Wisconsin Lutheran College Firing Professors

I thought Wisconsin Lutheran College was dripping money from the Schwan Foundation, but it managed to run into a budget shortfall and will can a few professors.

Milwaukee Journal

The Arizona public universities are suffering from enormous cutbacks. Since they subsidize students, ASU will be turning away students.

For-profit schools seem to be doing well. The two where I work have growing enrollments. One of my friends looked around at a meeting and said, "No one is teaching 20 classes a year here!" He was talking about maxing out the teaching load (five-week classes). I knew someone. Those who wanted more classes were told, "Qualify to teach more subjects." Most wanted to teach their favorite classes alone. One said, "Back to algebra?"

DeVry University is not doing well. It was once a giant with 50,000 students. UoP has around 300,000 students and the National Conference champions playing at its stadium.

No one knows exactly where the economy will hit bottom. The Wizard of Omaha, Warren Buffet, the world's greatest investor, has seen his stock price drop 50% from its high in 2007. That is just about where everyone else is...so far. Billionaires Buffet, Oprah, Murdoch, and Soros were all for Obamessiah. Now they have their wishes.

One reader says he is buying gold and silver. I am more inclined to repeat what the gremlin said in the movie named after them, "I am putting all my money in shotguns and canned goods."

Radio Legend Paul Harvey, 90, Died Today in Phoenix

Paul Harvey, eternally youthful,
received an award from President Bush.

When I was a child, no one talked when Paul Harvey came on the radio. It was a capital offense. Decade after decade, I would wonder, "Is he stil broadcasting?"

Mrs. Ichabod said, upon hearing the news, "And that's the rest of the story."

Paul Harvey managed to make that simple sentence famous and immediately identified with his work. He was consistently patriotic and upbeat, a quality rare in today's broadcasters.

In the News:

He based himself in Chicago, flew aboard his Lear jet to give corporate speeches and commuted by limo each day from his 27-room home in suburban River Forest, Ill., to his 16th floor studio above a street sign that reads Paul Harvey Drive.

When Harvey was 81 in 2000, his sole employer for all those years, ABC Radio Networks, signed him to a 10-year, $100 million contract. Rivals who had lost in the bidding told him they'd be back in 2010.

Harvey's ability to sell products in advertisements, via spots that read and which flowed seamlessly from his news stories, were legendary. He is considered the greatest radio salesman of all time and sponsors — only one in 15 were accepted — were required to sign on for at least a year.

"I can't look down on the commercial sponsors of these broadcasts," he told CBS in 1988. "Too often they have very, very important messages to put across. Without advertising in this country, my goodness, we'd still be in this country what Russia mostly still is: a nation of bearded cyclists with b.o."

The idea of retirement never occured to either Harvey or his wife, Angel, whom he married in 1940 and who was his producing partner throughout his career.

"I've got an old country boy's philosophy," he told The Chicago Tribune in a 2002 interview. "When the car's running, you don't look inside the carburator. Just keep rolling."

He got his start in radio in high school in Tulsa at age 14 when a speech teacher was so impressed with his voice that she took him to a local radio station, KVOO-AM and told the program director that Harvey belonegd on radio.

He began reading news, making announcements — and sweeping floors — and a year later began getting paid."It is impossible in print to capture the rhythm and flow of his delivery, a series of pauases, dramatic and playful inflections that combine to create somethng like a piece of perfomance art, a verbal telegraph," writer Rock Kogan wrote in his Tribune profile.

"Page Two."

The Only Product John Deere Would Not Stand Behind!

You city-slicker, Fuller-attending liberals need to know -
that is a John Deere Manure Spreader.

WELS Popcorn Cathedral Training

Lutherans say, "The old man never goes away."

How did Ski get trained to develop his Popcorn Cathedral?

I added this link to the Church and Chicanery links on the left.

Let me know when Ski finally erases his blog. Maybe never. The Church and Chicaneries will back him to the hilt because he is the new Kelm.

