The tone in which this happened is so well known that we need to qualify it in more detail. But because the closing prayer of Superintendent Fauck asked us to forget the discord in an extremely heartfelt and pleasant way, we should not take it upon ourselves to refresh our memory of the addresses in question by quoting the offensive statements here.
Back To Luther... and the old (German) Missouri Synod. Below are thoughts, confessions, quotations from a Missouri Synod Lutheran (born 1952) who came back to his old faith... and found more treasures than he knew existed in the training of his youth. The great Lutheran lineage above: Martin Luther, C.F.W. Walther, Franz Pieper.
Search This Blog
Sunday, March 17, 2024
RH2: "So much about the Missouri Synod": Hoffmann's report
Thursday, March 14, 2024
RH1: German pastor: Yes & No on Missouri; Hochstetter's critique (Part 1 of 12)
Pr. Christian Hochstetter |
To this day no report from German state-church circles has appeared in print which acknowledges so much about the Missouri Synod as this lecture by the late Pastor R. [Rudolf] Hoffmann [RH].
- "Walther's [Altenburg] theses were a resounding success" (p. 9)
- "The greater right lay on the side of Missouri" vs. Pastor Grabau (p. 16)
- "The doctrinal unity is built on the Lutheran Confession" (p. 20)
- "the unshakeable consistency with which they rest on the symbolic books" (p. 23)
- Walther's "astonishing wealth of thorough scholarship" (p. 24)
- "highly commendable that they have uncovered the hidden treasures of doctrine" (p. 25)
- "… difficult for anyone to agree with their democratic conception of Church and Ministry" (p. 16)
- "excessive language" (p. 19)
- Confessions are a "paper pope" (p. 28)
- "exaggerated Lutheranism" (p. 28)
- "arrogance of having pure doctrine" (p. 29)
- "unbiblical and un-Lutheran radicalism" (p. 32)
Saturday, March 9, 2024
"According to a pure understanding": true unity of the Church
And to the true unity of the Church it is enough to agree concerning the doctrine of the Gospel and the administration of the Sacraments.
And for the true unity of the church, it is enough to agree on the doctrine of the Gospel and the administration of the sacraments.
For this is enough for the true unity of the Christian Church, that the Gospel is with one accord [einträchtiglich] preached according to a pure understanding, and the sacraments are administered according to the divine Word.
Thursday, March 7, 2024
Luther on the Church in the End Times (Dan. 12:11-12), not in American Edition (yet)
And from the time that the daily sacrifice shall be taken away, and the abomination that maketh desolate set up, there shall be a thousand two hundred and ninety (1290) days. Blessed is he that waiteth, and cometh to the thousand three hundred and five and thirty (1335) days.
14 But I would like to interpret the daily sacrifice [Dan. 12:11] in a spiritual way, that it is the Holy Gospel, which must remain until the end of the world, together with the faith and the Church. But nevertheless it may happen that the world will become so epicurean that there will be no public preaching [or pulpit] in the whole world, and public speaking will be a vain epicurean outrage, and the Gospel will be heard only in houses by the fathers of the house; and this will be the time between the words of Christ on the cross: Consummatum est [“It is finished”], and: Pater, in manus tuas commendo spiritum meum [“Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit”, Luke 23:46]. For just as Christ lived a little after such Consummatum, [consummation], so also the Church can remain a little after the public silence of the Gospel. And just as the daily sacrifice of the Jews was indeed done away with in the seventh week by the Apostles' council [Acts 15:6], and yet remained afterward until the destruction of Jerusalem, and was also kept by the Apostles themselves where they wished (but without necessity), so also the Gospel can publicly become dormant [liegen] and remain silent in the pulpit, and yet be preserved by pious Christians in homes.
15 But such misery should not last longer than 1290 days, that is, four and a half years; for without public preaching the faith cannot stand for long, because at this time the world also becomes more evil in one year. The last 1335 days will finally be evil, so that there will continue to be little faith even in homes. Therefore He says: Blessed is he who endures until that Day. As if to say, as Christ said [Luke 18:8]: “When the Son of Man comes, do you think he will find faith on earth?”
16 Almost all teachers have spoken of such four and a half years, and all the books are full of them, without pointing to the reign of the Antichrist [Endechrist], which, according to the order of the text, Daniel does not suffer, who goes on to prophesy what is to happen after the fall of the Antichrist, and places these four and a half years after Michael, and after the oath of the angel on the water.
