Walther the Pietistic Pentecostal

http://ichabodthegloryhasdeparted.blogspot.com/2012/09/bullies-make-sure-there-is-only-one.html

LPC has left a new comment on your post "Bullies Make Sure There Is Only One Side of the Ar...":

Walther was a true Pentecostal minister. Pentecostal ministers never like to be questioned and they have no tolerance for dissent. Anyone who opposes them is considered a heretic, a well known bullying tactic.

May be back then these LC-MS Lutherans were really Pentecostals who love to quote, "touch not the Lord's anointed".

These so called "orthodox Lutheran" luminaries question everything; for example they question some parts of their denomination, an example of this is the so called "Steadfast Lutheran (sic)" group who does this often. Yet, they never question the source nor the origin of their denomination nor examine their history.

BTW, just observe, the number of historical scholars they have, they out number the exegetical and systematic scholars.

Ironic, no?

We call this ineptitude - the incapability of self-reflection.

LPC

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Three statues of Walther in Missouri?
Perryville, Purple Palace, and this creepy shrine.

GJ - Walther never received a solid Lutheran education. He had a four-year degree in rationalism plus his experiences with various domineering cell groups. Later he confessed the Stephan was a bit of a Pietist! So funny. If Walther was in a Halle-led Bible study cell group, a Pietistic cell until their leader moved and died, and Stephan's cell group ministry - Ferdy was a Pietist himself.

Walther served under two oppressive, demanding, take-no-prisoners Pietistic gurus. It was only natural that he was formed by that abuse and became another abuser.

He did not want the early history of the Missouri Synod written down, because he was so much involved in it.

But he did glory in the honors, in the big parade for him. The LCMS is the only Lutheran sect that venerates a criminal as a saint, ignoring the real founder Stephan in favor of his enforcer.

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bruce-church (http://bruce-church.myopenid.com/) has left a new comment on your post "Walther the Pietistic Pentecostal":

With Walther being such a criminal held in high regard in the Missouri Synod, it's good that Walther & Co. were not the Twelve Disciples. Otherwise, the Christian Church would be venerating the two thieves on the cross instead of Jesus.

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Pastor emeritus Nathan Bickel has left a new comment on your post "Walther the Pietistic Pentecostal":

Icahabod -

I'm still waiting for the LCMS to rid itself of these C. F. Walther graven images. Even the secular school of Penn State musters more worldly sense than any spiritual sense that Missouri has proffered; - at least to this point.

Those 10 incriminating actions of Walther are very telling and convincing. And Dr. Cruz makes an excellent point about Missouri's lack of self-reflection.

My question is: "Why won't Missouri harness all their doctrine into some practical theology and tear down these vain, shameful and embarrassing images?

Nathan M. Bickel

www.thechristianmessage.org
www.moralmatters.org

***

Stephan was investigated by the courts for his immorality before he left.
Walther kidnapped his niece and nephew and escaped arrest warrants issued by the police.

GJ - The 200th anniversary of Walther is revealing. The mythologists are still telling the same lies. Pastor Otten admitted that they lie about the armed kidnapping of Stephan at the cult center in Perryville.

The new Stephan book was attacked by the rabid dogs of Missouridom, even though 90% of the facts were already published in Zion on the Mississippi.

The problem with the Stephan book is that last 10%, which explains so much. Without spelling out the details, In Search of Religious Freedom (hardee-har-har title) shows that Stephan had a long-standing case of syphilis. His horrible rashes were syphilis, so he went to spas for treatment. His later children were born with syphilis, and the wife and children died young. Do we assume that Walther looked at those pitiable children and knew nothing of syphilis? that he saw young women around Stephan and suspected nothing until years later? that Stephan sailed for the Promised Land with his mistress and not his wife, but no one suspected anything?

Stephan had permission to hold cell group meetings at his Pietistic church,
but he often took young women along on his walks late at night,
for additional conventicle meetings.

ELCA Pastor Says the Bible “Doesn’t Tell Me What To Do” - Exposing the ELCA

Feel free to agree with us,
or we'll sue your pants off.

http://youtu.be/CmOrWG2FTbg



ELCA Pastor Says the Bible “Doesn’t Tell Me What To Do” - Exposing the ELCA:

The news article about Rev. Larzelere goes on to tell us, “He sees the Bible not as the literal word of God but as ‘a collection of stories, history and poems. It is not a talking book. It doesn’t tell me what to do.’”

'via Blog this'

Bullies Make Sure There Is Only One Side of the Argument

Everyone in favor, say Aye!
Anyone else? Go away.

