CM6b: Harrison omits Walther's emphasis of congregation, his whole point (1879 Iowa)

      This continues from Part CM6a (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. — The following is a 3-part comparison of a famous paragraph that Walther wrote in the 1879 Iowa District essay and the two subsequent English translations published by Concordia Publishing House, the last of these being a reprint by LC–MS President Matthew Harrison. I have identified who was responsible for each publication: 

Iowa 1879, p. 47 ————————— Everette Meier translation (1992 CPH, Essays for the Church, Vol. II, p. 26; CPH download) —————————— Harrison, At Home in the House of My Fathers, CPH 2009, p. 262

Let's have a larger look again at Harrison's 2009 reprint of Walther's paragraph:

Do you see it?  There is no emphasis of the highlighted words as they are in both Walther's original German, and in the original 1992 CPH English translation of Everette Meier. It took me several looks at it to realize what Harrison had done. Although Harrison kept the English translation of Walther's word "Gemeinde" or "congregation", he completely downplays Walther's whole point by ignoring Walther's emphasis, that the congregation, not the synod or pastor must decide matters of adiaphora, including matters of the liturgy and ceremonies! That is how Walther taught the Formula of Concord on this point, FC SD X, 9. 

      Yet Harrison even went further in his book Church and Office, p. xii, charging Prof. J. T. Mueller, in his English translation of Church and Ministry, with "hyper-congregationalizing":

“[J. T.] Mueller hyper-congregationalizes Walther's original.“

Harrison is here guilty of falsely charging Prof. J. T. Mueller with falsifying Walther, when Mueller was only emphasizing exactly what Walther emphasized from the Formula of Concord in his 1879 Iowa essay.

    Even more! In 2015, CPH published another reprint of Evertte Meier's 1992 translation of Walther's 1879 Iowa essay in its collection Walther's Works: Church Fellowship. Did they omit Walther's strong emphasis in this famous paragraph, as Pres. Harrison did in 2009? Here is how it was printed, on page 273:

 

Look closely. Although this 2015 reprint put the emphasis of italics back into Everette Meier's 1992 translation, it omitted the bolding of the word "congregation".  Walther emphatically stressed the rights of the local congregation in this paragraph.  Look again at the original German publication above. — I am not done yet with Walther's famous paragraph in the 1879 Iowa essay. 

    Could there be even more to this story? I discovered a surprising detail in the 2015 CPH reprint of Meier's 1992 translation. Editor Prof. Gerhard Bode, in the CPH book Walther's Works: Church Fellowship, p. 272, did the unthinkable…, he (and CPH Publisher Paul T. McCain?) used the 1921 Triglotta for quotations from the Lutheran Confessions!… instead of A. C. Piepkorn's English translation in Tappert's Book of Concord, p. 612! And in just the Formula of Concord's article X, 9 is a key difference that separates Pres. Harrison from C.F.W. Walther:

FC SD X, 9:

← Triglotta, Walther / Prof. Gerhard Bode:

“Therefore we believe, teach, and confess that the congregation of God of every place and every time…”

Piepkorn / Tappert, Pres. M. Harrison: →

“We further believe, teach, and confess that the community of God in every place and at every time…” [2024-06-21: corrected link]

What may seem like an insignificant difference is actually a major issue for Pres. Matthew Harrison, an issue he wrote about in an essay that he included with a 2015 CPH book, Chemnitz's Works, volume 9.  Harrison makes a point of chastising "every well-meaning Missourian" for believing exactly what Walther taught in his famous 1879 paragraph above. Harrison even admits to being in agreement with Walkout sympathizer A. C. Piepkorn against the Triglotta. I am including an excerpt from this short essay after the break below to document this.

      In the next Part CM6c…, we meet a synod president unlike Pres. Harrison, one who described Walther's famous paragraph as "ravishing eloquence".

["Briefly Noted: FC SD X 9", an excerpt from Harrison's essay, follows the break:]

[Chemnitz's Works, Volume 9 (Church Order) - Concordia Publishing House (cph.org), p. xxxii-xxxiii (excerpt), Matthew Harrison, “Luther, the Confessions, and Confessors on Liturgical Freedom and Uniformity”:]

Briefly Noted: FC SD X 9 (by M. Harrison)

Concerning FC SD X 9, it has long been popular to interpret Gemeine Gottes as though it meant each individual congregation. In fact, as I have noted elsewhere,70 the Triglotta (1921),71 in updating the German of the Formula, chose Gemeinde for Gemeine, thus (erroneously) leading every well-meaning Missourian to assume that what is intended by FC X is that each and every local congregation has the autonomous right, according to the Confessions, to do as it pleases in matters liturgical.  While Gemeine may mean a local congregation, the word (like Kirche and Versammlung) can and often does have both a wide and a narrow sense in the contemporary literature. When the Formula speaks in terms of adiaphora, it is doing so against the backdrop of the Interims, which imposed certain abrogated ceremonies (none of which involved the standard Western pattern of the Mass—except the Canon), such as salt at Baptism, prostration at ordination, fasting, etc. In our day it is common to read FC X as though it were defending an individual congregation’s right to be liturgical or to dispense with all liturgy. [This is what Walther taught! See above paragraph from his 1879 Iowa essay.] This ignores the fundamental assertion of the Augustana regarding the conservative intent of the Lutheran Confessions to retain the Western rites and liturgical usages (purified), and that the Apology does not present a Lutheran church the option of being “nonliturgical,”72 as is commonly understood in our circles. All of this is completely in accord with Luther’s directives in the 1520s. There Luther, as we saw, advocated liturgi­cal unity for the sake of love in each Herrschaft or Stricht (i.e., principality or district). This (and not “local congregation”) is precisely what the Formula is talking about when it uses the term Gemeine (which is translated correctly as “community” by A. C. Piepkorn in Tappert’s edition of the Book of Concord). This, too, accords precisely with Augustana VII’s “It is not necessary for the true unity of the church that ceremonies instituted by men should be observed uniformly in all places [allenthalben].” Allenthalben means as much as “every quarter” or “region” or “district.” Much more can and must be said about FC X, but this will suffice for our purposes here.