Walther, 1871: "True Union, our Ev. Luth. Church", against Unionism (Part 1 of 8, Un1)

      More than forty years ago, in 1981, Concordia Publishing House published a book, Editorials from "Lehre und Wehre" (LuW), of English translations of some of C. F. W. Walther's editorials to the theological monthly Lehre und Wehre. Most of these were "Forewords", the first essay of each new year.  Readers who have not already obtained this book, or others, from the CPH library "Walther's Works" would do well to get these. In particular, the essays in the Church Fellowship book are basic to fully understanding this important topic. 

      Unfortunately CPH did not (or would not) translate all of his editorials and major essays. Very little newly translated material was added for the "Walther's Works" library. So to add to the CPH collection on "Church Fellowship", I am presenting a polished English translation of Walther's "Foreword" for the year 1871, volume 17. — The background for this essay is that although the General Council Lutherans had made progress towards removing false teaching, largely due to Walther's Lutheran confessionalism, yet they too, along with the very liberal General Synod, were now weakening.  As one reads the history of the General Council, a forerunner of today's ELCA, it is a sad fact that its highly-regarded Prof. Charles Porterfield Krauth was not able to keep the Council from falling into Unionism. — From Lehre und Wehre vol. 17 (1871) pp. 1-11 [EN]. All underlining follows Walther's emphasis, highlighting is mine:

Foreword.

"One is now so stupid in thought or so demure in speech that one must offend if one is to speak and hear the truth."

(Hamann 's Werke. II, 235.)

The English rightly call the question of union the "question of the age”. For indeed the question which now chiefly agitates our time in the sphere of the church is none other than this. If formerly the main burning question in the church was: Where is the truth? Where is the true church? Now, however, we are weary of disputing about this, and declare the claim of every church to have the truth and to be the true church to be sectarian a priori. Through the devastation which rationalism has wrought in all ecclesiastical fellowships, such great antagonisms have arisen between the baptized Christians that the differences of the confessions [or denominations] appear to the great majority of them as utterly irrelevant, and the assertion of them, as if they still formed a partition between the Christians, either as pitiable parochialism or as detestable hatred of peace. Now that within each confessional church a few have returned to the confession of certain general truths of Christianity, it is thought that not only the last unfinished earlier struggles within Christendom before the intrusion of the overthrowing rationalism need not be taken up again and brought to a settlement, but that the whole struggle within the church during the time of its existence and the boundary divides that have arisen as a result can be ignored and, so to speak, the ecclesiastical development can begin anew. All those who again recognize Christianity as a religion of supernatural revelation should unite, if not to form an ecclesiastical body, then to form a great evangelical alliance against the powers of unbelief, which are uniting more and more. (page 2).

This spirit of union is not only to be found in those who call themselves United [the Prussian Union, Reformed with Lutherans], but in all the so-called Protestant churches, even in the Lutheran, and in this also in our dear America.

As far as the Lutheran Church in this country is concerned, strange changes for the better have indeed taken place in the short time of the existence of our Synod; but now that it has finally come to the point where all leaven of the unionist spirit is to be swept out of it, the wholesome movement seems to want to come to a standstill.

Many think that now that the General Council has emerged from the apostate Lutheran Church here in America and has reaffirmed, in no uncertain terms, all the symbols of our church, it is only a matter of subtle differences which have been revealed by the well-known "Four Points" [of Charles Porterfield Krauth] which the Ohio Synod presented to it as a test of its orthodoxy and Lutheran character, and for the sake of which it is micro-logical hair-splitting to argue. But this is by no means so. With the answer which the General Council itself gave at its last convention last year to the questions about pulpit and altar fellowship [Pittsburgh Declaration], it proved that its main representatives and leaders are still completely dominated by the unionist spirit and have not yet arrived at the truly Lutheran position. According to this answer, the Council only wants to reject from its pulpits and altars those who have:

“deliberately, maliciously and persistently apostasized from the Christian faith as a whole or in part, especially as it is contained in the confessions of the universal church, namely in its purest form, as it now exists on earth, i.e. the Evangelical Lutheran Church, who therefore overturn the reason known therein, assert, defend and spread such heresies in defiance of the admonitions of the church, and thereby lead souls astray from the way of life..”

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While Walther in 1871 states that "the differences of the confessions [or denominations] appear to the great majority as utterly irrelevant", Dr. Robert Kolb, professor emeritus of Concordia Seminary, said in 2001 that Walther

"provide(s) us with an ecclesiology shaped for a world in which the church was conceived of as divided into 'Konfessionen.' There is no readily understandable American translation of that concept! We have missed the chance to compose an expression of our ecclesiology for the denominational age of North American Christianity.… We will reap only confusion and contention among ourselves and in our relations with other churches if we do not begin soon to formulate a proper expression of Biblical truth regarding the church for a post-denominational age."

A "post-denominational age"? And Walther is not "a proper expression of Biblical truth"? It appears that Dr. Kolb is not only a part of what Walther calls "the great majority" who think that the "Konfessionen" are irrelevant, but that our age needs "to formulate a proper expression of … the church". Is that not the same as modernism? Dr. Kolb demonstrates his own syncretism by these comments and actually fights against Walther. His antagonism is to be expected given his own unionistic endeavors with erring Lutherans! — In the next Part 2, we get more details of how some members of the Council tried to stem the tide.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - -  Table of Contents  - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 

Part 1: Walther's LuW "Foreword" against Unionism

Part 2: General Council turns away from orthodoxy

Part 3: Christians are among erring, but no fellowship with them; "our little Lutheran Zion"

Part 4: Reformed, Baptists, Methodists — their errors

Part 5: Lutherans not "partakers of errors of others"

Part 6: Fundamental doctrines, narrow vs. broad sense

Part 7: True Visible Church = True Union Church = the Evangelical Lutheran Church

Part 8: Postscript: Unionism & prayer fellowship (Der Luth. 1908);  LCMS: Scott Murray, Samuel Nafzger