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| Interior of Notre Dame, Paris. |
And so it's going to be very hard in our society to ever build a cathedral again, much less to repair them, because we don't believe in what they represented. And it's ironic, because we don't like the past. We are at war with the past. We tear down monuments. We don't build cathedrals. We erase names. We say to Father Serra or Christopher Columbus, you don't live up to our standards of race, class, and gender, moral superiority. Shame on you.
Victor Davis Hanson
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GJ - During the Notre Dame, Paris fire, expert TV journalists assured everyone that the cathedral was completely destroyed. However, the oldest part survived, except for the roof, where the fire was started.
The fire has captured everyone's attention. Napoleon revived the building, which was not much more than a storage building then.
American Lutherans have been torching their own heritage for decades. I left First Christian Church, Moline, in 1964, at the peak of that congregation's attendance and prosperity. The former Augustana Synod church nearby, Salem, had the liturgy and chanting and - Lutheran hymns.
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| Charles Willey was a pioneer in Church Growth gimmicks. My far-sighted uncle saw right through him. Nostalgic members remembered the fun and games with fondness. |
With smooth-talking, always tan Charles Willey, First Christian had three services a Sunday in 1964 but were closing completely, an empty building another church wanted in 2017. Salem became a willing part of ELCA.
But the LCMS-WELS-ELS entities have been just as willing to self-immolate as the ELCA has. These self-described conservative synods have rushed to abandon:
- Justification by Faith
- The Means of Grace
- Lutheran hymns
- The Creeds
- The sermon
- Pastoral visitation
- Luther and the Reformation
- The Book of Concord and its editors
- A real seminary education
Buried beneath the rubble of ELCA, one can still find the great authors and leaders of the past:
- Passavant
- Krauth
- Jacobs
- Schmauk
- Lenski
- Leupold
Alec Satin is making those books freely available again through the Lutheran Library Publishing Ministry. Seminarians are known for grabbing those volumes at book sales based on the estates of pastors who actually read them.
How did it happen that the Beavis and Butthead of each synod was given the authority to light the fires? How did the biggest dunces become the professors at LCMS-WELS-ELS?
People do not realize it, because they are not inside higher education. Once the feminist harpies of the Left get into education, they hate everyone else out. The same is true in the leadership of LCMS-WELS-ELS.
Objective Justification and Church Growth are accelerants added to burn down the institutions hated by the apostates. No one dare question their plaster saints - that would be a violation of the Eighth Commandment, which they invoke while using the vilest names they can muster from their tiny memories.
