Steven has left a new comment on your post "Just Say No To the Abusive Cult Called WELS":
James, I believe "the new feminist Creed" refers to the Nicene Creed in the WELS hymnal Christian Worship. The phrase "for us men" is reduced to simply "for us."
I am a recent graduate of MLC having studied music education there. I took a course entitled Musical Heritage of the Lutheran church with Dr. Kermit Moldenhauer, who was on the committee that developed CW. He described the committee's goal to make some of the male references more gender neutral, but added that in hindsight he believes they may have gone too far on some counts. One lamentable change was in the translation of "A Mighty Fortress." The phrase "And take they our life, goods, fame, child, and wife, let these all be gone they yet have nothing won" is replaced with "And do what they will—hate, steal, hurt, or kill—though all may be gone,our victory is won." There are many in the WELS that were upset by this text change. It will be interesting to see if they revert back to the former text when they publish the next hymnal.
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GJ - The WELS apostates decided to use the liberal, ecumenical texts developed by a pan-denominational group, then claimed they were forced to use the new wording in the Creeds (note the plural).
The statement above is proof of the evil done, because the current college students have already forgotten the correct wording of the Creeds. "And became man" was replaced with "fully human." The original wording is clear and thus offensive to the feminists and their capon enablers. Nothing in the original text justifies "fully human." Jenswold said the new wording was correct because he was "an expert in Greek."
I wondered at the time, to myself. "If that is so, then what about John 3. "There came to Him by night, a fully human named Nicodemus."
The old heresiarch Ted Hartwig was the author chosen to defend the feminist Creeds in the magazine and journal. All the WELS pastors fell in line, bought the hymnals, and followed the wolf-pack.
Victor Prange said the entire hymnal was edited for the feminists. That really brought them in, eh? Their FICKLE editor Dorothy Sonntag left for ELCA.
By goofing around with everything, including Luther's hymn, The Sausage Factory and its cohorts in Church and Change signaled "Anything Goes!" in worship.
Bad coinage drives out good coinage. CW lowered the standards everywhere.
5 comments:
The main problem is keeping men and boys active in church, not so much keeping women and girls in church. That way Sunday morning doesn't have, say, 80% women and 20% men, attending. Gender imbalance leads to a shrinking church since emasculated Christianity won't attract men, and a feminine church won't attract that many people. As proof that conventional thinking is wrong, colleges thought that if they only recruited women by emasculating the university and provided them services (free medical clinics, women studies, clubs, etc.) that men aren't interested in, they wouldn't have to recruit men since they'd be pounding on the door trying to get where all the educated women are, but what happened is the idea of college became a turn-off to many men, and so now colleges are heading toward 60% women and 40% men. Now the campuses have an anti-male feel and are totally unromantic because, for example, every parking lot and every 100 yards along the sidewalk there's a pole with a blue light where people can call campus police. It all works together to put the kibosh on the idea of finding a wife in college. The same thing could be said for marriage. They thought that liberated women with careers making as much, or more, money then men would attract men to marry women, but the latest Time magazine has statistics that show where that has got us. Of course, Time tried to put a PC spin on the data so they could say in their subtitle that men need marriage more than women. They can say what they want in the magazines and in the universities, but it always has and will be the case that women are the ones who more often try to drag men to altar, not vice versa. By the way, the reason the liberals are so big on the pay gap between men and women is they say their programs will be beneficial for society once complete parity is achieved. It's like the undaunted Marxist professors who still say that communism didn't work only because it was never really tried, since Stalin ruined it.
My wife and I always sing the original words to "A Mighty Fortress...". Then we smile at each other. A tiny way to fight back I know, but a way.
Scott E. Jungen
Mrs. Ichabod and I use The Lutheran Hymnal always - our way of fighting back.
I keep a copy of CW, in case we need to sing The Planning Hymn!
Mrs. Jungen is also an organist, and still uses much of the music from The Lutheran Hymnal. Another of the many problems with CW is the music is hard for the average parish organist. Hence the use of The Lutheran Hymnal.
"Not all the blood of beasts, on JEWISH altars slain..."
Scott E. Jungen
That old hymnal had more pluses than minuses when you compare it to CW. It was a self contained organizer and planner for worship and a great template for those who may have wanted to do something a little different. My biggest pet peeve besides the feminist leaning language was the omission of what scripture text the hymn was based on. The notes in CW in this regard to me at least are useless.
I've heard the comment as well from other church musicians that the harmonizations are weird in many cases. When I was taking music theory in college, old hymns were typically used to teach basic harmony; i.e. voice leading in regards to chord changes.
Joe
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