Memories 5: trained in Dogmatics by Walther; Greek & Latin: "like water"; captivating Pieper- Pastoral Conferences 1880/81

      This continues from Part 4 (Table of Contents in Part 1), a series by Prof. Ludwig Fürbringer of his personal memories of the departed Franz Pieper in the 1931 Der Lutheraner magazine. — Pieper is now looming larger – much larger – for the future of the Missouri Synod…

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(page 266, col. 1)

Memories of Dr. Franz Pieper.

by Ludwig Fürbringer – [2.] (Part 5 of 16)

In the autumn of 1878, the newly appointed professor of our St Louis seminary arrived here and was received with great pleasure. In the Der Lutheraner of October,  15 [p. 156] the blessed Professor M[artin] Günther, then editor of the paper, reports: “On October 1, our Concordia was filled with joy.  On the morning of this day, the newly elected Professor of Theology, Pastor Fr[anz] Pieper from Manitowoc, Wisconsin. Bell ringing soon announced his happy arrival, and there was a welcoming ceremony in the auditorium, which was opened and closed with song. The long-awaited one was warmly welcomed by the teachers as a new colleague, by the students as a teacher.”

Professor Pieper was particularly, as already indicated in the previous article, called for Dogmatics so that just one with younger strength was trained in this field under Dr. Walther while he was still strong,  even now at sixty-seven years old. And so Pieper would probably become his successor. That was a very wise thought of those who had to manage these things. What a splendid gift and excellent strength the synod had received, who then served our institute for fifty-three years and after Walther's death in May 1887 also took over his main subjects at seminary: Dogmatics and Pastoral Theology. It will always be the right thing for all our educational institutions to provide for men of advanced age to have middle-aged and younger ones to work under them. I have observed more than once that the capacity of an institution has been going down for several years because this has not been observed and carried out in due time. And it is also an advantage to provide in this way some continuity in an institution.

But at first Walther was still in full force, and the young, newly-elected professor had other subjects to teach. Although he would always organize a dogmatic Repetitorium (repetition) [de.Wikipedia: the repetition of knowledge, usually to pass an exam] with the uppermost seminary class, Pieper’s main strength in those early years related to other subjects. Thus, in the years when I became his student, in the lowest seminary class he presented the Gospel of John and taught in hermeneutics, and in the middle seminary class he presented the Letter to the Romans and selected Psalms.

In the dogmatic Repetitorium which he directed, he proceeded, as far as I remember, in various ways; partly he discussed important dogmatic objects with the members of the class; in part he read with them selected passages from the famous, excellent work against the papacy, the “Examination of the Council of Trent” by Martin Chemnitz, the “second Martin” of our church. Pieper was still a young man when I entered the seminary in 1882, and I know that some in the preceding classes were older than their teacher, and he knew with youthful enthusiasm, which remained until his advanced age, to recite the objects and to warm our hearts for theology. I remember especially how he made an impression on me and others in my class in the first few weeks by his mastery of the basic Greek text of the New Testament, again a well-known ability that could be perceived in him throughout his life. He might begin an the exposition of the Bible text perhaps with a sentence in German, but then completed it, without looking at the text, in the words of the Greek original.

Therefore, it was also later written by students of the seminary to the students at our colleges that the professors in St. Louis spoke Greek and Latin fluently like (page 266, col. 2) water, which was especially true of Pieper and Stöckhardt. Pieper used Latin indeed for years, as did Walther before him, for certain sections of Dogmatics. And Stöckhardt demanded of us students to translate from the basic Hebrew and Greek text into Latin, an exercise for which I am still grateful today and owe much.

This made a special impression on probably the oldest Lutheran pastor of our country a few years ago. Dr. G. U. Wenner of New York, who visited our seminary and the Holy Cross Church during a church meeting in St Louis, was quite taken by Dr. Pieper in his lectures. And on his return to New York, he read a paper for his conference of the United Lutheran Church [see #15.] on the Lutheran Church in St Louis, also writing down Dr. Pieper's two short sentences on what Lutheranism actually is. [see also Wenner’s book The Lutherans of New York by George Unangst Wenner, search "Missouri"]

When Professor Pieper entered his work in St Louis, as the readers of our church papers know, the heavy, hot doctrinal dispute about the doctrine of the election of grace began, and it was granted to the young teacher to step immediately into the front row of fighters from the very beginning. One can say that Walther, Stöckhardt and Pieper led the main battle in those years. And from the very beginning, in Pieper's oral and written exposition, the quality which distinguished him in all his long teaching—the clear, simple, definite, fixed exposition of the Christian doctrine, especially of the doctrine of grace— came to light.

When I heard and saw Pieper for the first time, I was still a Secondary at Fort Wayne. The memorable synod of 1881 with the adjoining Pastoral Conference met in the old St. Paul's Church. [see this blog] It still stands before my soul quite vividly, how in this great, extremely excited and attentive assembly, Walther, Stöckhardt and others spoke from our synod.  But also our opponents at that time, formerly from our own synod, came to speak. Us college students at that time did not understand too much of these things, but always the whole appearance, the whole presentation of Pieper captivated and we were glad to get him once as a teacher. How skillfully he knew how to wield the pen then, as in the years of Lehre und Wehre, especially from 1881 on, and actually then to his blessed death. It  is commonly known in our synod and far beyond its borders how one article after another was carried out to testify and defend the biblical-Lutheran truth.

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      Fürbringer praises the process of training the young men while the "men of advanced age" are still able to provide this, and thus promoting "continuity".  This is certainly praiseworthy.  But did Fürbringer miss here an opportunity to also point out the importance of maintaining and passing on the Synod's orthodoxy, i.e. the "doctrine pure"?

      The proceedings of the Pastoral Conference of 1881 mentioned above has been translated into English and published in the recently released CPH book Walther's Works: Predestination.  This book also has the earlier 1880 Pastoral Conference proceedings as well (Chapter 2).  These 2 translations are perhaps the greatest new material that the CPH "Walther's Works" series has produced.  Almost all of the previous material was only a republishing of works already published before. I had these 2 items on my list of projects to be translated by myself given their immense importance in the great controversy of American Lutheranism,. I knew 20 years ago when I had them machine translated that these conferences were a display of the greatness of the "Missourians" when their teachers gave an impassioned plea to their opponents within the synod. So I was shocked to find that CPH had actually produced major new translations for this series.  Although this volume of "Walther's Works" is relatively small, it's price is worth every penny because of these two conference reports.  They show the great teachers of Missouri at their finest, defending not only "predestination", but also the Lutheran Doctrine of Justification. I hope to produce a future blog post on the rich material in these.  For German speaking readers, these books are available at Archive.org:1880 here, and 1881 here). I have also prepared full OCR German text documents with hyperlinks: 1880 here, 1881 here. — In the next Part 6, among other things, we will see a list of Pieper's great essays to the Synod.