here's one more from back when the riffs were fast, the sneakers were big, the hair was bigger, rock stars dressed like circus rejects, and your crew was always there to toss you a radical axe for a gnarly solo:

Why...

...am I such a royal f-up? Srsly.

From the Mouths of Presbyterians

A Southern Baptist said this in the comments on one of my interview posts at internetmonk.com:

The reason I think there are no “Lutheran Baptists” [I assume he means as opposed to "Reformed Baptist"] is that generally speaking the Lutheran church is outwardly liturgical and it “looks Roman Catholic”. But the irony of ironies is that “inwardly”, what is preached and taught especially THROUGH the liturgies is as far from Rome as heaven is from hell. AND the GREATEST irony is that in evangelical circles, they are inwardly just like Roman Catholicism even though outwardly, no formal liturgy and such, they are different. Rome and Evangelicals (modern usage of the term) are functionally the exact same thing, and secular society is increasingly seeing this better than the church itself cares or dares to admit.

Sasse said a lot of the same things.

Guys, you're killing me. Newbs are the experts now?

One thing that just slays me about both Catholicism and Orthodoxy is how if you've got a high enough profile in some Protestant church body when you convert, you're suddenly an expert on your new religion. And since I don't mind naming names, I'll name some. Frankie Schaeffer and is a layman in the Orthodox church who became seemingly an overnight expert in hisnewfound religion. And judging by his books, he doesn't have much expertise in either his old tradition or his new ones. Then you've got John Fenton and Gregory Hogg. Fenton and Hogg were high-profile converts who both got ordained in the Orthodox church before the chrism had even been wiped off their foreheads. And sure enough, now they're running around babbling like experts when neither of them have even been Orthodox long enough to celebrate three Christmases on the Julian calendar...and this in a tradition that insists that theology is 90% experience! In his attempt to out-Tradition everyone, Fenton's said laughable things about New Testament pseudepigrapha that I hope no Orthodox scholar would say, Heck, I feel a little weird answering questions for Lutheranism for the imonk, like I'm too new at this sometimes, and I've been a Lutheran since 2000 and been through a year of seminary.

Because most readers are too thick to read anything I say in all-or-nothing terms, I'm not saying a convert can't ever publicly defend his new religion. I'm just saying you really should make them go through an initial cooling off period or something before proclaiming them to be professional apologists, sending them on the lecture circuit, or ordaining them (seriously, ordination?). And I know that all the guys I'm thinking of are in traditions where what Scripture says is of little account if you feel like doing otherwise, but just imagine that Paul (who didn't go out evangelizing until 3 years after his conversion, btw) actually knew what he was talking about in I Timothy 3:6. If it helps you take it more seriously, try to think of Paul as part of the Magisterium and I Timothy as part of Tradition.

If you didn't watch the Browns-Bengals game, you are some kind of chump. Right now, I'm glad I had Lewis on my fantasy football team, because Peyton didn't do anything special for me today.

The Hip Hop Ain't Never Gonna Stop

Lutheran blogger? I can handle that. My interview continues here. I don't have time these days to write for like seven different sites at once, so if you want to see what I'm saying these days, keep abreast of internetmonk.com.

Pirate the Professional Intarweb Apologist

I have been doing buttloads of homework lately. It's insane. I don't have much time for blogging. Heck, I hardly even have time to wipe my butt after I take a dump. But I still write a bit. Currently, Mike Spencer aka imonk has been interviewing me on how God's sovereignty works in Lutheran vs Reformed theology. His site is here.

The comments on the previous post are absolutely fascinating to me. You bring up homosexuality, and people just have knee-jerk reactions that likely have nothing to do with your post. If you talk about anal sex (and I do talk about sex on this blog anyway), people just lose it--and the people who really lose it are the supporters of homosexuality! Ironically, the big fans of homosexuality are completely opposed to talking about sex! We're talking about a group of men that has defined themselves in terms of an abnormal sexual activity, but we're not allowed to talk about that exact activity.

The fact is, if you take away the anal sex, you don't have queers. You have celibate males, whom both homosexuals and contraceptive heterosexuals will call "repressed." The whole cultural context of the term "homosexuality" is one in which your nature as a man is not fully realized unless you are with some regularity inducing orgasm via someone else's orifice(s). Nothing of course matters except the sex of the person giving you an orgasm; a faithful married man with three kids is apparently of the same "sexuality" as some barbarian animal who rams his rod into any willing female he can find. The important thing is that you're having sex. Trust me, I had a girlfriend who accused me of being asexual because I didn't have sex with her. That's how these people think.

I just think that if you're a theologian who wants to normalize homosexuality (which means normalizing homosexual culture; get real--"gay monogamy" exists mostly in your head), you have to have theological concepts which you can readily liken to buttsex, rectal prolapses, manly group sex, anal leakage due to a sphincter that's been wrecked by your buddy's penis, and so on. After all, the Bible uses normal sex, menstruation, childbirth, fornication, and adultery in its theological language. Further, if this stuff is truly good, the analogies genuinely should not bother you. I don't mind the Church being called the Bride of Christ or worship of God being likened to the sexual fidelity of a wife to her husband (and I'm no woman, either!). So if homosexuality is normal and good, you genuinely should not mind a church union being compared to a gay three-way.