17 And although this interpretation seems as if one should be certain of the Last Day, which day or year it should come, that yet Christ denies knowing, Acts 1:7 and in the Gospel [Mark 13:32], yet it falls far short. First of all, if the sacrifice of the Gospel is made in public, no one will be able to recognize the year or the day when it begins, since it cannot cease on one day in all sacrifices. On the other hand, even if it were already known when it should begin, the 1335 days are set above the 1290, which no one in the whole world would recognize. And in summary, I think that these 1335 days will not be publicly understood as being fulfilled on the Last Day. Unless God were to raise up a Noah, for example, who could count these same days and certainly fulfill them.
18 But I for myself am content with this, that the Last Day must be at the door, for the signs which Christ preached and the Apostles Peter and Paul have now almost all come to pass, and the trees are budding, the Scriptures are greening and blossoming. Whether we can't just know the day is not the point; another make it better; it is certainly all at the end.
Tuesday, March 5, 2024
H6b: Pasche’s history, part 2: Germany–>America; to "the world-famous, truly Lutheran, Missouri Synod"
CHAPTER 4: Our new home where I was born.
I, Frederick Emil Pasche, was born in the village of Baiersberg, Germany, April 8, 1872. Our village is forty-five miles from Berlin and five miles from Kustrin on the Oder River which flows northward into the Baltic Sea. …
Our house was built with wood and clay, the roof being tiled. The trellis work, covered with grapevine …
We loved our home. My forefathers were lucky to be among those who were permitted to settle down here in the Oder Valley where the soil was exceptionally rich. …
CHAPTER 5: Our Church
… Our church was yet called a Lutheran church. But many things have happened in Germany which deeply affected the Lutheran church. Rationalism arose. … the attempt of the State to combine the Protestant denominations, chiefly the Lutheran and Reformed into one church. This movement, called "The Union", began in Prussia and then spread to other parts of Germany. …
What was to be done so that a truly Lutheran Church, unhindered by State control and freed from rationalistic unbelief, could flourish? … A call for the organization of emigrants was issued, which met with a very hearty response. More than six hundred people signified their willingness to leave home and friends and try to build up their lives, and above all, their church, on the American frontier. … these people found themselves in a new country, ready to build their homes and…their church. And what a great and wonderful church they were privileged to build; the world-famous, truly Lutheran, Missouri Synod. … This is our church, a church of which we are proud. It teaches the Word of God …
CHAPTER 6: We go to America
… Mother…remained unshaken in her faith and taught us children to pray, and she read with us from Spangenberg's Postil, a good old Lutheran sermon book with Bible pictures in it.
…Our good luck was that Mother's father had been good enough to deposit safely $400 for Mother before her marriage. And this sum was just enough to bring us to America, the land of great plenty. It was the end of November 1881, and the voyage over the Atlantic was extremely stormy.
CHAPTER 7: The land where milk and honey flows.
We came to America. It is good to be here. In the Old World many dangers threatened us. … America is the land of liberty. We feel really at home here. We are happy. We sing "America".
Saturday, March 2, 2024
H6a: Missouri pastor, a "Salzburger": F. E. Pasche's personal account
Pastor F. E. Pasche |
CHAPTER 1: My forefathers' first country.
At the time of the Lutheran Church Reformation my forefathers lived in the Austrian crownland of Salzburg, on the Eastern slopes of the Alps …
God also had blessed them quite abundantly in spiritual and heavenly things. Here the doctrines of Luther were introduced at an early period. Here Staupitz, the friend of Luther, spent the last years of his life; here Paul Speratus, Urban Rhegius, and others, spread the Gospel during the Reformation; here George Sharer [Georg Scherer, no English Wikipedia] was beheaded in 1528 for his Lutheran witness. Here Luther's Bible translation and Catechism and the Augsburg Confession were cherished and, despite all attempts of the Salzburg archbishops to extirpate Lutheranism, remained in the mountains and valleys and mines of the Alpine country.
It remained in the mountains long after the pastors were banished, through the Bible and the Lutheran writings. The miners sang the hymns of Luther and Speratus. The Lutheran books, for which the archbishops hunted, were hid in cellars and secret places in walls. …
The last edict of yet more cruel banishment was issued in 1731. Frederick William I of Prussia received twenty thousand fugitives in his kingdom, while a small number found refuge in the state of Georgia in America.
CHAPTER 2: How they were ousted from their country.
Firmian, the archbishop of Salzburg, had the most splendid palaces and gardens. He loved riches, was stingy, but given to drunkenness and wild life. When in the heat of much drink he was told that there were yet many secret heretics in his beautiful land he swore to exterminate all heretics from his land … He launched a harder persecution than ever before.