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Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "WELS Popcorn Cathedral Training":

There is just no question from that link that Ski loves a false teacher, Andy Stanley. He loves his teaching, loves his worship, loves the fact that Stanley despises the proper role of the means of grace.

How can WELS stay in fellowship with someone who openly and proudly worships in a Baptisit congregation? What happened to my synod???

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GJ - How can they discipline Ski for echoing Church Growth gurus of the past?

1. Ron Roth started TELL to promote the Church Growth Movement in WELS, followed by Bob Hartman and Paul Kelm editing it.
   
2. Reuel Schulz praised C. Peter Wagner, and Pentecostal Baptist, after studying with him at Fuller.
   
3. Paul Kelm consistently taught Reformed doctrine in WELS.
   
4. Valleskey gushed over Church Growth in the magazine, the classroom, and his dreadful We Believe, Therefore We Speak.
   
5. Norm Berg, Joel Gerlach, and many others trained at Fuller - not just Valleskey, Bivens, Huebner, and Olson (DMin).
   
6. WELS paid mission pastors to be trained at Willow Creek.
   
7. WELS started Lutheran Parish Resources in Columbus, to promote the Church Growth Movement.
   
8. Wayne Mueller promoted CG at the seminary at The Love Shack while denying there was any CG in in the sect.

So where does one start?

Walther's Law and Gospel Online

Walther is the ruling norm for Bronze Age Lutherans.

Walther's Law and Gospel lectures are now online. The title looks funny in the browser because there is an extra ">" in the code under title. Yes, I proof-read HTML too, so beware.

I would like to thank the people involved in the effort, because it makes reading, quoting, and citing so much easier.

The lectures are an English translation of a German transcription of his lectures. However, they are doubtless faithful to his original thought and meaning.

Many of the French Protestants (Huguenots) fled to Prussia during the persecutions in France. My father's mother's family came to America. The Huguenots were Reformed, but they were not given their own churches in Prussia. The Lutherans were supposed to convert them, but they converted the Lutherans. The Prussian Union, which Walther and Bishop Stephan fled, was a compromise where Lutherans gave up the efficacy of the Word - just like today in the Lutheran Church. Only today, the district presidents and bishops have the sword, instead of the magistrates.

Walther's Christian faith was Pietistic in origin. He could never bring himself to criticize Spener in his publications.

The peculiar double-justification, formulated by Walther and Pieper, came from Halle Pietism. The subjective-objective language was circulating widely in America in the Christian Dogmatics of Knapp (Halle University), which was published in German and translated into English. The book was used extensively by all denominations from the 1830s to the 1890s. Knapp begat Tholuck, theologically, and Tholuck taught Hoenecke at Halle University.

Synodical Conference Lutherans think church history began in 1841 with Walther and his Altenburg Theses. Here are the periods of church history in the LCMS:
1. Jesus.
2. C. F. W. Walther.
3. Jack and Robert Preus.

Walther made many positive contributions to the Missouri Synod, but he definitely took over the personality cult which Bishop Stephan began. The Missouri Synod was happy to make Walther into an idol. I even have a tiny C. F. W. Walther statue, which I got from Herman Otten in New Haven.

Many people think that anyone who questions Walther or Pieper is an automatic heretic. That attitude is idolatrous, dangerous, and sad to behold.

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L P has left a new comment on your post "Walther's Law and Gospel Online":

Pr. GJ,

Many people think that anyone who questions Walther or Pieper is an automatic heretic. That attitude is idolatrous, dangerous, and sad to behold.

Absolutely correct, Pastor! It is also fanaticism, is it not? and shame on them!

Whereas Walther said some helpful things in his book, my readings suggest that he is also responsible for a type of Lutheran Fundamentalism wherein critical thinking is abhorred.

LPC

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GJ - Perhaps we should blame those who came after Walther and made Missouri Walther-centric. Cascione and others seem to think I should burn incense in front of my Walther statue, like Queequeg and his idol in Moby Dick.