I am trying to figure out how someone can play with the word justification and make it mean both Justification by Faith Alone and Justification Without Faith. Clearly, we have many obvious examples of the first phrase used throughout the New Testament, in Luther, and in the Book of Concord.
The quotation above points to three great authorities on the topic:
- Melanchthon, quoting
- Martin Luther, with the
- Book of Concord editors citing both authors with approval.
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| All things considered, sincere Lutherans will pick Luther over Rambach, Quistorp, and Stephan/Walther. |
The beginning to this solution is CFW Walther following Martin Stephan's lead in asserting a own Confessional Orthodoxy while teaching against it. Neither Walther nor Stephan was well educated, though that has never thwarted later theologians from assuming the same ambiguous positions. Walther only had a college degree, and Stephan never graduated at all. In fact, Stephan was not qualified to be a pastor, but the rules were relaxed because a special Bohemian Pietistic church called him. That congregation was allowed to have Pietistic conventicles at their location, but nowhere else. Nevertheless, Stephan used the conventicles elsewhere and his night walks to justify his constant pursuit of young women. He needed his main mistress living with him when he went to the spa, though he dismissed his wife's offered help - in person at the spa.
Lutherans of Walther's era had a vast collection of Reformation writings, including the era of the Book of Concord and its immediate aftermath. But they also had the age of scholasticism that followed the Confessions, which became increasingly Pietistic. Rather than teach Luther directly, they worked backwards via the later, voluminous writings of lesser theologians.
The situation is worse today, because the Synodical Conference gurus start with Walther, at least as a rabbit's foot, and work back to Luther, claiming a justification dogma from Halle University and Rambach/Quistorp as if that folly belonged to Luther, Melanchthon, Chytraeus, and Chemnitz. To add to their confusion, they quote each other's immediate predecessors, whose qualifications are as weak as Walther's. Those who taught - or teach now - at Synodical Conference seminaries can often get by with a degree from their own weak synodical college and their even weaker seminary.
Academics try to keep their faculties from becoming inbred - even at the most elite schools - with their own graduates teaching their students, - Harvard staffed exclusively with Harvard alumni, etc. Time away from the alma mater and other earned degrees are considered essential for healthy educational DNA. But the Synodical Conference is not only inbred in the animal husbandry sense, but also academically.
In the Augustana Synod, the most influential academic was Gustaf Andreen, who earned a PhD at Yale in 1898 and gave up his Yale position to become the president of Augustana College in Rock Island. Passavant was another major influence on the Swedish Lutherans.
In Lutherdom, someone is de facto orthodox by virtue of his father and grandfather, which has led to many follies in various denominations - and in the Church of Rome, where nieces and uncles have close connections and great power. Adding power to the denominational resume is an education at the little college and the tiny seminary, often staffed with alcoholics and marginal characters given tenure because of their families. Even the larger schools, like Concordia St. Louis have those rules, with St. Louis' president Ludwig Fuerbringer (Walther's nephew) fathering Fibby, an ardent liberal and subsequent president of the seminary. "Do you know who my father is?" was prominent in causing the Seminex crisis.
Reader:
The other is from WELS's Meditations, March-May 2014, for Monday, 17 March 2014. The howler is in the second column which reads: "No matter what you did yesterday -- or failed to do -- and no matter what you will do tomorrow, God has forgiven you."
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| A new anathema sit! Whoever denies the dogma of Martin Stephan, STD, "Let him be damned to hell!" |
The Wow of Emmaus
The last Emmaus Conference was a fraud perpetrated by the LCMS, WELS, and ELS working together. The three sects have to work together now, because insitutions are going to be closed and money is evaporating.
Their uniting dogma is Justification Without Faith, which animates the editor and favorite authors of Christian News. Walther learned his Objective Justification from Stephan, who never managed to graduate from college.
To effect this great harmony, this dogmatic union, who was chosen to solemnly declare Luther taught Justification Without Faith?
- Not a Synodical President.
- Not a District President.
- Not a college professor from one of the weak synodical colleges.
- Not a seminary professor from any of the four, weak synodical seminaries.
Were not all the Synodical Presidents absent from this debacle of Lutheran apostasy? The academic leaders were probably almost as rare as hen's teeth, because hardly anyone came to hear someone with -
- No Biblical language training, except the superficial Ft. Wayne approach.
- Rejection from the LCMS ministry program, which led to an ELS call, thanks to Robert Preus.
- No scholarly publications whatsoever.
- An STM from the online, unaccredited, ELCA based Institute of Lutheran Theology.
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| The online Institute of Lutheran Theology, South Dakota |
