Tuesday, July 30, 2013

Paul Prange's Hour Plus Children's Sermon

Paul Prange, WELS Essayist
Paul Prange gave an hour plus children's sermon, oddly illustrated with Greek and Hebrew. None of the lay delegates and few of the clergy could follow the pointless Greek and Hebrew graphics. WELS likes to brag about their deep knowledge of the Biblical languages, but the requirements have been softened. Even in the good old days, future parsons got by through cheating.

The whole point of the Greek and Hebrew was to emphasize the perfection of WELS, which Mark Schroeder droned on about in his PR speech earlier. WELS is complete orthodox, pure, Biblical, Confessional, and flawless.

A number of people were discussing the essay as it was given, since we can IM each other on FB or through other technologies. When Prange touched upon justification he made every effort to make it seem to be justification by faith. He said those words more than once. But he slipped when he talked about various  meanings of faith. One wrong interpretation is "faith in faith," he said. He seemed alarmed for a second, realizing he had repeated a bromide of UOJ, one loved by Rolf Preus and David Scaer, "Your faith is not in Christ. Your faith is in faith."

We discussed how he seemed to teach justification by faith, but I pointed out how he failed to reject UOJ, so the discussion of justification by faith was simply a smokescreen to hide what they really teach. "Error loves ambiguities." Prange gave a good example of trying to please two sides at once, hiding the claws and fangs under several layers of fleece.

LCMS President Matt Harrison's campaign booklet
was terribly dishonest, so I fixed it up.
Mark Schroeder grooves on Harrison,
and both groove on Thrivent/Schwan.