![]() |
Pastor Fr. Lochner |
![]() |
Missouri Synod co-founder F. A. Crämer |
Honorary Memorial
for the blessed
Friedrich August Crämer.
Professor of Theology and Director of the Practical Theological
Seminary at Springfield, Ill, by his oldest friend F. Lochner.
(Continued.)
But now the time had come for Crämer to lay down the pastoral staff he had held in Frankenmuth for only five years and be placed in a completely different field of work. The first professor of the practical theological seminary, the unforgettable August Wolter, who was only 31 years old, had fallen victim to the terrible cholera raging in our country on August 31, 1849, after barely three years of blessed work, by voluntarily submitting himself and his students to the care of the church members affected by the epidemic, and Professor A. Biewend, who had provisionally taken over the teaching after Wolter's death, had been transferred to the preacher's seminary in St. Louis. In October 1850, Crämer was unanimously elected professor of the Practical Seminary.
The electoral college's nomination of Crämer as a candidate for the vacant professorship in Der Lutheraner at the beginning of August [vol. 6, p. 200, August 6, 1850] hit him and his congregation like a bolt from the blue. Not only had the initial conditions of the settlement been overcome and the congregation well organized, but now the bond between the pastor and a congregation whose purpose and origins had been so peculiar and which, after five years of living together under such peculiar conditions, had become ever more firmly knit, was suddenly to be severed. But there was something else why pastor and congregation could not find a solution to this relationship. These were the differences that were now coming to light between Pastor Löhe and the Missouri Synod regarding the doctrine of Church and Ministry, ordination, church authority and church constitution.[Lochner's emphasis]
Even when this writer [Lochner] had sent Löhe a copy of the draft of a synod constitution that had been drawn up in St. Louis immediately after his return home [~ July 1846], the latter [Löhe], for all his joy at the establishment of a synod union between his missionaries [Sendlinge] and the Saxons, expressed a number of reservations. He believed he saw democratic, independentist principles in the church constitution. He also missed the episcopal element in the provisions on the synod leadership, and the equality of the parish deputies with the pastors at the synods seemed to him to be "democratizing" and "Americanizing". When, however, as a result of this, some of the missionaries had doubts as to whether they could also drop the representation of Löhe's thoughts on church constitution without internal disloyalty by accepting such a constitution and therefore turned to Löhe for advice and instructions, the latter [Löhe] nevertheless wrote to Dr. Sihler on October 12, 1846:
![]() |
Wilhelm Löhe |
"To overcome the concerns of the Saxon brothers, my thought would require representation, which is currently impossible. But I value unity much more than the realization of my dearest thoughts in this matter. I am very serious that unity is the main thing on the basis — not on the basis of all Luther's words (for the Church did not follow him in everything) — but on the basis of the Book of Concord of 1580. Therefore, I also hereby release all my friends who have some reservations about the new synod constitution from any real or believed obligation to assert anything other than what was adopted in the Fort Wayne conference. They may, in my judgment, join the Synod with full peace of mind, and, were I over there, I would also join."
And even though he resisted the interpretation that he had changed his convictions, he concluded: "Unity is to me the most beautiful point in the whole development of the matter; before it is given up, everything else should give way." But when Löhe's Aphorisms on the New Testament Offices and their Relationship to the Congregation appeared in 1849, it became apparent that the difference that had emerged concerning our synod constitution had deeper roots, and our synod realized with dismay that Löhe was following hierarchical principles in the doctrine of the Church, the Office of the Ministry, and the like, and had entered the path of Romanism. [Lochner’s judgment also.]
Crämer could have had no trace of the above concerns [of Löhe] about our synod constitution. He, with whom I had already occasionally perceived in Germany from disputations he sometimes had with Löhe that he feared a Romanizing tendency in Löhe, welcomed in the draft of our synod constitution the expression of his innermost convictions, and therefore, after returning from that Fort Wayne conference in August [1846], introduced his congregation [in Frankenmuth] to it and instructed them about the biblical doctrine of Church and Ministry on which it was based. The result was that the congregation joined the synod all the more joyfully in the spring of 1847, or rather, helped to found it. It was therefore inevitable that Löhe's aphorisms upset the congregation and Crämer felt compelled to instruct them about their [Löhe’s “Aphorisms”] errors and to speak out openly against Löhe in a letter.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Comments only accepted when directly related to the post.