Draft - More Details on Threatening, Robbing, and Kidnapping the Bishop

May 28, 300 Roared Off the Steamship

Walther organized the mob that arrived in Perryville and surrounded the bishop’s cabin. Only those against the bishop were allowed to take the trip. They threatened his life, held him at gunpoint, forced him out of his home, stole all his money, took all his books and personal possessions, and forced him across the river to Illinois. They even disrobed him to make sure he was not hiding any money.[1]

This action has been called “deposing the bishop,” but it was a series of crimes and completely unscriptural. This mob activity led by Walther set the precedent in the LCMS-WELS-ELS for ignoring due process and Matthew 18, assuming dictatorial powers, and abusing people with the theme of might makes right.

First of all, only the people already in agreement with Walther were allowed to travel from St. Louis to Perryville. Those with a different opinion were left behind, not a voters’ assembly but a kangaroo court. They were fired up for execution, not for pastoral admonition and discipline. To compound the deceit of the times, the LCMS guides in Peryville today tell the innocent that the bishop was given three options. But only one option is needed at the end of a gun barrel – obey! Bishop Stephan had no advance notice of this angry horde and refused to acknowledge their authority. The former clergy arranged to have the real estate agent (!) read the charges to Stephan.

The bishop was charged with misuse of the funds, fornication, and adultery, the same charges brought against him in a court of law in Dresden, ending his career there. Since the same lawyers, Vehse and Marbach, were there in the Dresden court, people should only marvel that these were suddenly charges never before proven. Mrs. Stephan and the primary mistress Louise Guenther both testified.

The mob outside Stephan’s cabin whipped the walls to terrify him, and he felt afraid for his life. He signed the document of accusation, though obtaining a guilty plea through death threats is hardly legal or Biblical.

The next anti-Scriptural step was searching him bodily for any money on him and the cabin for the rest of the money. At the Walther site, the guide showed me the chest where Stephan’s gold was kept. “That would be worth millions today.” The man showed no remorse over stealing a vast amount of money, which was perhaps a mix of the society’s money and the bishop’s. The implication of the tour was – he had it coming to him. Never mentioned – the society was financially strapped from foolish spending, not all of it the bishop’s fault. The former pastors also took money from the fund and that was not consistently recorded or paid back. (Zion)

Stephan was forced to sleep overnight on the ground, another strange concept not addressed in Walther’s Pastoral Theology. He was forced across the river at gunpoint, with only 100 dollars, a few clothes, and a shovel. The mob took all his personal possessions and library. Stealing a library was replayed when Seminex stole the books from Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, for their own school, claiming, as one did, “They were our books.” Antinomianism reigns with legalism where Objective Justification is taught.

The trip across the river was probably on a ferry, not in a rowboat. The bishop was dumped in Illinois, sick, with not enough to survive. Future pleas to provide some food were refused. He sued for the return of his property and received almost nothing. The beautiful chalice given to him was kept by Walther and used at every communion service. Thieves often keep trophies to admire.

The lawyer Marbach, on behalf of the Society, interrogated Louise Guenther - after the fact, so the verdict and punishment were first and the facts second. The issue had already been settled in Germany and verified by her cozy position on the ship near Stephan’s cabin, living above him in the same building in St. Louis. Could Marbach and Vehse have traveled for weeks on the same ship and not seen anything amiss, with the bishop’s wife and his children (except one) left behind?

Louise joined the bishop in Illinois about two weeks later. He became the first bishop in Illinois and served as the pastor of a congregation that still exists in the LCMS. He died in Illinois, seven years after Walther’s mob threatened, robbed, and kidnapped him. A rumor lived on that Stephan had gold coins in his cane when he was expelled. The author of Servant of His Word examined the cane and found nothing there. The irony of thinking the bishop escaped with some money – but without his land, cabin, books, and savings – is too rich to ignore.

Not satisfied with this, Walther talked Stephan’s son into giving away the 80 acres in Perryville belonging legally to his father.

The Ninth Commandment.

Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's house.

What does this mean?--Answer.

We should fear and love God that we may not craftily seek to get our neighbor's inheritance or house, and obtain it by a show of [justice and] right, etc., but help and be of service to him in keeping it.

---

[1] Servant of the Word, cane story.

 Red Bud, Illinois

The Final Result of Worshiping CFW Walther

Good evening Pastor Jackson,

This excerpt is from the Concordia Theological Quarterly, Volume 77:1-2, January/April 2013.

This essay from Mark Braun is entitled "The Reception of Walther's Theology in the Wisconsin Synod"

[Beginning of Quotation]

" (August) Pieper criticized Walther for an overdependence on “the secondary sources of theology―Luther and lesser fathers,” and for his willingness to take over “dozens of proof passages from Luther and the dogmaticians,” even though they “do not prove what they are supposed to prove.” Pieper considered Walther a “brilliant dogmatician” but “an inferior exegete.” However justified Walther’s method may have been at the beginning of his teaching, it was “in principle and in practice wrong” because “it did not rest directly on Scripture and did not lead one directly into it.” Though his method “did no harm to the correct doctrine of Walther and his students,” it nonetheless “stressed too strongly the importance of Luther and the Lutheran Confessions and the Lutheran fathers in comparison with Scripture.” At its worst, “it even led to this, that later one did not stop with quoting Luther and the old fathers, but now one also quoted Walther” for proof of correct doctrine. Pieper was reported as having remarked, perhaps only partly tongue-in-cheek, “We could not persuade Missourians with the Bible, but when we quoted Walther to them, then they believed us.” Recalling his own student days, Pieper charged that “the average student in Walther’s time made out poorly” in “everything except dogmatics and pastoral theology.” New Testament exegesis “consisted mainly of dictated quotations from the Lutheran exegetes of the 16th and 17th centuries.” In isagogics “the Bible itself was seldom used in class,” and so “students came out of the seminary without having the slightest ability in exegesis” and “had not ever studied a single book of Holy Scripture some
what thoroughly.” 

