How many catch the irony of Lutherans officially rejecting Luther's doctrine?
The first responses are - "What does Holy Mother Synod say?" and "Aren't we loyal to Holy Mother Synod most of all?"
The apostates repeat the arguments of the living and the dead, the same ones who delivered vast sums of synod money to Fuller Seminary, Trinity in Deerfield, and Willow Creek Community Church. As long as everyone is ignorant of the facts and resistant to studying the issues, the fraud can continue indefinitely.
The functionaries appoint their political friends to carry out the agenda. It only takes a few votes on a few boards to control everything.
C. F. W. Walther was a college graduate only - nothing more. But the SynConference pretends that the Great Kidnapper is Equal to the Apostles (Constantine's favorite title) and the Exegete of Luther. The Concordists would have laughed at someone so poorly educated as the ultimate authority on everything.
Walther took over Stephan's Pietistic sex cult and appointed his own successors, worried that someone might write an actual history of the Missouri Synod's founding. There is no record of Walther knowing that Bishop Stephan, STD, kept a whole series of young mistresses, until he "suddenly" found out his boss was adulterous. Walther later blamed the adultery on Mrs. Stephan.
Left unsaid are the obvious symptoms of syphilis in Stephan, his sick wife, and his dying children. Leaving his wife in Dresden and coming across the ocean with his main mistress, Stephan shocked Walther and associates with his adultery? Ha.
Zion on the Mississippi details the role of Walther as a fox, a mob organizer, an unscrupulous power-grabber.
Walther and his minions gradually established a replacement for justification by faith. They were not 100% successful. In teaching Luther they had to reprint Luther. The Missouri Synod produced a magnificent Luther set in German. Like many of their early productions, the set could double as a bunker in case of war.
The German catechism of the Missouri Synod taught justification by faith, not UOJ. Another catechism still being sold by Missouri, their KJV catechism, is also silent about UOJ. Likewise, the original Gausewitz, a catechism for the entire Synodical Conference, taught justification by faith until he was long gone and WELS "fixed" it in 1956.
Claiming to be Lutheran while supplanting Luther is bound to cause problems. All the American Lutheran groups had the same difficulty. Pietism sponsored missions, and Halle was the mother ship for Pietism, the training ground for American Lutheran leaders - from Muhlenberg to Stephan to Hoenecke.
Augustana (Swedish Lutherans) struggled with unionism and Pietism, realizing that their original passions were causing them nothing but trouble in America. The same could be said for the Muhlenberg tradition, which was gradually united by an interest in the Confessions, just as Pietism tore it apart in the first place. But that confessional interest did not last long. The displaced liberals regained the upper hand and made rationalistic Pietism the theme of the ULCA, then the LCA, and finally ELCA.
WELS began as a union sect, Reformed and Lutheran, fell in with the Waltherians, and amalgamated their Pietism with a dash of orthodoxy. Unfortunately, the Walther-trained Pietists were bound to lead the sect in the wrong direction.
The Protest'ant crisis of WELS revealed that they learned their lessons from the Great Kidnapper himself. The WELS leaders said to the Protest'ants - "Shut up and listen while we tell you off." They kicked out everyone who said something was wrong. They got rid of their seminary president, so no one was safe from the gremlins, from that time on. They became easily frightened by anyone with brains, because conformity to the sect became the ruling norm.
The encroachment of UOJ has been gradual ever since. Watchdogs with no academic credibility make sure that no one teaches justification by faith with impunity.
