One Way to Study Luther

I told Mrs. Ichabod, "I can get over 300 books unlocked on CDs from Nelson." She said, "Do you want to buy them?" I laughed at the thought of buying 300+ mediocre books from Thomas A. Nelson.

They have Luther's Works (American Edition) on CDs for $200.

They also have Lenski on CDs for the same price. ELCA let it go out of print, for some reason.

I believe CPH has Gerhard on CD for a decent cost.

I read so much on the computer that I consider reading a real book to be a pleasure. The last thing I would do is start reading Luther on the computer. I told Mrs. I that I would rather get Luther's Sermons on St. John and read them as books. Luther wrote those sermons when he was asked to substitute for someone who did not get back in time. Luther said he would rather garden, but turned out one of the best theological books ever written.

The three best ways to study Christian theology are:
1. Luther.
2. The Book of Concord.
3. Lenski.

I admit that Lenski is not something to pick up and read. However, there is no better guide for troublesome passages.

If someone is brave enough to preach on the historic readings instead of the pope's three-year lectionary, Luther's Sermons (five-volume, Grand Rapids) are superb and a real bargain. That is still my favorite Luther set.

A Roman Catholic priest wrote me to say he still has my Luther set that I gave him. He still reads it all the time. I think he wanted to say he was really a Lutheran at heart. Many Roman Catholics are. I hope I played some role in leading him to the truth. It has not worked with Lutheran leaders - I am sure of that.

Lutheran Bomb Throwers

Bomber Bill Ayers, professor at UIC,
has a wealthy and politically powerful father.
Bill married another bomber, so we have this old, but heart-warming scene of the two bombers with their devil-spawn.

The University of Illinois in Chicago gave Obama's mad bomber pal a cushy teaching job and tenure?

That is not exactly a shocker. For one thing, the most violent radicals come from rich families. After a life on the run, they enjoy the finer things in life. They are all steak-radicals. They want to overthrow society while they continue to eat steak and enjoy a plush vacation home in addition to their tony urban digs.

Secondly, the elite in America are tolerant of the radical Left, often generous in supporting them. They are not so fond of traditional conservatives.

I have seen many examples of a Bill Ayers in the histories of various denominations. Find someone determined to overthrow the denomination's confession and you will find a well-connected father in the background, time after time.

The father is a pledge of fidelity that sonny boy is OK. In denominations, a father in the church business is handy for pulling strings and hiding scandals, too. A few clergy uncles and a rich layman in the background help too.

One famous example is Fuerbringer (go-fer in English, as Tim Buelow once explained to me). The father was a fine pastor, excellent professor, president of Concordia, St. Louis. His two books are excellent little histories of the LCMS. Moreover, the Fuerbringers were related to Walther. Ludwig Fuerbringer was so serious a student that he turned down speaking engagements so he could study more. He mentioned Luther's sermons as the basis for his pastoral counseling. (Imagine that today. The Sausage Factory has students reading Reformed garbage, always cautioning while promoting.)

Eventually, Ludwig's son, nicknamed Fibby, became president of the same institution. What could be better? However, Fibby was the well connected bomb thrower, just the opposite of his father. Fibby installed all the apostates in the school, not without help from other apostates. Soon the whole faculty was full of LCA-types, with only a few exceptions.

Rehwinkel tried to get the old faculty to say something. They muted themselves. Rehwinkel was sent around the world to keep him from "causing trouble." That reminds me of District Pope Robert Mueller saying to me, "You cause trouble everywhere you go." He also said, "You are one of our soundest pastors." Proof that the Word is efficacious.

Fibby did his work well. The LCMS exploded when people found out how expertly he administered the school. There were many other players in the Missouri drama, but Fibby's role was crucial.

Another parallel is David Valleskey's father starting him on the road to perdition with the promotion of Reformed doctrine in the name of evangelism. (Valleskey senior's parish is no more.) When Valleskey joined the Sausage Factory, one WELS observer said, "He will turn WELS upside-down." He did. We also have Wayne Mueller, WELS President-in-Waiting, having his son at Church and Change, the sect's remarkable agency for promoting every doctrine except Luther's. No one is going to dislodge Adam Mueller while daddy works at the Love Shack.

