= = = = Translation of 1850 "Synodalrede", by BTL using DeepL; all hyperlinks, emphases except underlining are mine. = = = =
Synod Address
of the current President, Professor Walther.
Venerable brethren in office and faith, beloved in Christ!
This time we will begin our synodical proceedings under circumstances as never before. The history of our synod’s congregations seems to have entered a new stage at this time. Up to the time of our last year's meeting, God had spared us, after his great mercy, severe afflictions and had given us the grace to build ourselves undisturbed. We were granted a time similar to that described by St. Luke the Evangelist: “So the Church was at peace throughout all Judea, Galilee and Samaria, and built herself up, and walked in the fear of the Lord, and was filled with the consolation of the Holy Spirit” Acts 9:31 Our (page 116) present sessions, on the other hand, begin not only with the sensation of hard blows from the divine hand that we have experienced since we were last together, but also with the prospect of severe trials and decisive battles into which that same hand has led us.
To recall only the most important thing, it was only after God's inscrutable counsel that He decided to remove from our ranks several of our most sprightly and efficient comrades-in-arms in the holy wars that we are called to wage against the kingdom of lies and sin. I will mention here only the names of Loeber, Wolter, Buttermann and Flessa, and you will measure with me the greatness of the loss which our Synod has suffered since its meeting last year. In our Loeber — I fear no contradiction here — she has lost her crown, her father in Christ, her living example of an experienced and righteous servant of the Church in doctrine and life, in pastoring and quarrelling, in friendly love and awe-inspiring seriousness, her most fervent intercessor, in short, a man who made himself a wall for her and stood against the breach. [Ps. 106:23] In our Wolter, our Synod has lost a teacher of one of its preaching seminaries, who was also an excellent teacher in terms of loyalty and zeal, as well as in terms of ability, and a shining example, especially to its younger members. Even with our Buttermann and Flessa at last, our Synod has had to bury no small hopes for the promotion of the Kingdom of God, to which the ministry of these young vigorous workers had also entitled it. By calling back these four dear members of our association at a time when the church has to daily pour out before the Lord its lamentation about the lack of workers for the great harvest, God has chastised us as harshly as He could hardly have chastised us more harshly. We have been called out, loud and clear: "Humble yourselves therefore under the mighty hand of God, that He may exalt you in due time." 1 Peter 5:6.
But a second reason why today we must look to the past and the future with a heavier heart than ever before is that in the past years of the synod we have had sad experiences, also in the case of several congregations which were served by members of our synodical association. Several of them, in fact, did not accept the Word preached to them faithfully as the Word of God, but in spite of all instruction and in spite of all requests and exhortations, stubbornly rejected it and forced their faithful pastors to turn away from them, as people who did not regard themselves worthy of eternal life, and so shook the dust from their feet. And even if here and there, by the grace of God, such a sad outcome has not yet been achieved, I cannot conceal from you today the fact that still several of our most faithful pastors, in particular, find not little resistance in their congregations and so can only carry out their ministry with a sigh among them. In the past year of the Synod, the Presidium of our Synod received so many sad news items about this that I confess that, at the same time, in view of the loss of capable workers which we experienced at the same time, I was often hardly able to suppress that word of little faith: “Lord, save us: we perish!” [Matt. 8:25]
However important and sensitive, venerable men and brethren, as these experiences have been and still are for us, I cannot fail to express before you my conviction that our Synod (page 117) is facing, in a quite different way, an even more important and decisive test, the most severe test that the Church can ever experience, a test of which the bloody persecutions can hardly challenge, in short, it is this — the temptation to false doctrine.
Before I describe the objects of this temptation in more detail, please allow me first to say something in advance.
It cannot be denied that after a long sleep of death, in which our German Lutheran Church seemed to be completely submerged, it has been vigorously stirring again for about three decades and has manifested new divine life in it. Not only have more and more dear men appeared since that time who, recognizing the depth of the apostasy of most of the servants of our Church to rationalism, raised their voice like a trumpet against it and loudly called for a return to faith in the divine revelation contained in the Holy Scriptures; but the eyes of many were soon horrified to discover that the [Prussian] Union of the church which had come into being at that time [1817] was nothing but a new fraud, whereby Satan wanted to destroy the new work of God and deprive German Christendom of the blessing of the new divine visitation of grace which had been bestowed upon it; and so, at last, the number of those who have realized and publicly testified in word and writing that the only true union founded by God already exists in the Evangelical Lutheran Church and that every other man-made union is a mere distortion of it, whereby Satan only apes the hardly awakened Christianity.
But what happened? — Did one deal faithfully with this God-given knowledge? — Oh, would to God, that I could, having arrived at this question, step aside and let a Luther, a Chemnitz, a J. Gerhard, or a completely different weighty voice from our time, instead of mine, answer this question here in public! How I would then like to keep silent and be a listener! — But since it is God's will that I, the least of you, have to speak publicly here again because of official reasons, I ask you for God's sake, that you now will look away from my poor person completely, and look only at the matter I am compelled to speak about.