Pieper did not reject the legitimate role of systematic theology; in a review of Schaller’s Biblical Christology in 1919, Pieper wrote that underestimating the value of doctrinal theology was “one of the gravest mistakes the Church could make.” History and exegesis provide the necessary foundation and “a full knowledge [of the] Gospel,” but “systematic theology must shape its form, and give it the proper finish.” Dogmatics fostered “accuracy of thought and the precision of logical expression peculiar,” making it “an indispensable study and a most potent factor in the training of masterly minds.”  Yet Pieper repeatedly voiced warnings against the dangers inherent in dogmatic theology. “The systemizing tendency of Lutheran dogmatics emphasized” the importance of Scripture “in principle but in the application often failed. And the more they systematized, the greater was the damage. Ever since Calixtus, everything had to fit into the logical straightjacket.” The dogmaticians “learned the disinguendam est [‘a distinction must be made’] to the minutest detail and―without any evil intention―damaged Scripture here and there.” 

While dogmatics is “altogether indispensable” for keeping the gospel pure, it is also “is in constant danger of losing the spirit of the gospel and becoming a dead skeleton as a result of processes that involve the intellect alone.” Dogma becomes “the word crystallized into an inflexible form” that “does not express the full content of Scripture.”  Koehler likewise warned that “dogmatic training” and “the dogmatism it produces will establish an array of doctrinal theses and make an outward rule of them, without probing their deep content and inner connection.” Worse, “it will seek, by means of a supposed logical reasoning, to achieve a connected system of thought, whereby in fact Biblical truth is emptied of it content and the resulting Christian knowledge and life is left superficial. This overemphasis on dogmatic theology and a corresponding neglect of exegetical theology helped to create what many outsiders referred to as                                                          
the “Missouri spirit,” evident “in hundreds of concrete cases, in raising suspicions about doctrine, in dead silence about the boycotting of nonsynodical literature, in competition in the area of foreign mission work, in a smug tone of criticism of non-synodical church institutions and theological accomplishments and in all kinds of scornful talk and remarks.” Most likely referring to his own synod, August Pieper charged that “this attitude is taken not only toward the synods that have remained hostile, but also toward those that in the course of time were recognized as sufficiently Lutheran.” This attitude “confronts even the friends of the Missouri Synod again and again to the present day.” 

[End of Quotation]

I apologize for the length of the quote. I wanted to keep it all within context. Koehler, August Pieper and John Schaller went to the seminary in St. Louis. They all had Walther as an instructor there. I will continue to keep you and Mrs. Jackson in my prayers.

In Christ

 I adjusted the title because Stephan left as a criminal, not because he was searching for religious freedom in America.

LCMS myth-minders are not happy that this book is so frank, yet the real story of Stephan's STD and Walther's cover-up has not been told.

Two Charismatic Pietists - The Weaver Messiah and the Wheat Flour Messiah

 Eric Jansson (1808-1850), his family and others left Sweden for freedom in America.

I asked our seminarian to visit Bishop Hill, near Moline, Illinois, which netted me a book called the Wheat Flour Messiah. The parallels with Bishop Martin Stephan are striking. Jansson was a wheat flour salesman.

Both men were poorly educated but charismatic leaders who attracted hundreds of followers and the hostility of the state officials. Stephan was a weaver.

Both were Pietists with extreme views about their holy lives. Their promiscuity was known by their followers but overlooked. Jansson traveled the Swedish countryside and pursued women in the style of Rasputin. Advocating holiness, his followers concluded his mind was pure but his body was adulterous. Traveling with some of his disciples, staying here and there, he became quite notorious.

 Walther did not suddenly discover his bishop's adultery. The Stephanites left Europe because their leader was under house arrest. The outbreak of syphilis among the young women was the cause for rioting, robbing, and deposing Stephan.

Martin Stephan was so active that he contracted syphilis, finding relief from his symptoms by walking late at night with young women and going to spas for medicinal baths. At one he stayed with his mistress but sent his pleading wife home. He installed one young woman in the parsonage and took his favorite mistress along when the Stephanites left for America. The Walther circle knew this but enforced his rigid and often bizarre rule over the followers.

Jansson considered himself the exemplar of the holy, the preacher, the teacher, the hymn-writer, and the catechism author.

Stephan's people had to agree with his exalted notion that the bishop was the Means of Grace, that Europe no longer had the Means of Grace when he left for America. Dissent from that position was punished.

• Jansson founded Bishop Hill, Illinois, in 1846. He forced celibacy on everyone but soon allowed marriage. Cholera and financial troubles set back their "New Jerusalem" and Jansson was shot dead by an angry husband.
• Bishop Stephan took his group to St. Louis and Perryville in 1839. Walther organized a riot, taking the bishop's land, gold, books, and personal possessions. Stephan was forced at gunpoint to cross over to Illinois. His mistress followed. He died in 1846.

Both men left behind historical landmarks, but the Missouri Synod has fabricated its history to hide the cult behavior, the extreme Pietism, and the complicity of the Walther circle. Perryville-Altenburg site is a shrine to the Great Walther. I was shown the chest that held the bishop's gold, with no thought of shame about it being stolen. In fact, the cult accused the bishop of getting away with some of his own gold hidden in his cane, which was false.

Walther was an expert at photoshopping his own history, confessing that Stephan was "a bit of a Pietist." He said that Stephan's marital problems were the fault of his long-suffering wife, who died with all of her children but one, of his disease.

 Walther carried out the plan of Jansson and Stephan, creating his own dogmatics. Jansson burned Luther's works. Walther buried Luther under his pile of publications.