One of the lesser lights in blogdom is obviously influenced by his sub-standard training in WELS. He wigs out over the fact that I linked Schmid as a favor to people who might want a compilation of orthodox Lutheran quotations. Schmid was a favorite in WELS and the ALC.
More wigging out - I have said nice things about Deutschlander's book on the theology of the cross.
The Lenski wig out - Every graduate of the Sausage Factory (WLS, Mequon) feels compelled to jump all over Lenski about justification by faith. My intuition was that these graduates have never read Lenski.
I was checking Lenski on Romans 1:17 and that proved me right. He is fairly close to the WELS position, at least in wording, in that passage. Lenski could be very Iowa Synod, in the middle about everything, even though he was Ohio Synod (ALC).
A well trained and ordained Sausage from The Sausage Factory will always start with a rebuke when the Book of Concord is mentioned. "It is only a book!" Or, "It is old fashioned. Nobody reads it." (Nobody he knows!)
But when a doctrinal dispute comes up, the same Sausage will direct the other person to...The Essay File at The Sausage Factory! That is not just the ruled norm of WELS, the norma normata. It is the ruling norm, the norma normans.
Is double-justification correct? Check the essay file.
Is Church Growth cool and wonderful to behold? Check the essay file.
Some of the wise men who have contributed are - Curt Peterson, the WELS pastor who is now publishing as an atheist; Mark Jeske, the WELS DNA pastor who is sinuflecting to Quiche-nik's Missouri; etc. etc. etc.
Most people would remove an atheist's support for Church Growth from contention, but not WELS. Curt wrote the right stuff, and he is a hero, by gum.
Illiterate Lutherans (the Shrinkers) play games with the books cited. They want to say that quoting one author is an endorsement of all he has ever written - not that they would bother reading it.
Walther has many good things to cite, but he was dead wrong about justification, welded to the Pietism which he brought to the New World. Melanchthon was one of the most gifted theologians of all time, but he also had a wobbly character and tried too hard to please everyone, leading to doctrinal confusion.
I like Luther best of all, but he admitted that he emerged slowly from the Medieval Romanism of his past.
That is why we have and esteem the Book of Concord, because the most able theologians of the time (Chemnitz, Chytraeus, Selnecker) gathered together the best confessional works to unify the Lutheran Church. No other denomination is so unified in doctrine and so rooted to the Scriptures and faithful fathers.
We do not have a quia subscription to all of Luther, just the Book of Concord Luther; not to all of Chemnitz, just the Formula of Concord Chemnitz; not to all of Augustine, who planted the seeds of Purgatory, but to those passages cited in the Book of Concord.
WELS and Missouri suffer terribly from their compulsion to defend their founders as infallible. They even deify the next generation, whether August or Franz Pieper. WELS and Missouri are more encased in the mummy-shrouds of infallibility than the papacy.
The results are in - the old Synodical Conference has yet to denounce and repudiate the Church Growth Movement. Instead, they continue to protect and promote the worst of the CG leaders.
That is the payoff for synodical infallibility, and a measure of God's wrath in punishing the Lutherans for their slatternly ways.
PS - I should mention that Joe Krohn enthuses about CG with Church and Change, like his pal Don Patterson, but distances himself from CG, like Don Patterson. However, Joe started the Rock N Roll blog to defend Doebler's Rock N Roll Church.
Joe defends his UOJ position with the dictionary, the 67th book of the Bible.
