The Pietist Walther Brothers
The Missouri mythology
focuses on CFW Walther, but the cell group affiliation began with the older
brother at Leipzig University. Otto joined Tutor Kuehn’s group and the brothers
remained together in that group for 10 years and then with Martin Stephan,
another Pietist cell group leader, until the younger brother kidnapped him,
sending him to Illinois. They even coordinated the kidnapping of their nephew
and niece from their father’s parsonage, because they claimed the children
wanted to go to America. When Otto died, his congregation in St. Louis extended
the call to CFW, who accepted it.
Kuehn was scorned as a
Pietist when he was a student at Leipzig, as were his disciples. As Forster
observed in Zion on the Mississippi, that drew the group together, and
they remained close friends, even to the point of joining Stephan when Kuehn
moved away and died. CFW began his studies at Leipzig in 1829 “and was promptly
introduced into the Pietist circles of the university and the city.”[1]
Consumption and the effects of Kuehn’s Pietistic acts of contrition forced CFW
home to recuperate. The great Old
Testament scholar Delitsch wrote:
During
that period of struggle he was wasted like a skeleton, coughed blood, suffered
from insomnia, and experienced the terrors of hell. He was more dead than
alive.[2]
During this time,
Walther read Luther, which is often mentioned by his admirers today as proof of
his profound education. Unlike today, Luther was respected as the greatest
Biblical expositor of Christianity, so even the Reformer’s opponents studied
him. Walther was weak in Biblical languages and spent his academic life
uttering his truths in dogmatic statements which had little relationship to the
Scriptures, even when cited. His example has been a burden on American
Lutherans, who placed loyalty to Walther far above knowledge of the Scriptures
and Luther. LutherQuest and Christian News made Walther the final word
on every issue, locking them into the Stephan-Walther Objective Justification
nonsense which plagues all of Lutherdom today. Proof comes from the 500th
anniversary of the Reformation, 2017, when the Lutheran church bodies were
tepid in recognizing Luther and were not ashamed to mock him and sell Luther
trinkets through Concordia Publishing House.
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| The facts in Concordia Publishing House's Zion on the Mississippi are dismissed by Walther worshipers as "the work of a disgruntled LCMS pastor." CFW knew that he would look far better if his early history was forgotten. |
