Martin Franzmann, WELS, LCMS - UOJ. From 2012

Martin Franzmann, 1907-1976,
taught for WELS and then for Missouri.
He is most famous for his hymns.

Although I sent off four boxes of Lutheran books, I also ordered a few items from Amazon and Alibris. If I can get a well known volume for for a few dollars, I order it.

I had a scan of Franzmann's commentary on Romans, but I saw the book on Alibris and bought it. The book is not a commentary at all and is certainly not scholarly. There are no references and no index. There is a list of some books on Romans with a brief description. I would call it a homiletical book.

One sentence gives away the theme of the SynConference:

In raising him from the dead, God was "justifying the ungodly" for whom He died; God was saying to a doomed mankind, "You are righteous, you shall live." There is in our faith, therefore, the same realistic recognition of the death of man that was in Abraham's faith, and the same expectation of the creative miracle of God's grace which raises the dead and calls into being righteous men.

Martin H. Franzmann, Romans, A Commentary, CPH, 1968, p. 86.

That was his statement about the ending of Romans 4. Franzmann's obscure words are the opposite of what Paul wrote.


KJV Romans 4:24 But for us also, to whom it shall be imputed, if we believe on him that raised up Jesus our Lord from the dead; 25 Who was delivered for our offences, and was raised again for our justification.

God was telling all of mankind "You are righteous"? Of course, Franzmann is not that explicit. The UOJ writers are seldom that clear. But the thoroughly brained-washed know that is what those words mean. They agree with the Pietist Rambach, who argued that the resurrection of Christ absolved all of mankind - especially the unbelievers. Jay Webber and Jon Buchholz support the Halle Pietism version of  universal forgiveness and salvation. You just have to believe their dogma is true: justification by faith in UOJ. 

Franzmann was a leader of the conservatives, and he was just as UOJ as Richard Jungkuntz, the leader of the Seminex coalition.

The UOJ position is not in harmony with the efficacy of the Word and certainly opposes the Means of Grace. Can the blue text be brought into agreement with Romans 10? Isaiah 55? Not at all.

Richard Jungkuntz also started out WELS, also at Watertown,
and also joined the Board of Doctrine, LCMS,
after teaching at Concordia, Springfield, Illinois.
As chairman of the Seminex board, he headed the first
gay Lutheran seminary, by partnering with the Metropolitan Community Church.
Deppe was the Seminex professor who went with the faculty to teach at LSTC, ELCA,
and later joined the MCC, where he belonged.

Lies Can Be Sustained for a Limited Amount of Time

Duper's Delight is a nickname for the smile that precedes a deliberate lie. I have seen it many times dealing with Lutheran leaders. Obama smiled for a moment when he told of learning about the private email server at the same time the public did - through the news media. However, we have copies of his emails, using the code name "bobama," that were on the private server.

I made some predictions about the Love Letter pastor in Alaska. I said it was a long-term habit - and his classmate wrote to me that it was. I assumed that a big stressor brought out the aberrant behavior, and that was exactly what happened. He had just been confronted about his ministry. Knowing WELS, I figured someone in his family was influential, so he was being protected by the District President and Circuit Pastor. Right again. More details could be added. An abusive sect behaves in predictable ways.

One former Lutheran was very upset about the Evangelical church he joined. I began telling him how people were behaving. He was quite startled and said, "How do you know?" I told him about my experiences and the common themes that reveal themselves when people are dishonest and covet power.

 If a dentist lived here, would his business decay?
The Lutheran leaders remind me of this house.

One irony is that people rush ahead with their claims even though technology has changed everything. Boomers are just about hopeless with computers, but the younger generations are almost as bad. I do not mean everyone should know the rules of subnet masking or recite the OSI model. Every so often I say to a techie, "It's always the physical layer, isn't it?" One Hispanic installer said, "Jes" with a sigh. Perpetual storage of data is the biggest threat to deceit.

The big change is this - everything is saved on hard drives, flash drives, servers, and The Cloud, usually multiple times. If someone wants to brag on the Net, the boasting is saved on the Net. The tiniest details can be put in a little pile to put together a profile. When I worked on an earlier class reunion, I paid for Spokeo ($30) to find classmates. I could start with a name and a state, find a home, discover the age of the owner, and learn about that person's job and the value of the home. I had two people named Charles R in my hometown. One was Junior. I found his address and his father's on Spokeo, by looking at their ages. There are always missing classmates, often in the school's hometown.

Someone googled a pastor's name and found a long post on Ichabod about that individual. But the pastor erased that call from his resume. Deception? Let's look at the website where the Invisible Pastor worked. No record of his time there remained. Often all the pastors are listed, but not always. Jim Huebner is the one and only pastor to serve Grace, Milwaukee. Huebner's blowhard bio sounds like he wrote it himself.

The funny part about erasing that information is that the individual draws attention to it by making it seem to go away. Church and Change had their own websty, photos and bios of the board members (half from Mark Jeske's congregation). As soon as I published that information, photos and bios disappeared faster than a bottle at an underage drinking party. Eventually Church and Change disappeared - or rather, went into hiding. The hellish members denied they were working together and hated me for publishing their gushing posts on their rather public discussion site.

When a WELS pastor threatened to gang rape a young woman, his name was erased from the congregation's website - or so they thought. I knew WELS had a policy of deleting information, so they could deny the obvious. I began opening documents and there it was, still on the congregation's website, but not on the staff page. Of course, he did not use his Christian name in making the threat. He used another name, like Carlos Danger (Huma's hubby) and the Net found him out.

The big lie among Lutherans is that they are Lutheran. This weekend the same old trite phrases will be cited repeatedly. Like love, love, love - which is now love, love, love, love, love - grace will be multiplied many times over to make up for their lack of preparation. They will invoke grace countless times, as the sectarians always do, but they will be unable to articulate the efficacy of the Word in the Means of Grace. If that did, as Professor Surburg wrote in Christian News, they would have to admit that their UOJ dogma and apostate agendas have nothing to do with the Christian Faith.

 Luther - "The world runs on greed and deception."
Or, as 29A says, "It's all about the benjamins."