1850 - Walther: Romanizing, Part 2 of 2

      This concludes from Part 1, a translation of Walther's 1850 address to the Synod convention, an essay which targeted the encroaching tendency toward Romanizing in Lutheranism. — Now Walther speaks directly on what the Romanizing tendency consists of.  This 1850 Synod Address was the trumpet call against a false defense of Lutheranism used by over-zealous Lutheran leaders. For those who may have a difficult time sifting out the actual points at issue, there is no better authority than… Prof. C.F.W. Walther.  For my part, the essay helps bring into sharper focus the doctrine of Church and the Office of the Ministry.  We conclude his 1850 address.

= = = = = =  Translation of 1850 "Synodalrede", by BTL using DeepL; all hyperlinks, emphases except underlining are mine.  = = = = = =

[Concluded from Part 1]

…and in the best opinion, to cleanse our Church from the newly accumulated rubble and refuse, they throw out jewels of holy doctrines and orders, for the achievement of which our fathers once joyfully risked their goods and blood. In contrast to the idea of the One Holy Christian Church and the syncretism of our days, they are unmistakably returning more and more to the concept of the Church as a visible, well-organized external institution. [as Theodore Graebner did in 1950; translated.] Contrary to the contempt for the means of grace and all that is objectively given, they are again approaching the doctrine of the power of the sacraments ex opere operato. In contrast to (page 119) the contempt for the old, and against the rejection of all foreign authority and established church institutions, they are now seeking to unite consciences to some human statutes and church orders. In contrast to the degradation of the preaching ministry, they are fighting against the important and just rights of the spiritual priesthood of all Christians as illusions of spiritually proud enthusiasts, and deny the so-called laity themselves the right to choose their pastors, and the right to vote at synods and in the church courts. In this contrast, they also derive the office of the ministry from the power of ordination by pastors who declare it to be a divine order; make the office and ministry of those who are to be mere stewards of God's mysteries a special status preferred to the lay priesthood; grant to the pastors of the Gospel a power and dominion de jure divino [according to divine right] even in those things which are neither commanded nor forbidden in God's Word; thus transform the Christocracy of the congregation of the saints and the chosen, of the free, who are the Mother of us all, of Jerusalem above, into the aristocracy of a Papal State, and finally make the power of the Word and the Sacrament dependent on the office of the one who handles these means of grace.

Although this latter direction has been evident for some time, both in the Lutheran Church in Germany and in America, it has remained without influence on our Synod until recently. In recent times, however, as you know, we have finally come to a serious conflict from two sides. The time when the members of the Synod could be silent spectators of the struggle that this direction has provoked is therefore over. The call to fight for or against has also reached us. —

If it cannot of course be my purpose here to prove the error of that direction, I cannot refrain from pointing out a few things which, to the small extent that I know, we should never lose sight of in our joint decision on this matter. [Quoted in Hochstetter, Geschichte…, p. 204]

The first one is this: This is not at all adiaphora, a set of measures, customs, ceremonies and constitutional questions, on which Christian wisdom decides; it is rather doctrine, that is, something that is not ours but God's – God's name and glory itself; something of which forgiving and giving up is not in our power for the sake of love and peace; something of which a little jot is more valuable than the whole world with all its wisdom and all its treasures; that on which the true Church alone is recognized; for her supreme treasure, in which all her other treasures are contained; for the pound entrusted to her, on whose faithful use and preservation she will one day have to give a strict account to God; for the purity of that heavenly seed on whose purity depends the purity of faith and life, all the light of souls, all the consolation of conscience and the hope of eternal life. Here, then, the old proverb is valid: "Amicus usque ad aras" — the friend up to the altars — ; yes, especially now, the apostolic exhortation is valid for us: ‘A little leaven leaveneth the whole lump’, Gal. 5:9, and what Luther writes about this in the following words: ‘Just as in philosophy, if one misses a little at the beginning, in the end it becomes a very great and immoderate error: so in (page 120) theology it is also true that a small error should pervert and falsify the whole Christian doctrine. For the doctrine is so precisely circumscribed that one can neither add to it nor take anything away from it without much noticeable damage. Therefore the doctrine should be like a fine band of gold, and there should be no crack or break in it; for as soon as such a ring gains a crack or break, it is no longer whole. All the articles of our Christian faith are one, and one is all; and where one lets one go, all the others will surely fall away in time, for they all cling to one another and belong together.’ So far Luther. [Quoted in Walther’s German book on Church and Ministry, p. 118; Walch1, 8, 2653, 109.]

