Authority Vested: A Story of Identity and Change in the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod

Christian Century, Feb 13, 2002 by Edgar Krentz

Authority Vested: A Story of Identity and Change in the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod. By Mary Todd. Eerdmans, 352 pp., $20.00 paperback.

THE LUTHERAN Church--Missouri Synod made the newspapers recently when one of its leaders prayed as part of a service at Yankee Stadium arranged by Mayor Rudy Guiliani and emceed by Oprah Winfrey. The LCMS's ultraconservative wing, sniffing "syncretism," asked that the offending pastor, David Benke, be expelled from the synod. When they learned that Gerald Kieschnick, the president of the synod, had approved Benke's participation at the service, the right wing attacked him too. The synod is now snarled in a debate over the duties of the church's president according to Missouri Synod "canon law."

The title of this work has a double meaning. Mary Todd writes an insider's history of ecclesial authority in the LCMS as 1) inherently male (hence "vested") and 2) ironically shifting from an original intense congregationalism to structural authoritarianism exercised from the central church offices, which by now are as authoritarian as pre-Vatican II Rome (my comparison, not hers). She takes the changing roles of women in the church as the focus for her account of that history, though her study has implications that go far beyond that concern.

Todd's account is clearly driven by a passion for equality in the church. She divides the history of the LCMS into three roughly half-century periods. The first runs from 1831 to the end of the 19th century. The LCMS began as an emigrant group committed to a single leader, Martin Stephan, who was regarded as a bishop. When he was, rightly or wrongly, defrocked, the reaction shaped the LCMS for its first half-century: it was strongly congregational and suspicious of all centralized authority. When these immigrant congregations established the LCMS in 1847, the constitution carefully described the synod as only advisory to the member congregations.

At the same time the church largely looked to a single person for leadership: C. F. W. Walther, the dominant figure from 1839 till his death in 1877. He had formulated a theory of ministry and congregation that enabled these immigrants to remain in America when their leader was defrocked. Their inheritance from the territorial churches of Germany had suggested that they were not able to be a church without a duly ordained bishop. Walther was president of the church body, president of its major seminary, editor of its house organ, prolific theological writer, and defender of what he perceived as the truth in controversies about the ministry.

In the second period, roughly 1900 to 1950, the LCMS shifted from an essentially German-speaking ethnic church to an English-language denomination. Todd does not mention the significance of the two world wars in this regard. Whereas Missouri German Lutherans were viewed with suspicion and hostility during World War I, they paraded their patriotism in World War II, with American flags in their chancels and honor rolls of those in the military hanging in their narthexes.

But Todd describes well the problems raised by this Americanization of the LCMS. Under Walther's successor at Concordia Seminary, Franz Pieper, the synod identified itself with the conservative theology of The Fundamentals in opposition to "modernism." (My father had those ten paperback volumes on his shelves in the 1930s.)

Tood documents how the push for women's voting rights in the secular world was opposed by many theologians (all of them male, of course) in the LCMS. At the same time Philip Wambsganss founded the first school to train women as deaconesses, modeling it on the Diakonissenanstalten in Germany. The program was independent of the synod. When it moved to Valparaiso University in the 1950s and attracted many women who wished to do formal church work but also be elementary school teachers, the synod wanted to take it over.

Not surprisingly, Todd devotes most space to the third period, roughly 1944 to the present. I lived through this period in LCMS history--until I was removed from the LCMS clergy roster along with other members of the Concordia Seminary faculty in the 1970s. In view of that, I am not an unbiased reviewer. In that period 44 leading theologians and pastors published a "Statement" which attempted to call the church to change its often loveless actions; this prompted a mounting reaction from the extreme right.

During this period women became frequent teachers in the church's schools and colleges (not, to be sure, in seminaries, except as librarians), obtained the vote in congregations, and began to make appeals for equality in the church, including ordination into the ministry. The right wing came out against women's ordination and has set the parameters for LCMS discussion to this day. Its rejection is based on an ahistorical, literalist reading of 1 Corinthians 14:33-36, 1 Timothy 2:11-14, and a theology of the orders of creation that affirms the subordination of women to men. (A sister church in Germany, the Selbststandige Evangelische Lutherische Kirche, began a discussion of the ordination of women last year and has produced a document that calmly presents the arguments on both sides. Should it decide, with the majority of Lutherans in the world, to ordain women, it will be interesting to see how the Missouri Synod reacts.)