The Rented Mule Award is an honor I decided to bestow, given the size and depth of my audience.
Individuals earn the award by teaching the historic faith, confessing the truth, and being beaten like a rented mule for their service to the visible church. This could also be called Bearing the Cross, but that phrase has become empty talk. Synods are too busy bragging themselves up to consider that concept.
Luther taught this concept, and his words were often more colorful. Naturally, they are still beating him like a rented mule. When the Roman Catholics stop and rest, the "conservative" Lutherans take over.
He wrote:
"Patient continuance is so altogether necessary that no work can be good in which patient continuance is lacking. The world is so utterly perverse and Satan is so heinously wicked that he cannot allow any good work to be done, but he must persecute it. However, in this very way God, in His wonderful wisdom, proves what work is good and pleasing to Him. Here the rule holds: As long as we do good and for our good do not encounter contradiction, hatred, and all manner of disagreeable and disadvantageous things, so we must fear that our good work as yet is not pleasing to God; for just so long it is not yet done with patient continuance."
Martin Luther, Commentary on Romans, trans. J. Theodore Mueller, Grand Rapids: Kregel Publications, 1976, p. 55. Romans 2:6-10.
The modern recipients are:
- The two families in Kokomo, Indiana, who were expelled from WELS for confessing justification by faith. Both families were excommunicated, with WELS using the Kokomo Statements to expel them, followed by WELS blaming them for the Kokomo Statements, three of which came directly from J. P. Meyer. Sig Becker defended the Kokomo Statements. So did Panning, the president of the WELS seminary.
- B. Teigen, who proved in a scholarly work that the Olde Synodical Conference taught a blatant heresy with their creepy Receptionism. The ELS and WELS took turns thrashing him. Sig Becker also defended Receptionism.
- Walter Meier II, the Concordia Seminary, Ft. Wayne professor, who showed that the Scriptures teach justification by faith. Jack Preus savaged him nationally in a letter, and Bob Preus replaced him as the next president of the seminary. Demoted and regularly beaten up by UOJ fanatics.
- Rich Techlin, WELS layman and attorney, who dared to point out Glende's and Ski's plagiarism of false teachers. The DP who supported plagiarism would not even grant an appeal. Demi-semi-excommunicated.
- Joe and Lisa Krohn, WELS laity who asked about UOJ and the waste of money thrown at Cornerstone for fund-raising. Excommunicated.
- Bruce Church, banned from Steadfast Lutherans (sic) for citing this blog.
- Lito Cruz, PhD, banned from Steadfast Lutherans (sic) for pointing out their myriad contradictions in defending the anti-Christian UOJ fallacy.
