Churchman 4: Walther's Hymnal; rejects Loehe's Romanizing

[2020-02-24: added quote from Loehe at bottom; 2019-10-24: added reference from David Scaer at bottom in red]
      This continues from Part 3 (Table of Contents in Part 1), a series presenting Ludwig Fuerbringer's 1936 essay "Walther as Churchman". — The history of the development of the original hymnal for the Missouri Synod is described along with the order of service or "Agenda".  Fuerbringer does a service for the Church by pointing out that Walther not only preserved the Reformation way of worship, he also kept it from returning back to Romanism – more on that below.

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Original German essay in CTM, vol. 7 (October, 1936), p. 721-730, full text here. Text preparation and translation by BackToLuther using DeepL, Google Translate, Microsoft Translate, Yandex Translate. All bold text is Fuerbringer's emphasis. All highlighting, red text, and most text in square brackets [ ] are mine.

Walther as Churchman.

[by Ludwig Fuerbringer; continued from Part 3]

One of Walther's outstanding works as a churchman is his collaboration — and, I may say again, his leadership — in the publication of our hymnbook [Walther’s hymnbook, Google Books] and our agenda. From the hymnbook we read in the handwritten chronicle of our synod the note: “In the summer after that” (after the foundation of the synod in April 1847) “the first Lutheran hymnbook appeared in the publishing house of the congregation of St. Louis.” 8)  And Walther said of the work on this book: “The choice of prayers was for me very, very difficult.” “We have chosen the hymnal with much effort and with much sighing. God grant that it is worthy to be used by the communion of believers!”  9)  <page 727> The principles which our fathers followed when publishing the hymnal are so correct and important that we will once again bring them to life. Walther writes in Der Lutheraner from the year 1847, p. 48 [? source error]: 

“As far as the recorded hymns are concerned, the fact that they are pure in doctrine, that they have already found as general a reception as possible in the orthodox German-Lutheran Church, and that they have thus received as unanimous a testimony as possible that they have flowed from the right spirit, has been taken into consideration in the selection of these hymns; that, since the book is first intended for public worship, it does not include also the particular changing conditions of individual persons but rather contains the language of the whole Church and that, although they bear the imprint of Christian simplicity per se, they are finally not rhymed prose but products of true Christian poetry. The editors have been vividly aware of the great task they had to accomplish; they have desponded entirely of their own wisdom and called upon God earnestly for His Holy Spirit's enlightenment and government and especially for the gift of testing and discerning the spirits; you can be assured that they have worked with fear and trembling and have chosen only those hymns from the immense treasure that the Christian Church possesses of German songs, of which they recognized, by the grace which God has given them, that they are worthy of all others, bequeathed from child to child and preserved as an inventory, an inalienable property, of the Church of the German tongue.” 

Again, history has confirmed the work of the fathers. Our hymnbook has remained essentially unchanged for almost ninety years and is still fulfilling its purpose in an excellent way and is still giving blessings that cannot be expressed in words. 10)

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8) This chronicle is kept in the collection of our Concordia Historical Institute in St. Louis.

9) Walther’s Briefe, vol. 1, 39. [Walther’s Letters]

10) Perhaps some readers may be interested that a diligently used, but otherwise well preserved, copy of the first edition of our hymnbook from 1847 [1855 ed.], which has various peculiarities, is in my possession. In 1922, on the occasion of the seventy-fifth anniversary of our hymnbook, it was given to me by Prof. F. A. Schmidt of St. Paul, Minnesota, who had received it from his parents when he entered the block college in Altenburg, Perry County, Missouri, as a pupil, and used it daily (“still used every day”) at the age of eighty-five, as his daughter wrote me then. 

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Our agenda, which appeared for the first time in 1856 under the following title, can also be traced back to Walther's activity as a churchman: Church Agenda for Evangelical Lutheran Congregations of the Unaltered Augsburg Confession.. Compiled from the old Orthodox Saxon Church agendas and published by the General German Evangel.-Lutheran Synod of Missouri,  <page 728> Ohio and other States. [HathiTrust 1922 ed.; 2020-01-11: 1902 ed. at Archive] Our Synod had in fact expressed the following at its eighth assembly in 1854: 

“The St. Louis conference had been commissioned at the conclusion of last year's synod meeting with the revision of the Saxon agenda to prepare for publication of an agenda corresponding to our local needs. The same had now submitted such a written review to the Synod, which was now set aside for examination and deliberation. The individual proposed changes were carefully considered and finally the further consideration and execution of this matter was referred to the St. Louis local conference again.” 11) 

And how urgently such a work was needed, a passage from the report of the Central District of the Synod says: 

“The lack of a good agenda corresponding to local needs is becoming more and more tangible. Many of our pastors have no agendas and can not get any. This is most unpleasant. Therefore, the Synod instructed its Secretary to write on its behalf to the Venerable St. Louis Pastoral Conference, to which the publication of a good agenda has been referred by the General Synod, and to urge the latter to urgently publish the agenda in question”. 12) 

