LutherRocks has left a new comment on your post "WELS Anti-Christian":
One only has to teach the Scriptures in truth and purity to avoid such things as synergism instead of preaching universal absolution and crypto-universalism...
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GJ - A new book, a dissertation about Herman Otten and the LCMS split, will be coming out soon. I am getting a review copy, so I will discuss the parts I know. Various participants have offered their perspectives.
Joe Krohn's comment above got me thinking about how the issues are framed, spun, and tucked away in the memory archives.
For example, the LCMS Seminex crisis was built around the topic of inerrancy, a term that still makes liberal Lutherans fulminate.
Unfortunately, the Lutherans chose to plant their stake in a Calvinistic term rather than Biblical, Lutheran doctrine, because they saw the conservative Calvinists as their allies. A similar discussion has taken place over women's ordination rather than women teaching men, women usurping authority from men. As one drunken guest lecturer at Notre Dame said, "I will bracket that discussion for now."
The Scriptures are inerrant, infallible, without error or contradiction. However, when the Lutherans attached themselves to the inerrancy term without addressing the efficacy of the Word and the problem of Enthusiasm, they renewed their kinship with Calvinsim.
Luther and the Concordists did not debate inerrancy and seldom mentioned it, because almost no one argued against the concept. Calvin pretended to be Lutheran but finally came out of hiding on the topics of Enthusiasm, the Sacraments, and so forth.
The Missouri debate led them to make common cause with the conservative Calvinists in America, who were also saying, "Why can't we go back to ye Olden Days?"
Instead of preparing people against the errors of rationalism and Enthusiasm, the Preus-Otten-McCain coalition drummed Calvinism into putty-soft heads. I have read a fair number of Calvinistic works. They are always anxious to prove that the Bible really is correct, an insight no more illuminating than "water is wet" and "the sky is blue."
Calvinism is the gateway drug of Unitarian-Universalism. First, they divorce the Holy Spirit from the Word. Second, they subordinate the Word of God to human reason. Those two influences alone will lead to atheism in time, whether the path goes through intellectual Calvinism or emotional Pentecostalism.
The Babtists have 57 flavors that include everything from Calvinism to rattlesnake-handlerism. Apart from the issue of infant baptism, they are quite close, and even agree on baptism being a mere ordinance, an act of man rather than a Means of Grace.
Doctrinal DNA will always give away the daddy.
Some will say, "Then Preus, Otten, and McCain drove Missouri in the wrong direction?"
The various Christian News leaders were being true to their Calvinistic heritage, true Waltherians.
Calvin and Walther started with propositions and made the Scriptures support their theses.
Calvin and Walther separated the Holy Spirit from the Word, divorcing grace from the Means of Grace.
Note that the current synod leaders are incapable of communicating as Lutherans. When they issue their encyclicals, they sound exactly like generic Protestants - stand firm on the Word, Gospel outreach, be friendly, balance the budget.
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rlschultz has left a new comment on your post "Cause and Effect:Who's Your Daddy?":
I never quite understood the appeal of Calvinism until I became an Ichabodian. When it is understood that the very first step is the separation of the Holy Spirit from the Word, then the doctrine of the efficacy of the Word is undermined. This opens the door to the spectrum of human reason. Human reason in action is pragmatism. This becomes easy to sell to the unsuspecting laity who will rely upon what their senses perceive.