But is that so, — and who among us would deny it? — then it follows secondly that, although the Church does not reject those who err out of weakness, in a particular Church of orthodoxy it is impossible for different doctrines to be treated as equals, and thus also within our synod congregations on those points. If a Church wished to permit this, she would thereby abandon herself; she would no longer be able to apply to herself the Word of the Apostle that the Church is a pillar and foundation of truth; she would thus place herself in the ranks of those [Prussian] Union churches whose characteristic feature is the equal justification of truth and error in their midst, in spite of all the hypocritical protestations which these mishmash churches raise against this accusation as an unfounded one. Above all now, therefore, the apostolic Word applies to us: "But I exhort you, dear brethren, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that you all speak with one voice, and do not let there be divisions among you, but hold fast to one another in one sense and in one opinion."1 Cor. 1:10.  Hence our Luther writes quite correctly: “Life can be sinful and unjust, yes, unfortunately it is all too unjust; but the doctrine must be pure and certain without sin. Therefore nothing iss to be preached in the church, but only the certain, pure and certain Word of God. Where that is lacking, it is no longer the church.” (Opp. Hal. Tom. XVII, 1686).

The third thing that I feel compelled to point out is that the doctrines that we are now dealing with do not belong to those which have not yet been discussed in the Church, but rather to those which have not only already been clearly and distinctly expounded by our most enlightened scholars of God in their private writings in accordance with the Word of God, but of which our whole Church has already, in its public symbols, made a firm common confession before the whole world. Yes, these are doctrines around which the great struggle of the Reformation era was actually once fought and in which the character of our Church is actually reflected. Therefore, if we want to give way on these points, we must consider whether we are not really renouncing our Church; whether we are not ceasing to be faithful servants and members of it; whether we are not breaking our dear oath taken on the Confessions of our Church and admitting to the enemies of our Church that the struggle of our fathers three hundred years ago was at least in part an illegal one, a struggle for error and against the truth.

The fourth thing I allow myself to remember here is finally this: although the points at issue do not concern fundamental articles of the Christian faith, and we are therefore certainly all far from being unkindly and sacrilegiously branding as heretics those who err in them (page 121); yet they are so closely connected with the most important doctrines, with the fundamental articles of our Christian faith, that the deviations in view of them, according to their conclusions, finally and necessarily overturn the foundation for the faith.

Now then, my dearest men and brethren, let us go to work in the name of the Lord. May the Word of God, this unicus judex omnium controversiarum, [“sole judge of all disputes”] be our only judge; may the Church of God be our witness; may the glory of God and the salvation of the redeemed be our only purpose; the awareness of the nearness of God, before whom our inner being is revealed, intimate, uncolored brotherly love, unfeigned humility and untiring patience, the governors of all our words; the promise of God to hear the prayer for light and wisdom and to allow the sincere to succeed, our consolation; but far away, ah, far away be all bitterness and self-opinionatedness: then Jesus Christ, the invisible head of His Church, will be among us in grace and will gloriously lead our work, which is not ours but His, out of the midst of us and will soon transform our present groaning in temptation into joyful psalms of praise and thanksgiving over His help.

Indeed, “according to the law and to the testimony,” [Isaiah 8:20] that is our watchword; whatever happens then, with this solution everyone must win: for to be conquered by the Word of God — is to win. Amen.

= = = = = = = = = = =  End of Address  = = = = = = = = = =

      Along with Walther's battle against Romanizing Lutherans, we also hear in this address the beginnings of his struggle against Pastor Loehe and the later Iowa Synod on "The False Arguments for the Modern Theory of Open Questions" for which he wrote a series of essays published in Lehre in Wehre in 1868 (English translations available here and here). — More about the 1850 Synod Address will be highlighted when I publish Chapter 7 of Hochstetter's wonderful History in upcoming weeks.

1850, Walther's address on Romanizing: "zeal leads them beyond Lutheranism", Part 1 of 2

      As I continue translating Hochstetter's History, now on Chapter 7, I learned of Walther's presidential address to the Fourth Synod in 1850.  Hochstetter highlights the major point of this address – the encroaching tendency towards Romanizing among Lutherans.  Walther's fight against the errors of Romanizing are downplayed or ignored among today's LC-MS leaders and teachers and so it becomes an error that deserves full exposure today, here and now.  I decided to translate this 6-page address to learn exactly what Walther said to the still newly established, pure, Lutheran Church in America, the (old German) Missouri Synod. In this Part 1, Walther laments the passing of 4 pastors in the first 2 paragraphs, then begins his major theme. [2020-09-06: This address was previously also translated by Pastor Joel Baseley in his book From Our Master's Table, p. 248 ff.]

= = = =  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.

