Walther as Theologian – Part 13:Conversion and Election I & II

Continued from Part 12.  Table of Contents will be in Part 1 when all installments are finished.

Because Walther and Pieper quote from theologians of past centuries, it can be a bit difficult to follow these essays in certain places.  But God has provided the resources of today's Internet to put much of the resource material at our fingertips.  The added hyperlinks will give direct or indirect access to most of the German theologians and Latin terms here mentioned.

Highlighting is my own.  Underlining is in original.

Hyperlinks within this document should be opened in a new tab (or window).

     A second installment below is being combined with the above as Pieper continued on the subject of "Conversion and Election".  It hammers home the "insoluble mystery" of the question that comes up in everyone's mind: "Why one and not another?".  With our modern mind, this unsolvable mystery does not sit well for we think that we are masters of knowledge and can figure out every mystery.  But it is not so with this mystery.
     This second installment begins the explanation of and defense against the teaching of intuitu fidei or "in view of faith" – the center of the great controversy in American Lutheranism.  And it was C.F.W. Walther who personally rescued the Church from this pernicious, perennial error.


    Prof. Franz Pieper carried Walther's defense against the error of intuitu fidei until the day he died in 1931.  Franz Pieper could ferret out all opponents who had "a certain degree of outward conformity to the Lutheran way of speaking" but who did not hold to the true Lutheran teaching of an insoluble mystery.  There are a lot of those today among our modern theologians.  Does anyone think that this error has been settled in American Lutheranism today?  Think again for today's ELCA teaches the same as their ancestors from the old Ohio Synod and Iowa Synod. Then learn from the master theologians Walther and Pieper on the true Christian teaching.  And let no one say this is a minor matter – it is a matter is spiritual life and death.
(Further quotes and comments may be added at a later time)

The next post is Part 14 – Conversion.