Then the Lutherans united in a firm covenant. August 5, 1731, more than a hundred of their representatives descended from the surrounding mountains to an inn at Schwarzach, were seated around a table, took salt, and made an oath never to deny the true evangelical faith, but rather be steadfast in it in life and death. …
But then and there these Lutherans also resolved to send spokesmen to all the Protestant rulers in Germany with the request to do something for them. This was emphatically done by the Prussian king who spoke for them before the Emperor and realm. The infamous archbishop Firmian … treated them as rebels who stirred up sedition and disorder, and he asked the papistic Emperor to help him subdue them. The Emperor acted as if he believed the rebellion fiction and sent six thousand soldiers "to quench the rebellion". … now they could not get away as all passes were guarded and emigration was stamped a crime which sharpened the punishment. But two men managed to slip by the guards that watched the border and got through to Berlin. Here Frederick William I received them friendly and promised them to do all he could for them on the day when they would be driven from their native country.
That day was soon to come. In November 1731, the decree of emigration was issued: All those that owned no immovable property were to leave within eight days and all owners of such property must leave within three months. This decree, too, was a shameless breach of the Westphalian Treaty of Peace according to which all were guaranteed a full three years of time before their free and unmolested departure. But this intolerant archbishop claimed that the Westphalian Treaty of 1648 was not binding in this case because, he said, these people were not mere religious renegades but rebels. How hard the lot of these poor people now became. Winter set in, but leave they must. … They were promised to be set free if they would swear off the Lutheran faith within fifteen days and again become Roman Catholic which, however, very few did.
Thus these suffering persecuted fugitives left their beloved Southern homes and wandered through foreign lands in a cold world. In several troops and at different times, from November 1731 until November 1732, thirty thousand of these people thus emigrated.
… [God] directed all these things for their best. He already had prepared a new and good place for them afar North. … Then their mouth was filled with laughter and their tongue with singing.
- - - - - - - - - - Concluded in Part 6b - - - - - - - - - -
Without clarification, this leaves the impression of placating its Catholic citizenry, and allowing that the Evangelicals, as Christians, were "subversive" under Catholic rule. The editors of this website may want to learn more about the "Peace of Westphalia, 1648" and why Firmian's ruling was illegal in that it did not allow the proper period of time for the emigrants to prepare. (This reasoning will likely be the reasoning used by the opponents of Christianity here in America in the future.) — In the next Part 6b, we conclude these excerpts, and this series, on South German Lutherans.“Before we sound all too critical about the expulsion of Protestants: Lutheran theology was only one side of the medal; for centuries, religious conflicts were only one aspect of social and political warfare. In a Catholic state with a Bishop as the landlord, a Protestant denomination was automatically a subversive if not hostile political statement.”
Tuesday, February 27, 2024
H5: Salzburgers' emigration: "they went…singing hymns"; now in Georgia, a "reconciliation"?
"... it seemed to me at the time as if I saw before me with the greatest emotion a vivid picture of the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt. There was a mixture of stooping, trembling old men with white hair, strong men and young men in their prime: exhausted and weary old women with powerful women and beautiful young girls. …But anyone who thought that these homeless people, as they approached us, would have filled everything with lamentation and wailing and mourned their pitiful fate with cries that pierced the clouds and streams of tears, would be very much mistaken. It is true that the bystanders were moved by the sight, that tears rolled down their cheeks and their compassion was expressed in sighs. But they [the Emigrants] themselves resembled triumphants and were similar to the old Christian martyrs, of whom it is said that they went to their fate singing hymns. So these confessors of ours approached us singing, and singing they left the city again, driven out of their homeland, wandering through many dangers on rough paths in lands unknown to them, without knowing where they would one day find a home and a permanent abode."
Modern scholars tend to call reports such as the above "legend". A full English machine translation of this 51-page booklet is available here, German text here. (Or view immediately below) See pages 17-18 for a closer account of the Catholic actions leading up to the expulsion. This book was produced by Salzburger descendants, not by objectivist unbelieving scholars. I have added highlighting to certain portions of interest, for example page 47, of an association to preserve "the heritage of ancestors expelled from the Salzburg region because of their Lutheran faith". I have also highlighted some problematic points. [See the next blog post Part 6a about this.]
If one of the central principles of liberalism, for example, is a religious liberty such as that codified in a separation of church and state, it must be admitted that this is not, contrary to [George] Weigel, a long-held or “basic” Catholic belief. It was a principle explicitly rejected as “absolutely false” and “a most pernicious error” by popes as recently as the twentieth century.