W-Ltrs3: When to leave a church, when not. Walther’s Letters, Part 3 (Response to Rev. Paul McCain)

       This continues my series (Table of Contents in Part 2) on the Letters of C. F. W. Walther. — One of the letters struck me, a letter in answer to a Lutheran student in Germany who had evidently sent him a letter requesting counsel on the question of when one should leave a church fellowship. 

After I had translated this letter, I discovered that Pres. Matthew C. Harrison had also translated the same one and published it in his 2011 book At Home in the House of My Fathers (CPH 2011) , p. 180-182.  Harrison highlights especially the following quote from Walther's letter in his prefacing comments: 

“In God’s Word, orthodox Christians are not commanded to forsake the corrupt church, for example, in Corinth or Galatia. Instead, they are to reform it. They are to seek absolutely everything possible to this end and only to separate when the corrupt church is revealed to be an irreformable sect, such that practicing fellowship with it is inseparable from participation in its errors and sins. Luther also acted according to this principle.”

We will comment further below about this.

      Since I have left the LC-MS, this letter certainly applies to me, even though I am not a student studying for the ministry. And I can add that there are rather high officials in the LC-MS who are concerned about my spiritual welfare since I have so clearly left their fellowship.

      Walther speaks plainly in this letter, as he does in all his letters.  He touches on his own sorrow over a wrong justification for leaving his post as pastor of a congregation in Germany, but gives a surprising scenario had he not left Germany with the Saxon Lutheran Emigration of 1838-9. Again, the following is my own translation (utilizing DeepL), not Harrison's translation:

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To Mr. Joh. Fackler, student of theology

Erlangen, Bavaria.

St. Louis, May 24, 1870.

My dear Mr. Fackler!

…True as it is that mere adherence to pure doctrine does not make an ecclesiastical body an orthodox one, there is no doubt that there is a great difference between a fellowship which is inherently false and one which is avowedly and principally gathered around false doctrine or doctrinal fusion. There is no doubt that the one who comes to the knowledge of the truth, for example, in the Roman or Reformed or United Church, without 

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consulting flesh and blood, must leave these fellowships if he does not want to deny the truth. But it is different with a church which originally stood right, but into which all kinds of abusus [abuses] in doctrine and practice have gradually penetrated. In this case, it is not necessary to take the walking stick immediately, but to first try everything to see if a renewal is not possible with God's help. As sad as the situation was in the churches at Corinth and in Galatia, Paul did not give the righteous the advice to separate, but punished the whole fellowship in order to make way for the righteous to host a reformation. The counsel that the Lord gives to the orthodox Christians, for example, concerning the Nicolaitans, is completely different. In this, our fathers are an important example. What a wonderfully irenic character the Augustana has! But how the language changes in the Smalcald Articles when the Pope made a show of having the abuses sealed by a papal council! My guiding star in such questions has always been this word of Luther and similar ones:

 

“The holy church sins and stumbles or even errs, as the Lord's Prayer teaches; but she neither defends nor excuses herself, but humbly asks for forgiveness and corrects herself as she always can: then she is forgiven, so that her sin is no longer counted as sin. If now, in the midst of obedience and stubborn disobedience, I should not recognize nor distinguish the right church from the wrong one, I know no more to say of any church,” (“Luther's Letter Concerning His Book on the Private Mass of 1534”. XIX, 1579.) [W1 XIX, 1579. § 19-20, col. 2 W2 19, 1294 § 19-20; AE 38, 229 – Harrison gives incorrect reference for St.L edition.].

From a degenerate fellowship, formerly right standing, I can only counsel to separate when it is notorious that it has become “hardened”; and this is notorious only when every effort has been made to bring it back, but to no avail. Calling upon my good right in such a fellowship, I do not leave it until I am either put out or indirectly compelled to go out by being put in the position of either doing something against conscience or giving way. If God had wanted

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me to have this realization some thirty years ago, I would probably have been in America as well [as he was then after the Emigration], but not as a runaway from the ministry, but as an exile. I do not judge the Bavarian church with [Julius] Diedrich according to the abuses occurring in it, but according to how it should be in it according to its own principles. According to God's Word, the visible church is always to be judged synecdochically in such a way that the righteous give it the character which has its right in it. —

