CHRISTIANITY TODAYpublishes this assessment from a second-generation Lutheran minister in good standing in his community, because of its spirited call for rededication to the great priorities.—
ED.
Dear Brethren of the Missouri Synod:
Thirty-four years have passed since I last wrote to you. That was in July, 1926, when The American Mercury published my highly seasoned article, “The Lutherans,” which made some of you feel very badly, I fear. You have long ago forgiven me, I am sure, or will do so when I tell you that I now think quite differently than I did at 21, and that today I want to touch a sympathetic chord.
In 1926 I did not accuse you of false doctrine, though in my youthful innocence I made the sad mistake—which only one who is not Lutheran is entitled to make—of ascribing to you the doctrine of consubstantiation. On the other hand I doled out grudging praise because of your firm conservative position and your separated stand.
Now, a generation later, I wonder whether I can still laud you for those things. Some of your prominent professors are being accused of heresy: denial of the inerrancy of Scripture, negation of the immortality of the soul and of the resurrection of the body, belief in the annihilation of the wicked; and on the other hand, defense of the “immaculate conception” and the “assumption of Mary” as permissible opinions. Many of your clergy appear confused or indifferent in doctrinal matters. One of your pastors is currently professing the ancient error of modal monarchism. Others clamor for church union with those who do not hold our historic confessional position. My files bulge with reports that all is not well. Pastors are concerned and indignant. Laymen are grieved and disturbed. Low rumblings of discontent are heard at home and abroad.
Not yet blind, albeit in dire need of spectacles, Missouri is, in spite of all, as she has been ever of old, a lusty unshorn Samson in the Dan and Judah of American Lutheranism, harassed and oft invaded by the Philistines of modern misbelief. For generations now she has been a judge in the American Israel. A Nazarite from birth, she has gone from strength to strength.
THE CAUSES OF DECLINE
In our histories we have seen the Lutheran Church on this side of the water threatened by two particular dangers that once nearly erased all but its memory. Those perils were doctrinal indifferentism and rationalism. Some of us who have studied the causes of the decline know that the situation was so bad that in 1792 the confession of the Lutheran symbols was omitted from the new Constitution of the Pennsylvania Ministerium and from that of the New York Ministerium likewise, and that, in both, indiscriminate church fellowship was the order of the day. We know that from 1807 to 1825 the New York Ministerium had for its president the confused but crafty rationalist Fred H. Quitman (D.D., Harvard). Nicum, an historian of the Ministerium, described him in quotations from two other Lutheran church historians as “a Socinian, a Unitarian,” and as “positively and pronouncedly a rationalist.” Under an apparently official imprimatur never repudiated by the Ministerium, he issued in 1814 a catechism in which, as its own historians have been at pains to demonstrate in detail, Lutheran doctrine was shaded, perverted, and thoroughly compromised. By order of the same Ministerium, two years later a hymnal was published which incorporated an agenda containing rationalistic forms. Pastors preached what they pleased, for inadequate doctrinal standards precluded effective prosecution.
Careless convivial draughts of mixed theological brew lulled the Ministeria of New York and Pennsylvania into a Rip-van-Winkle nap that lasted a good half century. The clergy behaved as if mesmerized; they had either forgotten what Lutheranism is or they no longer cared. For years, in this area, the term “Lutheran” was only a convenient label designating a theologically amorphous group of Pennsylvania Dutchmen and their confreres in New York. Theological bonhomie was the very air they breathed and were to continue to inhale for many years after the organization of the extremely tolerant General Synod, whose constitution did not even deign to mention the Lutheran Confessions.
A SOURCE OF STRENGTH
Today we have a very different kind of Lutheranism in America. Why? Under the merciful guidance of God the answer is an intelligent use of printer’s ink. In 1844, Dr. C. F. W. Walther, later to become president of the Missouri Synod, published the initial issue of Der Lutheraner, which became one of the greatest instruments of Christian propaganda ever to appear in America. Walther dreamed of one united Evangelical Lutheran Church in North America, but, unlike most of the ecumenical enthusiasts of today, he envisioned this not as an agglomeration of doctrinally heterogeneous elements but as a truly Lutheran body, based firmly upon the historic Book of Concord as a true exposition of Scripture doctrine. His first task was to demonstrate through the pages of Der Lutheraner what true Lutheranism is. When Lutherans in name became Lutheran in fact, then it would be time enough to unite with them or to receive them into fellowship.
Walther’s method got results. Though his dream of a united Lutheran church was never realized, yet pastor after pastor and congregation after congregation left the General Synod and came over to Missouri. Others, in 1867, organized the conservative General Council, and, in 1913, the General Synod itself officially adopted the Lutheran symbols.
Describing the Missouri Synod as “the greatest and most important of the Lutheran synods of our country,” a General Council writer in the 1880s paid us this heartwarming compliment: “I see before me no more striking instance of the blessing which God bestows on men’s faithfulness than this very Missouri Synod. If it had not with such iron tenacity held to its confession of the pure doctrine; if it had not offered such trenchant testimony and had not opposed each and every deviation from the path it had recognized as the only true way; if it had shown itself more pliant in its practice than in its teaching; if it had adapted itself in ever-so-small a measure to the views of our rather impressionable age—it would not have achieved the results which it may now claim.… If the Lord God had not taken pity on the Lutheran Church in America by placing the Missouri Synod in its midst, we would today be an insignificant band, perhaps still bearing the name ‘Lutheran,’ but for the rest offering ourselves as an open pasture for foxes and other game.”
This is our glorious past.
WHAT OF THE FUTURE?
