wfn.org | LCMS: Report on Cloning has Marriage, Family Base

[Worldwide Faith News <wfn@igc.org>]

The Lutheran Church--Missouri Synod
Board for Communication Services

LCMSNews -- No. 28
May 20, 2002

Report on cloning has marriage, family base

By David L. Mahsman

A new report on human cloning gained approval last month from The Lutheran 
Church--Missouri Synod's Commission on Theology and Church Relations (CTCR).

The report, "What Child Is This? Marriage, Family and Human Cloning," was 
adopted without dissenting vote during the commission's April 18-20 meeting 
in St. Louis.

Dr. Samuel H. Nafzger, the CTCR's executive director, said he hopes the 
report will be edited, printed and ready for distribution to all LCMS 
congregations and rostered church workers by mid-summer.  It also will be 
placed then on the commission's Web site, http://www.lcms.org/ctcr.

As the title suggests, the report considers cloning within the context of a 
discussion of marriage and family.

"The aim of this report is to make a contribution to the ability of 
Christians to discern when to celebrate emerging gifts and when to witness 
against looming evils," says the report's "Introduction."

Nafzger said that the "guiding principle" for the report is found in the 
concluding affirmations of the CTCR's 1981 report on human sexuality.  That 
report says, "We honor God and the neighbor rightly when we ... affirm that 
this union of mutual love [between husband and wife] is the only proper 
context for human procreation."

At the same time, Nafzger said, the new report "goes into some length 
saying that a child from cloning would be a human being, a creation of 
God.  We distinguish the process from what a child is."

Says the report, "One person may have been born into a fine family of 
Christians, while someone else may have been born into a fine family of 
nonChristians.  Others may have been born in non-family circumstances, or 
be the product of artificial insemination or some other reproductive 
technology.  In future years humans born from a process of cloning may walk 
among us.  However, the most important thing is this: No matter how a 
person's life begins, anyone -- even though they are born in the flesh -- 
can become a child of God through the rebirth of Holy Baptism.

"This means that we cannot determine the pluses and minuses of various ways 
and means of producing humans by thinking that some people either are more, 
or they are less, human because of their origins," the report 
continues.  "Whatever we discover about the wisdom or `unwisdom' of various 
ways of procreation, we will have recognized these twin truths: 1. `there 
is no distinction; since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of 
God,' and 2. all `are justified by his grace as a gift, through the 
redemption which is in Christ Jesus' (Rom. 3:23-24)."

The new report was developed as a result of an assignment from the 1998 
Synod convention, which asked the CTCR for a study "to help the church, on 
the basis of the Word of God, make informed ethical judgments concerning 
cloning and attendant issues."  Some of those "attendant issues," including 
those related to stem-cell research, will be considered in ongoing CTCR 
study, Nafzger said.

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