So I ask again: what happened? Did one deal faithfully with that knowledge given by God? Did we really return to our dearest Evangelical Lutheran Church, to this union founded by God himself, did we really return to the faith and confession of our fathers? Are the men whom God sent to the teachers at the time of the Reformation of Christianity [i.e. Luther/Reformers], and through whom God revealed and gave them His pure and clear Word, but who had been thrown out of their chairs by an ungrateful following generation [i.e. Schleiermacher, Prussian Union, etc.], have these men [Luther etc.] really been reinstated in their office, and are the spirits of the prophets in our days [modernists, rationalists, mediating theologians, etc.] again subject to these prophets [Luther etc.] of a better time? Have they really repented, and each one of them, as a prodigal son, truly returned repentantly to the abandoned faithful mother? — As hard as the answer may seem, and especially for me the least appropriate, I can't help it, I must answer here if I want to give honor to the truth: “No! That, except for a few witnesses to the truth, has not happened.”
Well, after having been ashamed of the Lutheran name for a long time (page 118), in our day several of the most gifted, learned and respected theologians are again confessing that they see no cause to be ashamed of the name of a Lutheran; and, again, several of them have placed themselves at the head of the German Lutheran people to lead the cause of the Lutheran people, and the people look up to them with great hopes — but what are they doing? Some of them, apparently at the height of their scientific knowledge and their richness of humanity and spirit, cannot decide to capture all reason under the obedience of Christ, [2 Cor. 10:15] to sit down with the infants at the feet of our old teachers, and to have mercy on the poor people and stammer with them, but rather exploit the right and duty of a supposed development of doctrine to destroy it. Among those, however, on whom the eyes of our Lutheran people are longingly fixed in this time of distress as their champion and savior, we see men of a quite different direction. Among them we see men who are obviously serious about thoroughly purifying themselves from the ruin of this last sad time; men who do not stop halfway, but who want to return from their confusion. They recognize vividly the terrible devastation that rationalism and unionism have wrought in our Church. They see with horror how the awareness of being a member of the One Holy Christian Church of all times and places is dwindling more and more; how everywhere the bonds of the Church are loosening more and more; how everything apparently splits partly into carnal, partly into super-spiritual sects; how what is externally given in Christianity is increasingly being put into the background and what is experienced and done by the individual is being placed above it; how everything old is thrown away more and more as obsolete and everything new is more and more accepted as vain new found treasures; how even the slightest semblance of submission to foreign authority is more and more outlawed, but submission to one's own authority is all the more asserted and demanded;
how the holy office is more and more stripped of its divine dignity, reduced to a human institute and thus robbed of its effectiveness for salvation: all this, I say, is viewed with horror by the latter. Their hearts bleed in view of the distress of our poor, seduced and abandoned Lutheran people. They [Grabau, Loehe, etc.] are determined to help, to help thoroughly — but what are they doing? Precisely because they want to be and become Lutherans, their zeal leads them beyond Lutheranism, against their will and without their knowledge. In the best opinion, they bring back to the treasury of our Church those things of which a Lutheran once purified the Church with great effort and hard struggle, as if in front of evil disfigurement;…
= = = = = = = = = = = concluding Part 2 follows = = = = = = = =
There is a tremendous amount of history being covered in this short history of Lutheranism since Luther. And Walther punctuates the various segments with his incisive question: "But what are they doing?" … which concludes in Part 2 of 2. — After the "break" below there follows a translation of the opening notice to the 1850 Synod convention.
Along with the above presentation of Walther's address, the following is my translation of the opening notice (p. 115). The conditions in 1850 of interest for us today is that this convention was delayed some months because of the continuing effects of the cholera outbreak in America at that time. One of the pastors, Buttermann, had died of cholera.
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Synod convention in 1850.
Due to the hindering circumstances caused by cholera (which again affected St. Louis this year), the Synod was unable to hold its sessions of this year at the time indicated in last year's Synodical Report; however, the proposal of several Synod members “to hold the assembly in the period from October 2-12” was accepted by most members, all the more so as many important matters were submitted for consideration. Consequently, the preachers and delegates of the congregations met on Wednesday, October 2, in the morning at 9 o'clock, in the Trinity Church of the German Lutheran congregation of the Unaltered Augsburg Confession in St. Louis, and the present President, Professor Walther, opened the sessions with the singing: “Come, Holy Ghost, God and Lord” [TLH #224, LW #157], and a heartfelt prayer. — There were a total of 21 public meetings, but also 14 committee and other meetings.The opening of the synodical sessions was always done in such a way that in the morning at the beginning a song was sung, then a chapter from the Acts of the Apostles was read out by a pastor and God's grace and blessing was invoked from Him for our deliberations etc. In the same way, only with the omission of singing, the afternoon sessions were opened and the Lord’s Prayer closed each time.On the two Sundays as well as on several days of the week, services were held, with Pastors Biltz, Biewend, Jaebker, Dr. Sihler, Craemer, Lange, Schaller, Brohm, preaching partly about the evangelical pericopes and partly about other texts.The number of the members who were already gathered at the beginning, some of whom arrived later, including the newly admitted pastors and teachers, is shown in the above list.The reader will find all the rest in the following.
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As I translated this, I took the time to look up the hymn that Walther used to open the Synod, "Come, Holy Ghost, God and Lord.", a hymn of Martin Luther that I then sung. I was reminded of my youth, and the joy, and the instruction, that I was given through these old German hymns.
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