Taking some time from fighting the Midianites, Gideon sent me a note about Luther's discovery of the Gospel.
That prompted a post I was considering for a time. As he said, Luther had to become disturbed by his study of the Scriptures and teaching them. The dogma of the Church did not match the Bible at all, and he could find ancient (Augustine) and current examples (Staupitz) of Gospel teachers.
The worst false teachers like to speak of their lineage, their family's time in the synod, as if ordination is a fine wine, aged in oaken barrels. Others work their way to the top as a snitch, as Stalin (a former seminary student) did. Once he was done betraying his friends to the police, he was the top terrorist.
Whether clergy or laity, sound doctrinal attitudes come more from scraping away and rejecting the debris from the past. I was criticizing Church Growth from a Disciples of Christ member - Donald McGavran - when a WELS seminary professor's son, Jon Balge, asked, "Didn't you belong to the Disciples, Greg?" - as if that neutralized what I was saying. For someone who lived and studied at Mordor, it was a mortal blow, because everything is family, aged like fine wine, limburger cheese, and surströmming.
My parents had me baptized at a Congregational church and immersed at the Disciples of Christ church in Moline - now closed nota bene. Yes, the Disciples converted me - I loathed the superficiality of that church so much that I got out of the family car one Sunday and went to the Augustana Synod church across the street. I never came back. I was not happy seeing WELS drawn to the happy-clappy gimmicks I witnessed at First Christian in Moline:
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| Rev. Charles Willey |
- Rev. Willey riding a motorcycle down the church aisle.
- Rev. Willey wearing a chaplain's helmet and coming to church on a firetruck.
- Rev. Willey giving non-sermons with no content.
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| First Christian in Moline, now closed, is the canary in the coalmine. They were early with CG gimmicks and clowning. |
Many have observed the same obsessions in WELS, though WELS is shrinking faster than bacon on a hot griddle.
Luther grew up in Medieval Germany and was trained first in law and then in Augustianian monasticism. As a priest and monk, he had all the wrong training, but getting a doctorate in the Scriptures and teaching the Word redirected him.
He admitted in the Galatians Lectures (Kregel edition, about page 90) that his Roman training still stuck to his bones.
I was brought up with evolution, not dogmatically, but generally the idea behind science. There was excitement about Luther when I joined Salem in Moline (still open). They took the Augsburg Confession for granted, as Pietists, but they did mention it as part of membership. Oddly, the conservative pastor taught The Mighty Acts of God, by Robert Marshall, a 100% historical-critical method book.
Augustana is Latin for Augsburg, as in the Augsburg Confession, but the Quia Marias of the Synodical Conference are just as indifferent to the Augsburg Confession as we were in the Lutheran Church in America, which digested the Augustana Synod.
I became interested in the Social Gospel when studying at Notre Dame, and that led to my dissertation about the Social Gospel professor at the Augustana Seminary - A. D. Mattson. That research necessarily got me more interested in the history of Lutheran synods in America. Clearly, the Social Gospel was not Lutheran doctrine, but it was the key motivating idea in Robert Marshall's LCA. Marshall - the failed PhD in Old Testament - became the successor to Franklin C. Fry.
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| How could JP Meyer be wrong? He taught in WELS for 50 years! President Panning edited this pile of rubbish, endorsing its content by reprinting it at their little publishing house. |
In spite of many fine words, WELS-LCMS-ELS-CLC have these two passions in common:
- The Church Growth Movement
- Justification without Faith - UOJ.
But no one wanted to fight for liturgical worship and Biblical doctrine. Nevertheless, they certainly woke me up with their CG tasers and UOJ bludgeons.
As Gideon indicated, the disturbances take us back to the Word, to the clear, plain message in the Scriptures.
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| "Tell President Schroeder this district is peaceful again." "I will, President Seifert." |