Hist7: Chpt 3: Ministry defended, Democratism overcome – spiritual priesthood, not ungodly lay rule

      This continues from Part 6 (Table of Contents in Part 3), a series presenting an English translation of Pastor Christian Hochstetter's 1885 496-page book entitled (abbreviated) The History of the Missouri Synod, 1838-1884. — This chapter covers the settling of the Lutheran emigration after Walther restored the Lutheran doctrine of the Church, but in this installment, he had to defend the Ministry from a different attack. The reader would benefit, as I did, from a re-reading of Franz Pieper's segment on Walther's Doctrine of the Office of the Public Ministry, from the series "Dr. C.F.W. Walther as Theologian" here, or in the printed book. I also benefited from a study of the error of "Donatism" which is in its essence the same as "Democratism". — 

Some quotes from Chapter 3: all emphases, except underlining, are mine:

● 52: "The desire to take their children away from the unbelieving school teachers,… they wanted to snatch… the souls of their children and descendants away from godless philosophy."

● 53: Walther on the 1st log cabin seminary: "Our poverty was so great at that time that even such a small log cabin stood before our eyes like a miracle, for which we could only thank God with tears of joy. … a hierarchical central government over the church, which the lawyers among the former followers of Stephan had cherished, was thoroughly dashed!"

● 54: "Even parents who did not belong to the "Saxon congregation", as it was now called, had to purchase Luther's Small Catechism for their children"

● 55: "young America, whose arrogant, unbridled spirit is not dampened even by the makeshift Sunday school."

● 57: "In 1849 the pernicious epidemic of cholera claimed many victims in Perry County."

● 61: "In 1850 he [Walther] was elected professor of Concordia Seminary..… some had gone from hierarchical Stephanism to the opposite extreme, namely Donatism and Democratism, who declared that Pastor Walther's adherence to the divine rights and powers of the holy ministry was a continuation of the Stephanist system and who tried to persuade the congregation to remove him as a second Stephan."

● 62: Walther to Dr. Vehse: “I have freed you from the fetters of the hierarchy, and therefore I am the less inclined to expect of you, that you will again put your pastors in fetters!”

● 68: "Walther also warns against such a degeneration of the Gospel, which makes it mostly an instruction and teaching;… many more people are lost today because the Gospel is not preached to them without restraint than because they hear the Law too seldom."

● 72: Walther's "desire for the freedom to be allowed to serve God the Lord according to His Word became ever greater. And this justified desire, not a rapturous attachment to Stephan, led Ferdinand Walther to decide to set off for America with the other brethren in the faith in October 1838.… [Walther] refused to swear that blasphemous oath of allegiance to Bishop Stephan."

● 76: "Evangelicals and Methodists, like the high priests in Jerusalem…"

● 77: "We consider false teachers who bear the Lutheran name as little for our fellow believers as we do for the worst blasphemer of the Lutheran name"

● 79: "We are not only going back two centuries, but even more so 3-1/2 centuries, to the time of the Reformation."

● 80: "As Dr. Walther teaches in a Reformation sermon, the Lutheran Church is both: the true Bible Church and the Church of grace, Christianity itself the religion of grace"

● 81: "Neither he [Walther] nor his co-workers were concerned with pleasing North American democracy."

● 84: On Luther and Walther: "The harshness he uses against the enemies of pure doctrine in the Scriptures was not of a quarrelsome and malicious mind, but of a great seriousness and zeal for the truth."

● 85: "Walther is as orthodox as Johann Gerhard, but also as fervent as a Pietist, as correct in form, as a university or court preacher, and yet as popular as Luther himself."

● 89: "Walther is a faithful son of the German Reformation; having emerged from the Saxon Lutheran Church, he separates in Lutheranism the genuine continuation and resurrection of pure apostolic original Christianity."

● 90: Walther "recognizes in theology not a science, for which the innovators consider it to be, but a spiritual skill (habitus)."

Images of some men appearing in Chapter 3:

       Th. Brohm      —      Loeber     —     G.H. Schubert     —     Dr. Vehse    —   O.H. Walther    —   Franz Delitzsch

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The following is an English translation of C. Hochstetter's Geschichte… by BackToLuther utilizing the DeepL Translator with minor assistance from Dr. Fred Kramer's translation.  All hyperlinks, highlighting and red text in square brackets [] are mine. All internal hyperlinks are active in this embedded window, external links should be opened in a new tab or window.

In the next Part 8, Chapter 4. —

      A comparison of the two errors that Walther fought against, Stephan's hierarchy and the Donatism/Democratism of Dr. Vehse and others, shows a more conciliatory stance over against Dr. Vehse than with Bishop Stephan. Walther was truly a champion for the rights of the congregation and would never allow these to be jeopardized.  He would never fight against "Democratism" by Romanizing. He fought it by using Luther, the Confessions, and Lutheran Orthodoxy. — Although the threat of Donatism and Democratism was very real in this installment, it becomes apparent in Hochstetter's History that the more frequent and pernicious error that Walther had to fight against, throughout his lifetime, was… Romanizing hierarchical tendencies – Stephan first, and later with Grabau and Loehe. — After the break below, a small print, in-line (not embedded), version of Chapter 3 is given, not for the general reader but for search engine searchability. — In the next Part 8, Chapter 4. —