I like genuine detective stories. The fictional ones start with the author's solution already in print.
The modern Bible is the biggest detective story of all time - with many criminals working to achieve their goals over the centuries - to give us what we have today.
As the world turns, and "as the WELS declines," someone besides me should be interested in how it happened.
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| "Don't call this hogwash. Call a Fuller DMin a career booster, porkers!" |
The Boomer pastors spent their entire careers speeding the decline in every denomination they tainted, usually following the same Garasene method.
The King James Version was a familiar whipping boy. If they could only get rid of that, they could soar ahead. Since Boomers grew up in an era where every church seemed to need a new addition, or a new sister church, the children born after WWII (25% of the population) took the present as also the future. The Lutheran Church in America structure was modeled after General Motors. Was that really a good idea?
The issue was not doing but thinking. The European rationalists like Barth/Kirschbaum and Tillich (another adulterer) made theology a toy, a plaything fashioned from their vast study of philosophy. Many famous theology books today are based on one word, so perhaps prefixes are next. One professor reached Yale on the strength of his famous book, Agape. Tillich made his reputation as a man for his times with an idea he borrowed from his graduate student, The Courage To Be. The Yale Divinity theology student we met, with his first wife, is a Barth expert heading the Barth institute at Princeton. Instead of revolutions devouring their own, some reproduce their own. Notre Dame had a number of students writing their doctoral dissertations about a professor of theology working there at the time, John S. Dunne, a Holy Cross priest. Some of us would whisper, "Do you get what he is saying? I don't."
The Bible is not the unique revelation of God for these people. No one is an outright atheist, but almost everyone keeps miracles, the Incarnation, the Virgin Birth, and the Resurrection at arm's length in all discussions, essays, and books. My sainted friend was denied the chance to complete his doctoral dissertation on angels. As our Tillich-loving advisor said, "I won't even let you submit it."
I wrote before that a priest and a Christian Brother - doctoral students in theology at Notre Dame - were quite upset that a famous Catholic lecturer taught the mythology of the Old Testament (yay to that, they reported) but he said about the New Testament, "That is all true!" The students were furious, and one became a Catholic university president. Both completed their PhDs in theology. Not surprisingly, I made them angry too.
Making the KJV obsolete has been a by-product of the rationalizing denominations. At one time we could all repeat the same verses from the same Bible, and they were easily remembered or corrected when mis-stated. That is no longer true.
The text of the New Testament has been a toy, ever since 1881, when Wescott and Hort revealed their crimes against the Greek New Testament and proclaimed, "We now have the original text!" I will explain more about that later.
We can easily determine how strong the rationalizing has become, an extension of Calvinism in its decline. What is the solution to all problems? Answer - A program, a method. If something works in one place, the results can be reproduced elsewhere.
The so-called conservative Lutherans are backed by their Pietistic Calvinist heroes Walther and Pieper.
The ELCA radicals have the modern theologians to cite:
- Barth
- Bultmann
- Tillich
- Rahner.
This is a song from Princeton, I believe -
"Hark the herald angels sing,
Bultmann is the latest thing.
At least they would if he had not,
De-mythologized the lot."
