Fundament 2: Unitarians; American classic literature; Lodges

      This continues from Part 1 (Table of Contents in Part 1), a translation of Franz Pieper's essay on the foundation of the Christian faith ("Das Fundament des christlichen Glaubens"). —  Pieper begins with those who practically admit that they are not Christians – the Unitarians.  And he reveals just how widespread this belief is among Americans, then and now.  They are in our heads, in our reading…

= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =

Text preparation and translation by BackToLuther using DeepL, Google Translate, Microsoft Translate, Yandex Translate. All bold text is Pieper's emphasis. All highlighting, red text, and most text in square brackets [ ] is mine.

Das Fundament des christlichen Glaubens.

The Foundation of the Christian Faith.

[by President Franz Pieper, Concordia Seminary; continued from Part 1 - page 35]

The Unitarians and the Foundation of the Christian Faith.

The Unitarians deny the Holy Trinity. This includes the denial of the eternal essential (metaphysical) deity of Christ and, consequently, the denial of the vicarious satisfaction of Christ (satisfactio vicaria).  As surely that the Christian faith is not faith in a mere man, but faith in the living Son of God, (Matt. 16:16) and not only faith in Christ as a model of life, but is faith in the only mediator between God and man, who has given himself a ransom (ἀντίλυτρον) [1 Tim 2:6] for all for that such would be preached in his time, (1 Tim. 2:5-6) so surely have all Unitarians, the Unitarians of former times and in our day, completely abandoned the foundation of the Christian faith. They stand outside the Christian Church, extra ecclesiam, as the first article of the Apology of the Augsburg Confession says. The Unitarian religion is, according to Scripture, blasphemy and idolatry.

Unitarianism has also become widespread in our country, in the United States. It has also generally penetrated the Reformed sects, formerly called “Orthodox” sects, in contrast to Unitarianism, and already holds the majority in some of these sects. At the Northern Baptists’ gathering last year in late May and early June [page 36] in Milwaukee, the “modernists”, that is, the Unitarians, won out across the board. 

Unitarianism, as the Baptist fundamentalists in Milwaukee testified, had also invaded the Baptist mission to heathens, and Dr. Stratton of New York made the correct observation that the Christian Church certainly had no advantage from this Baptist missionary activity. The heathen were “converted” not to Christ, but away from Christ. — 

Furthermore, we must also not forget that the Unitarian religion is a large part of our American classics literature. S.J. Barrows, the author of the article “Unitarianism” in Samuel Macauley Jackson's Concise Dictionary of Religious Knowledge, for example, uses Emerson, Irving, Hawthorne, George W. Curtis, Longfellow, Holmes, Bryant, and historians Prescott, Bancroft, Motley, and others. Therefore, our teachers at our colleges are staggered off their position when reading from these Unitarian writers. The same applies, of course, to reading German classics such as Lessing, Schiller and Goethe.

Furthermore, we must not overlook the fact that Unitarianism also approaches us in the form of the religion of the Lodge, and especially to our congregations. The official Lodge religion of the main lodges is decidedly Unitarian. It’s content is that every man can go to heaven on account of one's own virtue, with the explicit rejection of the Christian belief that only faith in the crucified Christ is the way to heaven. Thus in Webb’s Monitor of Freemasonry  by Robt. Morris, p. 280 [1959 ed., p. 385] : 

“So broad is the religion of Masonry, and so carefully are all sectarian tenets excluded from the system, that the Christian, the Jew, and the Mohammedan, in all their numberless sects and divisions, may and do harmoniously combine in its moral and intellectual work with the Buddhist, the Parsee, the Confucian, and the worshiper of Deity under every form.” 