One pastor came back from the WELS convention and told me how Richard Stadler (feminist WELS pastor, pal of Herman Otten's sister Marie Meyer) was conferring with Wayne Mueller and Paul Kelm.

One reader wrote me about Paul Kelm working for Valleskey at Apostles.

When WELS wanted someone to put the stamp of approval on Manufacturing Disciples, the Reformed (NIV) reading of the Great Commission, they turned to the son of a faithful teacher. Mudslide's son promptly moonwalked into the Reformed camp, endorsing a fatuous position.

I have thought of writing a series of biographies: Conservative Fathers, Apostate Sons. However, it would be run to 20 volumes.

Oh-Bomber's Political Connection in ChicagoAn Education Guru at UIC

A tenured and highly paid position is perfect for the unrepentant bomber Bill Ayers, a significant political friend of Barack Hussein Obama.

Obama's Pal - Bombing Our Enemies Was Immoral, But Bombing Our Own Citizens...

Ayers’s spectacular second act began when he enrolled at Columbia University’s Teachers College in 1984. Then 40, he planned to stay just to get a teaching credential. (He had taught in a “Freedom School” during his pre-underground student radical days.) But he experienced an epiphany in a course taught by Maxine Greene, a leading light of the “critical pedagogy” movement. As Ayers wrote later, he took fire from Greene’s lectures on how the “oppressive hegemony” of the capitalist social order “reproduces” itself through the traditional practice of public schooling—critical pedagogy’s fancy way of saying that the evil corporations exercise thought control through the schools.

It hadn’t occurred to Ayers that an ed-school professor could speak or write as an authentic American radical. “There are vast dislocations in industrial towns, erosions of trade unions; there is little sign of class consciousness today,” Greene had proclaimed in the Harvard Education Review. “Our great cities are burnished on the surfaces, building high technologies, displaying astonishing consumer goods. And on the side streets, in the crevices, in the burnt-out neighborhoods, there are the rootless, the dependent, the sick, the permanently unemployed. There is little sense of agency, even among the brightly successful; there is little capacity to look at things as if they could be otherwise.”

Greene told future teachers that they could help change this bleak landscape by developing a “transformative” vision of social justice and democracy in their classrooms. Her vision, though, was a far cry from the democratic optimism of the Founding Fathers, Abraham Lincoln, and Martin Luther King Jr., which most parents would endorse. Instead, critical pedagogy theorists nurse a rancorous view of an America in which it is always two minutes to midnight and a knock on the door by the thought police is imminent. The education professors feel themselves anointed to use the nation’s K–12 classrooms to resist this oppressive system. Thus Maxine Greene urged teachers not to mince words with children about the evils of the existing social order. They should portray “homelessness as a consequence of the private dealings of landlords, an arms buildup as a consequence of corporate decisions, racial exclusion as a consequence of a private property-holder’s choice.” In other words, they should turn the little ones into young socialists and critical theorists.

All music to Bill Ayers’s ears. The ex-Weatherman glimpsed a new radical vocation. He dreamed of bringing the revolution from the streets to the schools. And that’s exactly what he has managed to do.

In record time Ayers acquired an Ed.D. with a dissertation titled “The Discerning ‘I’: Accounts of Teacher Self-Construction Through the Use of Co-Biography, Metaphor, and Image.” There wasn’t much biography, metaphor, or image in the 180-page text. Ayers’s research consisted solely of a few days spent interviewing and observing the classroom practices of three nursery school teachers he knew personally. (In Ayers’s own autobiographical section of the text—de rigueur for Teachers College dissertations—he reminisced about growing up in a wealthy Chicago suburb, about his warm family, and about having been arrested in campus antiwar demonstrations. Of his bomb-making skills or his ten years in the underground he said not a word.)

With his Teachers College credential in hand, Ayers landed an ed-school appointment back in Chicago, where his father was CEO of Commonwealth Edison and nicely plugged in to the city’s political establishment. These days, Ayers carries the joint titles of Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago. One of his several books on the moral imperative of teaching for social justice is a bestseller in ed-school courses. Like many other tenured and well-heeled radicals, Ayers keeps hoping for a revolutionary upheaval that will finally bring down American capitalism and imperialism. But now, instead of planting bombs in bathrooms, he has been planting the seeds of resistance and rebellion in America’s future teachers, who will then pass on the lessons to the students in their classrooms.

