CM4a: Pieper follows Walther on Church & Ministry (I); Pieper, "our greatest theologian"?

     This continues from Part CM3 (Table of Contents in Part CM1) in a series defending Walther against a false portrayal by LC-MS President Matthew Harrison on the doctrines of Church and Ministry. — One naturally asks the question in all this controversy how the teaching of Franz Pieper fits in.  Did he follow Walther in opposing Loehe and Kliefoth in their teaching on Church and Ministry?   

Without going into further details, we quote from his Christian Dogmatics, vol. 3, p. 447 (also Christliche Dogmatik 3, 511):

"… (Muenchmeyer, Loehe, Kliefoth, etc.) taught a strongly Romanizing doctrine of the ministry, namely, that the office of the public ministry is not conferred by the call of the congregation as the original possessor of all spiritual power, but is a divine institution in the sense that it was transmitted immediately from the Apostles to their pupils, considered as a separate “ministerial order” or caste, and that this order perpetuates itself by means of the ordination."

That is exactly how C. F. W. Walther taught, especially in his "Antitheses". 

      Is it not disingenuous of Pres. Harrison to say of Pieper that he is "our greatest LCMS theologian who is still studied at our seminaries today" when Pieper teaches against his LC-MS "co-founder" Wilhelm Loehe? — That is not all of what Pieper had to say, and we highlight another reference he gave on the same page that documented the even more serious weaknesses of both Loehe and Kliefoth, in the next Part CM4b.