I met a retired colonel in the local post office. We talked a few minutes and he invited me to the next school board meeting. Later I learned from Google that he was a Green Beret in Viet Nam, a football star, a college professor, and college board member.

All we wanted to do at the board meeting was introduce an idea for Bella Vista to have its own schools.

This is an unusual town, set up to be an active retirement village for geezers like me - only I do not boat, fish, golf, hunt, or play cards. In time, many younger families moved into BV, but their children had to be bussed to Bentonville or Gravette. At this point BV has 3,000 children in school and no schools. The bus-rides are rather long in rush hour traffic, so LTC. Jim Parsons and I spoke about a future district for this town.

Reaction varied at two district board meetings. Some were quite attentive and receptive. Others were combative and loud. The local papers published editorials against the idea, before and after the meeting in Bentonville, where most of the school tax money goes. Jim and I laughed about the free publicity. "Now they will discuss it around town."

Parsons gave me his book to read - Hillary and Other Bullies. He dealt with the Clintons when they were limiting their damage to Arkansas, and he fought to take down signs honoring the disgraced president. Parsons has argued for spending tax money wisely and being fair to the teachers who do their jobs.

We had several conversations about bullies we have known.

The SynConference has a well deserved reputation for bullying, which began with its founder, Bishop Martin Stephan, STD. He made sure that all the pastors obeyed him without question. They simply overlooked his flagrant adultery with young women, including his stay at the spa (in one room) with his main mistress, while he was being treated for syphilis. Walther "suddenly" discovered that Stephan was an adulterer, but he did not treat the leader with anything resembling Biblical principles.


KJV Galatians 6:1 Brethren, if a man be overtaken in a fault, ye which are spiritual, restore such an one in the spirit of meekness; considering thyself, lest thou also be tempted.

Instead, Walther stole the bishop's land in two different maneuvers, organized a mob, threatened the man's life, stole a small fortune, robbed the bishop of his extensive library and personal effects, and kidnapped him at gunpoint, forcing him across the river to Illinois. Walther stole the bishop's own chalice, given to him as a personal gift, and used it for Holy Communion at Trinity Lutheran Church. Thieves love to glory in their stolen goods, so they can gloat over their ill-gotten gains. The LCMS has never given the stolen chalice back to the Stephan family. They keep it locked up now. Ironic?

Walther got rid of a bishop so he could make himself the Missouri pope, an infallible ruler. Walther would not let the districts appoint his successor (which was the custom then, according to Fuerbringer).

Congregational polity is one of the ongoing myths of the Missouri Synod. The theft and sale of the campus ministry property in Minnesota is one more example of synodical tyranny. Silencing discussion about their latest child rapist (Darwin Schauer) is another example. Missouri and WELS have done just as much lying about abusive pastors and teachers as the Roman Catholic Church has.

Bullies come in many styles and positions. District Presidents and bishops are usually bullies. I have heard of good Missouri DPs and non-bullying ELCA bishops. But they are exceptions.

What does the bully DP look for in a congregation? He searches out a like-minded bully or two. He wants to work with dysfunctional members who hate God's Word and take that out on the pastor.

Synodical bullies have no respect for the call, but they are filled with their own self-importance.

Handling Bullies
In swimming class one bully liked to jump me and hold me down underwater. That was not wise on his part. On his third try, I took a deep breath and went under with him, held on, and waited until I could no longer stand it. Then I waited a few seconds more. He accused me of almost drowning him, even though he drove me down with his body-weight. He never dunked me again.

Church bullies cannot stand honesty and order, so they should be faced with both. If a  District President or Circuit Pastor wants to pull a stunt, the congregation has to say, "This is not correct procedure. We are shocked and disgusted that you would try a sneak attack on the pastor."

Congregations and districts have constitutions. More importantly, they have the Word of God to guide them. When someone swaggers in, full of wrath, ready to bounce a pastor, or slithers in like his fore-father, Satan, working with guile and deception, the action has to be stopped at once. Faith Lutheran in Moline told their bullying bishop that he and his minions would be arrested by the Moline police if they ever appeared on their church property.

Defying the Word Hardens and Blinds
Believe it or not, congregations get their jollies from undermining pastors. They do not realize that the defenestration of a pastor is the beginning of the end for their own parish. As Lyle Schaller observed, the dirty tricks used once often become the glue that holds the congregation together. Hateful actions pile up. People sense the reprobate nature of the congregation and stay away.

