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Memories of Dr. Franz Pieper.
by Ludwig Fürbringer – [6.] (Part 15 of 16)
I remember especially our last meeting. During a visit on my part we had again talked to him about ecclesiastical and theological matters. I had suggested to him whether he might like to address a final word to the ministry of our synod in our theological monthly or in any other way. But he neither promised nor rejected it, saying only that his theses on the doctrinal position of the Missouri Synod should be his legacy. He was especially cordial on this visit, accompanying me from his house to the path leading past him, arm in arm, shaking my hand vigorously at our parting. When I wanted to visit him twice later, he was resting, and I did not want to disturb him. But the thoughts that moved him in these weeks, he had also spoken to others. When I passed by his house with President Alex Ullrich of our North Illinois District at the end of April and encouraged him to visit Pieper for a short time, he was given the following words [Pieper’s Last Words] of farewell for the brothers in Chicago, which were immediately recorded by President Ullrich: “Tell the brethren this: First and foremost, ask the gracious God to give me a gentle and blessed end soon. Tell the brethren to ask this for me.
And now what I (page 331, col. 1) would like you to especially take to heart: Tell the brethren that they will want to thoroughly study and discuss at conferences the theses in Concordia Theological Monthly on our doctrinal position. [Brief Statement 1932] That will be a good training for everyone. That is the Missourian doctrinal position based on God's Word.
That and nothing else is the teaching of the confessors of Augsburg. I am afraid that some of our opponents and former combatants will confess to these theses and yet with the heterodox they promote a mixed belief. [Glaubensmengerei]” When then President Ullrich said to him as he left that he certainly spoke the mind of all his former students when he expressed his heartfelt thanks for this, since he as their teacher had above all impressed into their hearts the grace of God in Christ so clearly and so gloriously,
Dr. Pieper concluded the conversation with the words: "Oh, I, an unworthy sinner, whom God has so greatly blessed that I for so many years was permitted to teach and have proclaimed this inexpressible grace! May the dear Missouri Synod never forget that it is her God-given chief duty to send forth in all the world the testimony of sola gratia (by grace alone)!”
And trusting in the grace of his God and Savior, which he proclaimed for the last time to the whole assembled Synod at River Forest 1929 in his particularly beautiful essay “The Open Heaven”, he also went blessedly home. His eldest son, Pastor Franz Pieper of Cleveland, Ohio, had just come to visit him on his last evening, talked to him and comforted him. The consolation he brought him was just the old, well-known passages of the Lamb of God which taketh away the sin of the world [John 1:29], and the blood of Jesus Christ which cleanses us from all sin [1 John 1:7], and the glorious, unfading hymn verses of our church: “Jesus, my Savior, lives” [“JEsus, er, mein Heiland, lebt”] and “My Savior, be Thou near me, When death is at my door.” 2)
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2) The well-known closing lines of Paul Gerhardt's passion song “O Sacred Head Now Wounded” [“O Haupt vol Blut und Wunden”, v. 9]: “My Savior, be Thou near me” were often quoted in Dr. Pieper‘s dogmatic lectures and articles, always with profound emotion, when he mentioned a curious occurrence from more recent times as a testimony that only the Biblical - Lutheran doctrine of Christ’s vicarious satisfaction could console our sins in death. The well-known Göttingen theology professor Albrecht Ritschl had disputed and denied this basic doctrine in his writings and once remarked that Gerhardt's hymn, which is based on and expresses this doctrine, was not a suitable Good Friday hymn for the Christian. But when he was lying on his deathbed, he asked his son, Professor Otto Ritschl, to read these verses to him, as the son himself related after the death of his father. When Dr. Pieper for the last time publicly mentioned this incident in the above lecture at the Delegatensynode in 1929, he added: “This is the confession that there is an open heaven only through Christ's atoning sacrifice, and that all exclude themselves from the open heaven those who offer, instead of Christ's atoning sacrifice, their own virtue and works and by this way want to make their way to heaven.” (Lehre und Wehre, 75, 227). That is why one of his grateful students rightly made the words of the “open heaven” the subject of the poem which is found elsewhere in today's number.
... the New Missouri unfortunately "forgot" itself in 1938 when it's Committee on Lutheran Union essentially recommended fellowship with the ALC because of a so-called "agreement in the doctrinal statements" between the Brief Statement of 1932 and the 1938 Declaration of the American Lutheran Church (see also here). The fellow members of the Synodical Conference testified loudly to this forgetfulness — to no effect. Subsequent years were largely a continual slide into doctrinal oblivion for the LC-MS. — We will now see just exactly how Franz Pieper died... in the last Part 16…
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