You ask me: “Do you think that there are Lutherans in the Union?” I answer: Yes and No! Yes, inasmuch as a Lutheran is one who has and confesses the Lutheran faith; No, inasmuch as all such mouth confessors in the Union deny their confession by deed. In short, I regard the Lutheran believers and mouth confessors in the Union as schismatic Lutherans, guilty of the sin of syncretism, with whom I can therefore have nothing to do, even as with my fellow believers and church fellowship. —

As for the concession Luther made to Melanchthon that one should serve Holy Communion for a time under one form to those who are therefore imprisoned in their conscience (for it seems to me that Luther was certainly drawn into this practice by Melanchthon and afterwards, in his great humility, did not want to let him fall; cf. X, 1934 ff; XIX, 1669 f; XVI, 1702), I must confess that I absolutely cannot find myself in it. I do not dare here to make a . . 1)

Make do with this little then! Finally, I remind you of the following two sayings: Is. 8:20; 1 John 2:27. God guide you into all truth and keep us both in it!

Your sincere friend and brother in the Lord

C. F. W. Walther.

————

1) There is a gap in the letter here.

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    President Matthew Harrison, of the so-called The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod, uses this letter to ostensibly curb the tendencies within his Synod to adopt Reformed, enthusiastic methods. This is certainly a praiseworthy goal. To do this, his LC-MS should be following the Brief Statement of 1932, an "adopted" statement of faith by Synod for the LC-MS.  But they are not doing this, they are giving all kinds of sophist arguments against it by their teachers and leaders.  This is to be expected because they do the same thing against the Lutheran Confessions, denying that the Pope in Rome is the Antichrist, which is clearly stated in the Confessions, certainly by Luther; openly teaching that the Bible is "divine-human" rather than divine authorship, in contradiction to the Apology IV, §108, etc..   But most importantly, Harrison's LC-MS has left its Hauptartikel, its chief article of sola fide, or “through faith alone”, or in other words, The Lutheran Doctrine of Justification.  For if it had not turned away from this article, they would not be calling the Roman Catholic Church a changed church (one calls it “the glasnost of Vatican II”) which has never denied its chief articles set down in the Council of Trent.

      And so it is ironic that Matthew Harrison's church, the LC-MS, has become like the Bavarian Church that Walther spoke of in a previous letter to student Fackler in Germany, which “now has many analogies with the Roman Church of 1530.” And Luther's word for the Roman Church was that he could not “imagine that they would allow us the pure Gospel. For in doing so, they would have to be willing for us publicly, from the pulpit and in writing, to condemn their errors and everything that is contrary to the Gospel.”

      True, the LC-MS did not officially "throw me out", but Walther also said that 

“I can only counsel to separate when it is notorious that it has become “hardened”; and this is notorious only when every effort has been made to bring it back, but to no avail. Calling upon my good right in such a fellowship, I do not leave it until I am … indirectly compelled to go out by being put in the position of either doing something against conscience or giving way.”

(This series continues in Part 4, Walther's letter on the issue of slavery. Walther's letter to Carl Manthey-Zorn regarding his departure from the Leipzig Missionary Society.)

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[» The following was written before I knew of Rev. McCain's passing on Nov. 25, 2020. «]

      And so this is my response to Rev./CPH Publisher Paul McCain, who some months ago commented publicly on my blog to counsel me to find a church to attend.  I have only just now published his comment here.  [Comment of Sept. 27, 2020, published Jan. 9, 2021] — 

To: Rev./Publisher McCain:  you offered your comment in the spirit of counseling, and I now offer the above as counseling for you in return. Walther in the final analysis does not command one to wait until one is "thrown out", but also allows one to go out when one is “indirectly compelled to doing something against conscience.” That is exactly what happened to me.  Although not the final reason for leaving the LC-MS, I would relate to you the actual situation among the LC-MS parishioners. As I returned to my Christian faith, I wanted to share God's Word with fellow congregation members. I went to visit an elderly man in the hospital and brought my Bible to read some verses to him to comfort him.  When I arrived, the man's son was with him who, I recall, was also a member of the congregation.  When the son saw what I had in my hand (my Bible), and discovered my intentions, he summarily asked me to leave the room.  I may take that as being "thrown out" by the LC-MS. 

[Now see the next blog post, an Excursus on Rev./Publisher Paul T. McCain's passing.]