According to Mackey, Lexicon of Freemasonry  (p.404) [1860 ed., p. 287], the lodge members are also committed to a religion. But it is a commitment to the lodge religion with the express exclusion of the Christian religion. “They  [the lodge members, including those who still want to be Christians] are not permitted to introduce them [namely their “peculiar opinions”] into the lodge or to connect their truth or falsehood with the truth of Masonry.” This establishes the practice of our congregations against the lodges. The practice of our churches against the lodges is based on this. If lodge members notify us for church fellowship, e.g. at the Lord's Supper, we do not have the right to consider them Christians. Because they are members of a society that confesses the Unitarian religion in the most pronounced and abrupt form, they must first prove their Christianity. And this can only happen if their involvement with the Lodge’s religion and any participation in the [page 37] exercise of Lodge religion is renounced. That's not asking too much. Even the weakest Christian sees the justification of this demand.  We must not underestimate the work that the Holy Spirit has in every one, even the weakest Christian. If a person has recognized himself as a damnable sinner before God and trusts in God's atoning blood of Christ—and only such a person can Pastor and congregation hold as a Christian and admit to Communion—he recognizes the lodge religion as a direct denial of Christianity and participation in the Lodge worship as idolatry, with which he wants to have nothing to do. Where in a congregation the Lodges have gained room, it is usually the case that at the first registration for the Lord's Supper, the report of the examination of Christian status is missing. There was no need to inquire whether the person in question recognizes himself as a poor sinner and that the foundation of his confidence before God is the blood of Jesus ​​Christ, the Son of God, which makes us clean from all sin. It is obvious that this test concerning the Christian faith of those who seek communion with us belongs to the concern of the souls and conscientious administration of the sacrament. In this way of dealing with the so-called Lodge Question, hundreds, even thousands of pastors of the Synod have either managed to keep their congregations completely free of lodges or, if individuals have strayed into the camp, return them to the communion of the Christian Church. They acted in the knowledge that the Lodge religion is Unitarian which clearly and boldly pushes aside the foundation of the Christian faith, namely the forgiveness of sins alone for the sake of the blood of the Redeemer. Our pastors acted and will act so in the knowledge that not postponing serious pastoral care is proper here, because it is the life and death of the souls who were purchased by Christ's blood for their life.      F.P.

= = = = = = = = = =  continued in Part 3  = = = = = = = = = = 

      There seems to be nothing written by later LC-MS authors on the matter of lodge members in their churches.  I suspect that any semblance of spiritual discipline, as Pieper outlines for true "Missourians", is largely dispensed with today.

      A more recent account of a handling of a congregation member who was also a Freemason was given by LC-MS pastor Norman Habel in the early 1960s in Brooklyn, New York.  Habel eventually became one of the professors of Concordia Seminary who removed themselves in the 1974 "Walkout".  , He was rather forthright in his 2015 book Why on Earth are you still a Lutheran? Memoirs of a Heretic when he recorded the following conversation with a parishioner (p. 37):

‘Good evening! I am Hans Schmidt, the chairman of the congregation.’

‘See this badge on my lapel? It identifies me as a Freemason. Plan to do anything about it, Pastor?’ The Lutheran Church had publicly declared that Freemasons were heretics, or at least far from the faith, and good Lutherans dare not join them.

Rather taken aback, I invited Hans inside to discuss my understanding of my role: I was expected to preach the sermon, visit the sick and bury the dead... especially bury the dead.

‘My God, you’re young’, said Hans. ‘Hope you survive. Many haven’t. Anyway, welcome to Ft Hamilton Lutheran Church’

I was a gullible boy from the Australian bush thrown into an American jungle. I had been invited to ‘fill in’ for a couple of months at a parish in Brooklyn, New York.

Habel's forthright narrative reveals that he had not been properly trained by his LC-MS teachers (or he had forgotten their teaching) on how to confront such a member as this, as Pieper taught above.

      Pieper includes a rather comprehensive list of American literary figures who wrote from a Unitarian viewpoint.  I have wondered why he did not include Mark Twain since Twain became largely a scoffer of religion through his writings of humor and otherwise, even as he had been identified as "Presbyterian".  He was a member of the Masonic Lodge during his early life. Pieper had plenty of American writers to identify with Unitarianism without the inclusion of Twain, but I remember reading Twain's fictional books as required reading in the education of my youth and can say that he impacted my Christian faith in a negative way, just as Pieper lamented how this was happening in his day. —  In the next Part 3…