 |
| ELCA, LCMS, and ELDONA agree - "We want to be papal, even popish." |
One WELS teacher said, "Foreign students are walking bags of money." Various students from other countries pay for room, board, and books with cash from mom and dad. These students are a great asset to the school, but the schools have taken that for granted, part of the slippage that has become an avalanche of cost and disastrous budgets.
Synod schools are not based on quality but DNA. Only some of the Seminex "heroes" left, eager to join the nascent ELCA. The rest of Seminex burrowed into the woodwork and took over, step by step. The Preus brothers, Jack and Robert, claimed the orthodox won. Yay! But nobody had the spine to deal with the layers of ELCA wannabees - and no one did.
One little example - easily multiplied - was the CPH NIV Commentary. The editor of Psalms denied the many examples of Christ in the Psalms. I recall Herman Otten posting that fact, especially since Luther wrote a commentary on the Psalms which was just the opposite. How does one get around Psalm 2, or Psalm 22? I have had Old Testament gasp at how literal Psalm 22 is. One student said, "That is a verbatim description of the crucifixion!"
Was anything done about this? No. I met that Psalms NIV-CPH editor at a little gathering of LCMS pastors about that time. He retired. Nobody fussed about him. Otten, oddly enough, always defended anyone who graduated from the St. Louis or Ft. Wayne seminaries, even when some of them bolted for the Elysian fields of ELCA. Herman said to me, "The Seminex professors at LSTC were not the problem!"
Another example was his support and promotion of an ex-LCMS pastor on the man's third marriage. I said to Herman, "That's three now, and you are putting him on the front page of CN." He tried to remember, so I said. "The first wife left him because he chose the other as the mother of his child. You told me they broke up too, so this is either a third wife or that pastor re-married #1 or #2." He conceded that fact, but it made no difference.
The Otten-Preus amalgamation worried most about Objective Faithless Justification. The current raging pipsqueak Christian News editor - just kidding, it's worse - can only carry on the task of sanctifying anyone who graduated from one or the other seminary. Jack and Robert Preus are given a pass because they touched the nerve of the LCMS laity, who were far more conservative than the pastors as a whole. Even then, the pastors on Otten's side staged a huge dinner in the early days, to show their support of Otten and the good old days.
The ELCA wannabees realized they could purify LCMS by burials over time, and that worked. Who is left of the ones who fought apostasy? CPH became very ELCA-ish, worse than ever before. The seminaries were so Romanized that Robert Preus wrote Justification and Rome, repudiating OJ with many great citations from the post-Book of Concord theologians. Preus saw it coming, but even the two sons, as editors, did not see or accept Justification by Faith. One cannot win a war going to battle with cardboard swords and newsprint shields.
Back to the Schools of Higher Education
LutherQuest and the ALPB Online Forum Ovaltines are trying to float the colleges a little longer. Matt the Fatt's regime has closed Selma, the NYC college, and the Chinese campus. The HotChalk school - Portland - is teetering with a huge lawsuit. The great brains who thought they could make a fortune from the HotChalk learning platform were dumber than any salesman might hope to meet.
- How could anyone say "HotChalk" without laughing?
- How could these LCMS genius types overlook the online fad already fading away?
- If every college in America goes online, how much smaller is the Portland piece of pie?
 |
| Matt (without a beard) never stops reaching out to the Left. |