If there are grounds for removing a pastor, the steps taken should be considered carefully and done with great concern for his own spiritual health and future.
The only legitimate reasons for removing a pastor are:
1. Immorality.
2. Failure to do the work of a pastor.
3. Persistent false doctrine.

One wizened WELS pastor said that the first two issues alone would remove half the ministers from of the parish. One DP told me that hardly any pastor visits anymore. Great training! Great supervision! Maybe the leaders need to do their jobs once in a while.

In the third case an examination of the issues should be done with great care. The issue is not What Does Holy Mother Synod Teach? but What Does the Word of God Teach in Harmony with the Confessions?

A careful study of doctrinal issues is always worthwhile.

Walther set a bad example with being so keen to accuse all rival groups of false doctrine. He had to have his way within his own sect too. Walther was a bully. He considered himself God's Counselor and demanded the same obedience toward him that he once offered his adulterous bishop.

The bullies do not like my exploration of the true character of their sects. They want the arrests and prison terms kept a secret. They want to move against anyone with impunity, under the cloak of confidentiality. But that time has passed. I am more than ready to take another dunking, hold my breath, and then some, and see who comes up sputtering and begging for mercy.

Where are the Hounds of the Lord - Dominicans -
ready to burn all heretics at the stake?
They are busy kneeling before
Sweet, Stanley, Groeschel, Stetzer, Driscoll, Hybels, and Kelm.

Expulsion from the Garden of Eden by Thomas Cole, 1828

http://www.explorethomascole.org/gallery/items/39

Crystal Bridges just finished an exhibition of the Hudson River Valley School of Artists. The name was once used to mock the landscapes. Now they are valued, printed, sent out for special viewing. The five giant paintings called The Course of Empire just went back to the NY Historical Society.

Today, the scandal of Cole is his choice of Biblical themes. He painted St. John preaching in the wilderness and his last painting at age 47, The Good Shepherd. The sheep in the foreground has a cross on his fleece, being guided by the Shepherd to the distant flock in Paradise. Cole died soon after the painting was completed.

The Biblical themes are not incidental to Cole's work but foundational.

Detail, The Good Shepherd

Thomas Cole, The Good Shepherd, 1848

Later I will put two favorite Cole series on two separate posts. One is The Course of Empire. The other is The Stages of Life.

I put the Eden painting on Facebook's timeline, and one Lutheran immediately responded to it.

The 19th century was a time in America when the secular was beginning to win the war against the Christian Faith. We are in the last stages of that battle.

An interesting factoid has regular church-goers in America favoring Romney by over 20 points. Those who never go to church favor Obama by over 20 points. Occasional visitors to church are split.

Married women favor the GOP. Single women favor the Democrats.

At Yale Divinity School in the 1970s, married couples without children were called "singles." That was so common that we adopted the same terminology without thinking about it anymore. "Do they have children? No they are single." The reason for the word-play is that marriage and children turn the self-indulgence of youth into mature love for another person and especially for the children. A young couple without children will plan dates, but a married couple with babies will plan for the children's future.

We live in a culture of fake eternal youth, so decisions are astonishingly self-indulgent. Not everyone can have a passel of children, but now people avoid children as being financial burdens and potential headaches. One of my students said, "I don't want children because they will cost me money and take away from my time."

Older people like me become more serious about doctrine because there is not much left to accomplish and eternal life looms ahead. I see younger classmates struggling to stay alive, and that makes me more grateful to God for the energy I have left.

The secular rationalists have won  in Lutherdom. The choices in 1960s Moline were:
1. Liturgical services, with Biblical sermons.

That was taken for granted. With a bit of travel, one could find a congregation from the LCMS:
1. Liturgical service, traditional hymns, Biblical sermon.

At some point WELS built a chapel in a cornfield, on the way to Augustana College. It was a:
1. Liturgical service, with the LCMS-WELS hymnal, and had Biblical sermons.

The choices were so limited in the Quad-Cities that no one thought, "Let's have a pit band, clowns, and a minister dressed like he is going to mow the hay in the back 40." Lutherans were liturgical. Pentecostals were enter-turgical, with predictable beehives for the women and keyboards and ignorant preachers in pompadours.

The secular rationalists see everything in the church as a business. Few people realize that all the Roman Catholic religious orders are manages as self-supporting businesses. They look with gimlet eye at every chance to make money and loathe any obstacle to profits. Mother Theresa was a magnet for gathering money for the poor for the Church of Rome.

The four-letter Lutheran synods (ELCA, WELS, LCMS) are money-making rackets in cahoots with the Thrivent anti-Lutheran insurance business. In each synod a tiny minority rakes off the biggest share of money for themselves. Like Roman bishops, they live like princes and rule like the despots they are.