Gay Marriage & Theology

Our friends in the ELCA, ECUSA, and other liberal church bodies are particularly enamored with homosexuals these days. They literally cannot find enough ways to extol . Naturally, gay marriage is one of those "social justice" issues that various folks in these churches have committed themselves to. But I was thinking about how the sanctifying of one guy pounding another in the butt is not viewed by them as some sort of necessary evil, but just as "normal," lovely and good as what God originally created. But obviously it has its uniqueness as well. A man can't give another man a baby, although he can give him an anal prolapse and various other kinds of rectal malfunctions. So I was thinking about how Paul uses normal marriage theologically and came to the conclusion that at some point, liberals need to find a similar theological use for this new kind of marriage that can only be consummated anally. We already have regular marriage as the metaphor for Christ in the church, so that one's taken. But maybe we could compare women's ordination to being a female transvestite. I personally would compare the union among the ECUSA, PCUSA, and ELCA to a three-way orgy of manly buttsex.
And if homosexuality is really as beautiful and normal as what God created, you shouldn't be bothered by that analogy in the slightest. Embrace it. Unionism is like getting your feces pounded in by another dude, and I affirm that alternative ecclesiastical lifestyle.

Out of the Seminary, Into the...?

Quitting seminary has been rather good to me. I think I really needed to be back in church and out of the seminary environment, as much as I liked the academic side of it. If it didn't mean going another $30,000 into debt, I'd consider getting my MA and possibly going on to get a PhD in somethingorother somewhere and going off somewhere to teach. But teaching math's a pretty sweet gig, and I can't say I mind the prospect of doing that the rest of my life, either. Overall, I just feel like I've got a better hold on my sanity these days.

Window Office

I'm moving to one. Take that, nerds!

Logic is Important

Some of my readers seem to be thoroughly unschooled in logic. Which if any of the following was my post here doing?

a) Refuting the claim that Lutheranism teaches a legal fiction.
b) Proving that Lutheran doctrine is true.
c) Proving that Catholic doctrine is false.
d) Conceding that Lutheranism teaches a legal fiction.
e) Showing that the argument that Lutheranism teaches legal fictions while Catholicism does not is in fact a case of special pleading.

If you answered anything but (e), give yourself a D- in Logic 101! Now it's obvious enough that I was doing (e), but what about (a) through (d)?

a) Showing that an argument commits a logical fallacy is not the same as proving the conclusion is false. For example, "Everyone thinks the earth is round, therefore it is round" has a true conclusion but commits the logical fallacy of the Appeal to Popularity.
b) Showing that Catholicism also asserts legal fictions doesn't prove that Lutheranism is true. Asserting so would actually be the Tu Quoque fallacy (aka "You too, buddy").
c) I nowhere proved or attempted to prove that legal fictions by the usual Hahn-like definition are false.
d) "Not refuting" a charge and "conceding" the charge are not in fact the same thing. My original post leaves the original charge of "legal fiction" up in the air.

When you read something on the Internet, be careful to read what it actually says. This is often quite different from what you think it ought to have said. Most people think that an argumentative post addressing Catholic apologetics should do a, b, and c, and so they read it as though that's what I've actually done. But I didn't do that. And why not, you ask? Because if I should ever get to addressing what few substantive arguments Catholic apologists have against Lutheranism, I want to get all the arguments that commit major logical fallacies off the table. Arguments that commit logical fallacies should be ignored, not refuted. And hopefully, I hope other Protestants will learn to ignore the logical fallacies and think about the real issues--and there are real issues and serious arguments out there. But it is absolutely mindless to run around in circles trying to seriously address as though they were valid arguments that rely on special pleading, ad hominem, appeals to popularity, and the like.

Anyway, pay attention to what I write. Before you dash off some comment thinking you're gonna hand me my ass, ask yourself, "Did he really say that?"

Nominalism, McGrath, Logical Fallacies

I think I've largely made my peace with nominalism as a result of McGrath's book. Boiling theological controversies to "realism" vs "nominalism" is generally a huge oversimplification and sometimes not even applicable. The Augustinians, Franciscans, Dominicans, Calvinists, and Lutherans were all heavily populated with nominalists, for example.