Future teachers signing up for Ayers’s course “On Urban Education” can read these exhortations from the course description on the professor’s website:

“Homelessness, crime, racism, oppression—we have the resources and knowledge to fight and overcome these things.”

“We need to look beyond our isolated situations, to define our problems globally. We cannot be child advocates . . . in Chicago or New York and ignore the web that links us with the children of India or Palestine.”

“In a truly just society there would be a greater sharing of the burden, a fairer distribution of material and human resources.”

For another course, titled “Improving Learning Environments,” Ayers proposes that teachers “be aware of the social and moral universe we inhabit and . . . be a teacher capable of hope and struggle, outrage and action, a teacher teaching for social justice and liberation.”

Ichabod Is Read Around the World

B 16 has publicly apologized. When will WELS publicly apologize for Columbus, Ohio? for Tucson? for Grand Rapids? for Watertown?

My technology friends tell me Ichabod is being read around the world, but especially in the states of Wisconsin and California.

I hear from various readers. One was a Roman Catholic and is now joining a truly conservative Lutheran congregation.

Another is Bruce Church, who has interesting blog material he sends my way. This morning I noticed he is giving stuff to Norm Teigen as well. Norm's blog continues to be my daily favorite.

Norm Teigen represents what is being lost (or thrown away) in the Little Sect, WELS, and Missouri. Every organization has its faults, but I believe the old Synodical Conference was once the domain of kind, gentle, orthodox people. The pastors were genuinely self-sacrificing. Some were intellectual giants who labored in obscurity but produced remarkable material.

The apostates took advantage of the trust built up by real churchmen. The apostates used their own nastiness, aggression, and ruthlessness to drive out the earlier leaders and pastors. The single biggest uniting factor has been Church Growth for the last few decades. Other damaging factors are unionism, Pentecostalism, and homosexual liberation.

Whatever is bad is then driven out by what is even worse. ELCA proved that. As bad as the LCA and ALC were in 1987, their synodical officials were considered too conservative to be trusted in the new lavender ELCA. Who created the La Cage ELCA? - the worst offenders of the LCA and ALC. The worst offenders of the past began howling as soon as they were shelved and ridiculed by the new leaders.

I look back at the LCA congregation I joined when I was 16. I left the Disciple of Christ on my own because First Christian in Moline made me ill. (How ironic, since the entire Lutheran Church today is enthralled by a sociologist from the Disciples of Christ, Donald McGavran!) The LCA congregation I joined had only recently been part of the Augustana Synod, part of the LCA merger. The only services we had were liturgical. The sermons were Biblical, not self-help rants.

The Wisconsin Synod did not like the fact that my LCA experience and theological training made me aware of the fraud being perpetrated by the Love Shack and the Sausage Factory. The more they lied, the more research I did. Many documents were sent to me, sometimes anonymously, other times by pastors who lacked the spine to do the work themselves.

Now the ELS, WELS, and Missouri synod members are crying in their beer about the bad leaders they have elected and enabled. They enable these thugs by sending them money, attending their meetings, and apologizing for the crimes committed in the Name of God.

Let me make a comparison. Bill Clinton did not become president and stay president because he was a good leader. He was a farce as Arkansas governor. He was a crashing bore as a speaker. He was far worse than a womanizer and creek-jumper. Every time he fell on his face, people propped him up again. He had powerful international friends already when he was governor of a largely ignored Southern state. When someone that incompetent is put in power and kept in power, it is because of powerful friends.

When you see an adulterous pastor promoted by his pals, it is not because of the wisdom of Holy Mother Synod. It is because of its corruption. That corruption is so entrenched now that the leaders are not even embarrassed over their criminal cover-ups. As soon as anyone gets a peek at what they are hiding, the attacks begin.

If you enjoy Ichabod, you will laugh at the following. A number of people have been falsely accused of being "Greg Jackson." If that is not funny enough, one pastor threatened Holy Mother WELS with sending me the latest WELS theological pratfall. He is no longer a WELS pastor.