Now what of the future? Are we forfeiting the Spirit of God by mesalliance with the Timnath of syncretistic, theological latitudinarianism? Are we being shorn of our strength by an encounter with the blandishments of the neo-orthodox Delilah? How shall we avoid destruction in the house of Dagon?
Doctrinally, we must stand as alone as Luther at Worms, for we may clearly perceive the peril of standing otherwise. In terms of people, union is addition, but for the sounder church it is doctrinal subtraction. Assuming that the memberships of both are equal, let 100 per cent represent the doctrine of the one church and 80 per cent the doctrine of the other. Add the totals, and you get 180 per cent. But now you must divide by two, and the result is only 90 per cent. You now have twice as many members, and isn’t that fine? But you have 10 per cent less truth than you started with.
I have stated what may be called the Law of Union or the First Law of Ecumenicity. Or shall we call it the Lex Missouriensis? Whatever you may wish to call it, I am sure that it has various applications, some of which may readily occur to you. For example, you may derive from it the Second Law: “Those who want union are those who have nothing to lose by it.”
Yet in such matters arithmetic is far from adequate; we need a higher form of mathematics. Error is not static. Dr. W. M. Oesch of the Lutheran Seminary at Oberursel, Germany, has recently and well said, “The sinister syncretistic malady means—first in principle, then in practice—that not only one but many and ultimately all heresies are to be tolerated.” And unless the Lord intervenes, toleration is only the beginning. As the late Dr. John H. C. Fritz used to tell us in his seminary classes, error demands first toleration, then equal rights, and finally supremacy. Thus a little leaven, allowed to work unchecked, will at last turn the whole lump into a corrupt clamjamfry.
In spite of the tremendous new translation into English, we are leaving Luther behind. Would that we read him as the fathers did, for he has many things to say to us—some incisive things, too, on the matter of doctrinal loyalty versus the syncretistic spirit. For instance: “They say that one might well yield and surrender a little and keep up fraternal and Christian relations and fellowship with those who err in an unimportant point, so long as one agrees with them otherwise. No, my good man, for me none of that peace and unity that one gains by the loss of God’s Word.”
We must be on our guard, too, against the pride and pleasure of acquaintanceship. In Germany, our fathers’ principles kept them aloof from errorists, and by their persecutions the false teachers, in their turn, kept our fathers humble. Later in America language isolated them, and their foreign ways caused them some embarrassment. True, they were for the most part scholars and gentlemen of culture. Many of them read their Hebrew and Greek Testaments daily, and some could even converse in Latin. When they essayed to speak English, however, they could never be sure that people were not inwardly smiling at them for turning Poughkeepsie into “Bogibsi” or announcing to the congregation that they were going to “make a preachment.”
TO BE ONE OF THE CROWD
Such factors of safety no longer exist. We are now in the main stream of American life. In our desire to be good fellows we may play a round of golf with the priest or have lunch with the rabbi. There is no harm in it, perhaps, and we may even accomplish a great deal of good, but, aside from missionary implications, should we get chummy with a Presbyterian cleric across the street who does not believe in the Virgin Birth or hobnob with a Methodist dominie who has discarded the deity of Christ? Our contacts with specious theological scholarship have multiplied, and there is danger that we shall identify ourselves with it, at least in its subtler, neo-orthodox forms.
Let us beware, too, of the insinuating estrangements from the desk and the study that are so difficult to avoid in a wealthy, hedonistic, and materialistic environment such as ours. Prosperity can be a drug to conscience. The amoral influences of a decadent society daily impinge upon our souls and infiltrate our characters in a thousand insidious ways. We tend to adopt the mores of the crowd and to sin the popular and socially accepted sins, at least by association and silent consent. Disinterest in the cultivation of the theological habitus follows from such things as night follows day. A session with a popular magazine may distract us from the Greek Testament. Television may beguile us from Pieper’s Dogmatics. The concept of the Church as big business and of pastors as branch office managers invades our thinking and determines our conduct, leaving us no time to sit down and review the Book of Concord, whether in Latin, German, or English.
Scholarship? Who wants it more ardently than we? But let it not be a welter of mere dialectics, and, above all, not at the expense of divine truth. “Taking all in all,” says Dr. Oesch, “let American Gnesio-Lutheranism [genuine Lutheranism] not throw away that which God has given—a very great legacy indeed, which charges the churches thus blessed to keep what was bestowed and at the same time reach out for what must be complementary to the past. May God grant genuine progress on the unshakable foundation, adhered to loyally along paths of sound historical continuity. But this requires suppressing treason. It solicits prayer for a very great miracle, for one of those rare, full victories of truth after some serious falling away, which God was importuned to grant now and then.”
LETTERS TO THE CHURCHES
The letters of John to the Seven Churches are as apposite today as they ever were. Some of them apply also to us of Missouri. All of them should be required reading in this, our season of trouble. We dare not add to the words of the Book, but “he that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith unto the churches.” What if a thorough housecleaning is clearly in order?
“As many as I love, I rebuke and chasten. Be zealous, therefore, and repent.” Thus saith the Lord, and he is speaking not only to Laodicea but also to us.
In 1880, Rudolph Hoffmann wrote: “The simple Christian wants no uncertain, wavering stand in matters of faith; he wants to have a firm foundation.… The Missourians are Lutherans in the full sense of the word. They resist all unionism, and well they may, for this constitutes the strength of this Synod.”
Hoffmann was no friend of ours, but in this instance he was right. In our precious heritage of separated confessional loyalty to Holy Scripture lies the secret of our influence. May it never wane.
E. P. SCHULZE
Your affectionate brother in Christ,
The Lutheran Church of Our Redeemer
Peekskill, N. Y.