The fact that this matter had been transferred to the St. Louis Conference was always an indication that the matter would be under Walther's leadership and direction, and this now explains a peculiarity of our agenda which has been discussed several times. It is a matter of fact that our agenda goes back to the old orthodox Saxon church agendas, namely to the electoral, later royal Saxon agenda. This may well explain why, although it has all the essential parts of the Old Lutheran order of worship, it is not as richly liturgical as it would have been if other agendas had been taken into account. The power of tradition and custom was not entirely removed from our fathers either. That they were otherwise oriented in this field is shown by a series of articles in the fifth volume of the Der Lutheraner, pp. 121 ff. [German text p. 139 ¶ here, last paragraph  here] by E.G.W. Keyl, the brother-in-law of Walther, which were based on Kliefoth's valuable work The Original Order of Worship in the German Churches of the Lutheran Confession, its Destruction and Reformation. [Mecklenburg, HathiTrust, 2nd ed.] 

Wilhelm Loehe:
“well-known Romanizing”

And in particular they also knew Loehe's agenda; for this outstanding liturgist had worked out his agenda in 1844 directly for America and dedicated it to “the venerable pastor of the Lutheran congregation of Fort Wayne in the state of Indiana, Mr. Friedrich Wyneken”. Without being able to prove this now, I strongly suspect  <page 729> that Walther, in this matter, could not follow Loehe’s well-known Romanizing views and inclinations, but rather rejected them. 13)

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11) Synod Report, p. 10-11. [1854]

12) Proceedings of the First Convention of the Central District of the German Evangelical Lutheran Synod of Missouri, Ohio and Other States in 1855, p. 26.

13) Perhaps, in the interest of history, I may again note that the first edition of our agenda is also in my possession, after it was taken from the library of our Luther editor A. F. Hoppe was transferred by his daughter.

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      Fuerbringer names the "well-known Romanizing" German theologian Wilhelm Loehe.  His suspicion about Walther is quite correct and Walther's judgment may now be directed at prominent teachers at Concordia Theological Seminary-Ft. Wayne who are failing in this, e.g. Profs. David Scaer, Naomichi Masaki, John T. Pless, and their favorite son, Pres. Matthew Harrison.

What does "Romanizing" mean?
      When Walther complained against the Iowa Synod in his day, he was complaining against what Fuerbringer identifies – the influence of Wilhelm Loehe's "well-known Romanizing". Specifically Walther complained:

"But now, over against the Reformed, [the Iowa Synod] lay the main stress—instead of on the pure doctrine of justification—

1. on outward churchianity,
2. on the visibility of the true church,
3. on its ceremonies, rules, and constitution,
4. on the office [Amt, of the ministry] as a special rank created by ordination and
5. [on] its privileged dispensation of grace,
6. on the ex opere operato effectiveness of the sacraments (i.e., by the mere use of them, regardless of faith)".

Today the LCMS honors Wilhelm Loehe, not so much for his missionary endeavors, but for the areas that constitute his "well-known Romanizing" (see here).  Among the praises for the 2012 CPH book Walther's Hymnal is one by Prof. Richard Resch of Concordia Theological Seminary which states that the book "turned the ship of American Lutheran hymnody away from the influence of pietism, rationalism, revivalism, and unionism". However Resch fails to mention what Fuerbringer does… Romanizing. Fuerbringer confirms his point when he points out that Walther's order of service (Agenda) was "not as richly liturgical as it would have been if other agendas had been taken into account" — In the next Part 5…
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2019-10-24: ADDENDUM – Prof. David Scaer confesses his real father in the faith:
2020-02-24: ADDENDUM II – quote from Loehe added below.

      Prof. David Scaer clearly identifies his teaching as against Walther's when he stated the following in his essay "Francis Pieper (1852-1931)" in the Mark C. Mattes' 2013 book Twentieth-Century Lutheran Theologians, p. 21 (emphasis mine): 

"[Pieper] here makes no mention of Wilhelm Löhe who in sending his students as pastors to America was as much responsible for establishing the LCMS as was Walther."

Would any Fort Wayne professor want to deny Prof. Scaer's assertion that Wilhelm Loehe (and Hermann Sasse) are the real founders of today's LC-MS?
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2020-02-24: From the book The Pastor: Wilhelm Loehe (CPH, 2015), an English translation of his writings, p. 272 (emphasis mine):

“Now the main question is this: What is the first and most important place in a Lutheran church: The altar or the pulpit? It is easy to answer this question. In a Lutheran service it is not the sermon but Holy Communion that is the greatest celebration."

This is not Lutheran teaching, nor is it that of Luther, but it is that of the Romanizing LC-MS.