Assuming Ockham actually made the point McGrath said he made, he had a really valid point. Ockham basically argued that deriving soteriology from metaphysics put God in subjection to metaphysics, which would actually make metaphysics the preeminent reality over God. But since God created all reality, this doesn't actually make any sense. It's not ontologically necessary for God to do anything. I think Ockham's solution to the dilemma was pure voluntarism, although I don't find that satisfying at all (and neither was it the only approach taken). Luther, for example, was not a pure voluntarist on the atonement, but Calvin was. What McGrath called the de-ontologizing of salvation, which is really the freeing of God from the constraints of any particular theory of metaphysics, opened up at least the hypothetical possibility of other means of salvation, i.e. we are saved in such and such a manner, but God could have chosen to save us differently. A pure voluntarist would say that God could have saved us even without the incarnation, but not every nominalist is a pure voluntarist! For example, I think Ockham's voluntarism, at least as described by McGrath, tends to subject God's essence to his will. However, I think Ockham was right in insisting that God cannot be subjected to the constraints of any higher category, ontological or otherwise.

What does this have to do with logical fallacies? If you accept that reality by definition must be subject to God, then any argument that runs along the lines, "If God did A, he would be bad" is fallacious. If good is defined in terms of God rather than as a higher category in terms of which God is defined (or to which he must submit), then if God did A, then it would have been good for God to have done A by the very definition of good. I think it also takes all arguments taking the form, "It was possible for God to do so, it was fitting for God to do so, therefore God did so," and throws them in the trash. But that of course is only "If." There are plenty of enthusiastic realists out there who have no problem with ontologically driven arguments about God's actions.

Now there are whole bunch of epistemological questions I'm leaving unanswered here, and if you push them a certain direction, you could be heading straight for wrangling eternally about the theodicy. That's where I would side with Luther and say that in truth, we know very little about the working of God's actions and mind beyond what he reveals to us in Christ and the Cross. The mind of God is not at all attainable through philosophical speculation, but that's an epistemological claim, not a matter of logic.

Anyway, I should have a conclusion. After Ockham, the questions of what God could or should have done are rendered meaningless and thus short-circuit any attempts to prove anything about them. The only relevant question then becomes what God actually did do or currently does. And since you no longer have recourse to "should" or "could" in your arguments, your only criterion is what God himself has said about the matter.

Excursus on Special Pleading, Pt 2

It's often not very hard to throw around the charge of special pleading. It can often be little more than the academic version of "I know you are, but what am I?" So how do you refute a special pleading charge? Basically, you have to show your argument does not in fact follow this structure:

1. If A, then B.
2. X has property A, therefore it has property B.
3. Y has property A, but Y also has property C.
4. Therefore in the special case of Y, A does not imply B.

You can do this only by showing that Y does not in fact have property A. This can be done by globally showing that Y does not have property A, or by showing that not-C is part of the definition of A and next proving that Y has property C. Arguing that Y has properties D, E, and F, which is all we've had in the previous comment threads, are simply further cases of special pleading.

Proving Y has not-A cannot be done arbitrarily, of course. In an argument, you have to have agreed upon certain premises with those with whom you are arguing (arguments never happen in a vacuum). You have to argue from the definition of A, which means that all parties in the argument must agree on said definition. Obviously, if you claim "Not Y" is part of the definition of property A, no one will agree on that, as that's actually the fallacy of question-begging. Further, when showing that Y does not have A, you have to be careful that you don't show that X does not have A at the same time, and similarly for showing Y has property C. This, of course, is not possible if we have a genuine case of special pleading, which we in fact do in the case previously discussed.

An Excursus on Special Pleading

There are some new twists on special pleading in the comments. The arguments go something like this:

1. The Lutheran doctrine of justification is a legal fiction, therefore it is false.
2. The Catholic doctrine of indulgences is also a legal fiction, but theological language is analogical.
3. Therefore, the Catholic doctrine of indulgences is not false.

And:

1. The Lutheran doctrine of justification is a legal fiction, therefore it is false.
2. The Catholic doctrine of justification is also a legal fiction, but it conforms with the theories of goodness and truth that fall out of a particular metaphysical system.
3. Therefore, the Catholic doctrine of justification is not false.

Both of these arguments are special pleading. For one thing, in neither argument is it clear why the exception clause applied to the Catholic position grants the exception at all. The courts do not care if a legal fiction is consistent with goodness or uses some analogical language. It's still a legal fiction. Second, both exceptions could be applied to Lutherans as well. To whatever extent the phrase "the merit of Christ transferred via indulgence for the remission of temporal penalty" is inherently analogical, "the merit of Christ transferred via faith for the remission of all penalty" is analogical as well. In a like manner, the Lutheran doctrine of justification does in fact conform with ideas of goodness and truth consistent with a particular metaphysical system, probably more than one. It quite obviously conforms with Ockhamist voluntarism, and it conforms with any system of relational metaphysics that sees "righteousness" in terms of the creature's relation to God rather than as an ontological quality inhering in the soul, which in turn is quite compatible with the ideas of goodness and holiness established in the Torah, which is far more concerned about relational status than ontological properties. I'm sure one could come up with a number of other metaphysical theories as well.

So in both cases, we still have special pleading. Suggestion: Drop the whole line of argumentation. It just doesn't work. If you want to argue against Lutheranism, you'll have to come up with something better than "It's a legal fiction."