LI just won a special award in computer science at Walmart headquarters.
He is also fluent in Hebrew, Greek, Latin, German, and Spanish.
Yale Divinity sent me their magazine today, listing all the big donors. I looked for alumni news and saw my classmates going into active retirement, changing jobs. One person, younger by seven years or more, has a a series of blogs, so I looked them up.
The blog posts stirred up many memories, because the author knew the same faculty, including Roland Bainton, author of Here I Stand, A Life of Martin Luther, the all-time best seller for Abingdon Press. Bainton posed twice with LI, once holding him in a baby carrier, the second time at Sterling Library when we came through on a visit.
Yale was too big and too old to promote the conformity of mediocrity. I find it ironic today, to see WELS pastors list seminary as "graduate school" and claim infallibility because they actually studied Greek. They also shun to a fare-thee-well, but that does not make them educated in Lutheran doctrine or faithful in practice.
YDS gave the Yale gadfly blogger an award at graduation. He said, "I thought the faculty hated me." The dean said, "We do, but we respect a challenge."
The posts about Bainton reminded me of the legendary church historian. When he anticipated that I needed information for my Notre Dame dissertation, he offered to go to the library and xerox pages to send back to me (if I did not own a particular book). The topic of my dissertation was a gadfly who studied at YDS.
One of my regular Facebook friends lived in the same student housing. He and his wife were godparents for LI. Another godparent had two doctorates from Yale Medical but died young.
An academic divinity school is entirely different from a denominational seminary. I shocked people by seeking ordination. Most were aiming for additional degrees, teaching, law, business school, and social work.
I had the strange idea that the Lutheran Church would welcome someone writing with an academic and pastoral background. I was disabused of that notion many times over. In each synod I saw an extremely narrow focus on what was proper and encouraged, with permanent condemnation for straying from that agenda.
The LCA focused on its own infallibility - not that the others were different from that. Naturally the LCA had little interest in Lutheran doctrine, genuine Biblical studies, or criticism of its liberal agenda. However, the LCA in the 1970s was orthodox compared to WELS in the 2010s.
Missouri seemed very mixed, in a permanent state of schizophrenia, depending on and yet hating Herman Otten at the same time. Missouri had its LCA wannabees and its conservative core. When I was deciding to leave the LCA, I really thought the Lutheran Church was dead in America. That was a correct assumption, proven later by the smaller sects.
Every LCMS convention was a turning point in history, yet nothing changed, except in the empowering of the liberals and the Church Growthers.
I was justifiably suspicious of WELS from the beginning, not from anything I heard. I simply figured a smaller group would have its unwritten rules, peevish little power groups, etc. I was far too optimistic.
While crowing about how orthodox they were, the WELS leaders were already in bed with the LCA. John Lawrenz, as a prep school principal, ran down the LCMS for destroying its prep schools. John did his best to wreck the entire WELS school system, as a dedicated Church and Changer. He forgot to mention his unionistic Pietistic agenda.
Now, as he is fading out, Lawrenz has turned over the leadership of the micro-mini Asian seminary (four professors, one Mexican janitor) to a founder of Church and Change, Steve Witte, DMin, Gordon Conwell.
The micro-mini synods are even worse than WELS, giving WELS an opportunity to appear less corrupt, less immoral, and less anti-Lutheran than the CLCs, etc.
WELS Cannot Continue
The Little Sect on the Prairie has already decided it will be gone in 20 years - that is their optimistic report.
WELS is so parochial that they judge everything according to growing up in the State of Wisconsin, their in-bred family ties, and all the dirty tricks they have played on each other. Mean-spirited, vindictive, and cowardly are terms that best fit the leaders of WELS. Yet they believe that following the Babtists and New Agers will make them different. People will flock to their imitation community churches.
This is how strange it is.
Ski's The CORE--which is really just another site for the Ron Ash/Tim Glende St. Peter Freedom cult--shares an old WELS building with another Emergent Church. People go to nearly identical services hosted by two different congregations or denominations, and yet they are the same me-centered entertainment service, bragging about "transforming lives" with Jesus.
Ski and Glende keep track of all dissent and bully people into silence.
Glende, though denying his outright plagiarism, excuses his copying because he does not want the congregation to die.
Change and DIE! - that is how an ex-WELS member describes this phenomenon.
But in love, we will wait to see what happens. Give them time. They are working on it.
Back To Yale
The value of an independent university education is independence of thought. The same classroom could have Roman Catholics, Bob Jones graduates, LCMS Lutherans, UCC, and Episcopalians in it. The unwritten rules of each denomination did not apply. Being a DP's son or a priest's "nephew" did not matter.
Yale had certain standards and lived up to them. So many teachers were required reading everywhere and world-famous scholars that a visiting expert could barely gather a basement meeting room.
WELS, Missouri, and the Little Sect do not live up to their standards. They deceive people constantly. They are so frightened of failing as an organization that they copy the idiots at Fuller, Mars Hill, Willow Creek, and the Crystal Cathedral (where Schuller is already a bankrupt fad).
The Syn Conference is ashamed of being Lutheran and opposed to teaching justification by faith. If someone wants to attend a liturgical service while visiting a new city, a Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox parish is a better bet than anything from the Syn Conference.