Just watch one of these synodical wolves meddling with congregations, undermining pastors, enabling dysfunctional members, and then saying "I am helpless to deal with notorious adulterers, flagrant false teachers, and mincing minsters with an eye for the altar boys."

I liked the old system of slavery better. The slave-masters did not charge huge fees to pay for their luxuries, calling them missions, while motivating everyone with a whip.

Here is the biggest laugh of all. The Church Growth Movement came down from the ELCA-WELS-LCMS-ELS leaders. The Church Growth fad was imposed, sold, and funded with offering money, the biggest skimming operation since Congress took office under Obama.

Now that the Church Growth Movement is a colossal and expensive failure, the synods blame the members and pastors for failing to make them look good.

And even funnier - or more tragic - they are now training the dumbest pastors and stupidest members to become generic Groeschel Methodists as the Final Solution for changing demographics. Using Groeschel, they are training people to hate Biblical doctrine and accelerate apostasy. Hate the Confessions. Dump the liturgy. Sing the kiddie songs. Pay the talentless rock group. Copy the sermonette. Steal the graphics.

Trinity design by Norma Boeckler

Lutherans Experiencing a Change in Lutherdom

Various Lutherans have mentioned to me that they notice a change in Lutherdom. The over-paid officials are not any wiser. The seminary professors still choose between Fuller Seminary and the Pope. Money is tight, and the doctrine is still loose and watery.

The change is coming from the Internet.

The Net has made plagiarism faster and easier. People used to manually copy the work they were stealing, but tracking it down was just as laborious. Now readers can do a Google search on Cyberbrethren and detect Paul McCain's plagiarism in a few seconds.

The Net is the new printing press, a major innovation in communication - more significant than radio, television, or the infomercial. Therefore, the Net has spawned many tools to making this communication even more efficient. Many of us own a large collection of digital books on our hard drives, made possible by PDFs from Adobe and other digital formats.

Now information and opinions can be shared world-wide for free, instantaneously. I met a Lutheran missionary from Brazil. I know he was keeping up by reading Ichabod. I smile when I see the red light glowing on the Feedjit map - bottom, left column. Israel has been lit up.

Blogs cross-pollinate. I often think to myself, "What would ChurchMouse say about this? If I say Calvinists contradict one another, what would he say about Lutherans?"

I am guessing that the opinion forums have opened up the musty basement storage closet of Lutherdom. Steadfast Lutherans is somewhat managed by SP Matt Harrison; Intrepid Lutherans is shadowed by SP Mark Schroeder. Ichabod is also an opinion forum, where many participate anonymously and others use their names.

At least three Martin Luther College students have heard faculty discussing how to keep their work off the Ichabod radar screen. That was confirmed by the faculty's immediate, forceful denials. The faculty have their names listed in Google Alerts, in case they come up on this blog. They promote this blog by telling entire classrooms not to read Ichabod.

The fact remains, any corrupt official or apostate professor is going to think twice today about the being featured on one or more blogs. The officials can censor the news, as Matt Harrison did with the Darwin Schauer child molestation scandal, but the word is out and the WayBack Machine works. (WayBack picks up old posts, even the erased ones.) I still feature Schauer and Hochmuth, plus anyone else who gets arrested doing the Lord's work.

There are secret blogs and email lists. I find those terribly sad and cowardly. The apostates and the faithful should duke it out in public. Anaerobic infections are the worst kind. The carbuncle of Lutherdom needs to be lanced, not Photoshopped.

Many contributed to my Church Growth collection of quotations. This has not kept the worst false teachers from being promoted and protected in WELS. At least the follies are known today.

WELS Exegesis Overlooks Anything Contrary to Their Dogma

A. Berean has left a new comment on your post "UOJ Debate and Information on Extra Nos":

Don't forget that Scripture does say that we believe in Christ IN ORDER to be forgiven (or in this following passage justified). Galatians 2:16: "Knowing that a man is not justified by the works of the law, but by the faith of Jesus Christ, even we have believed in Jesus Christ, that we might be justified by the faith of Christ, and not by the works of the law: for by the works of the law shall no flesh be justified." The greek word ινα is used which means "that; in order that" and it is used with the subjunctive (hence the "might"). So we really do believe in Christ IN ORDER to be justified. Remember too according to Romans 4, the righteousness of Christ by which we are accounted righteous is imputed to faith (vs. 5, 11, 13, 22, 24).