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The Congregation's Right to Choose Its Pastor Concordia Seminary - Saint Louis Scholarly Resources from Concordia Seminary Ebooks Print Publications 1-1-1977 The Congregation's Right to Choose Its Pastor C F W Walther Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, [email protected] Fred Kramer Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, [email protected] Wilbert Rosin Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://scholar.csl.edu/ebooks Part of the Religious Thought, Theology and Philosophy of Religion Commons Recommended Citation Walther, C F W; Kramer, Fred; and Rosin, Wilbert, "The Congregation's Right to Choose Its Pastor" (1977). Ebooks. 23. https://scholar.csl.edu/ebooks/23 This Book is brought to you for free and open access by the Print Publications at Scholarly Resources from Concordia Seminary. It has been accepted for inclusion in Ebooks by an authorized administrator of Scholarly Resources from Concordia Seminary. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Ti,, Cong,<&111011'• Righi to Choose lu P utor THE CONGREGATION'S RIGITT TO CHOOSE ITS PASTOR The Congregation's Right to Choose Its Pastor C. F. W. Walther 1- Translated by Fred Kramer Edited with Discussion Questions by Wilbert H. Rosin Concordia Seminary Publications Texts Series - Number 1 The Congregation's Right to Choose Its Pastor / by C. F. W. Walther/ translated by Fred Kramer/ edited by Wilbert H. Rosin Concordia Seminary Publications Texts Series-Number 1 Robert Rosin, General Editor ISBN 0-911770-68-2 Copyright © 1997 Concordia Seminary 801 De Mun Avenue, St. Louis, MO 63105 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of Concordia Seminary, St. Louis. Printed by BookCrafters, Chelsea, Michigan f~ SDlo S- W °:) Z lt"lq / 181709 c_, d-- CONTENTS Preface ........................................................... 7 September 18, 1860 .......................................... 19 October 2, 1860 . .. 28 October 16, 1860 .............................................. 36 November 13, 1860 . .. 39 November 27, 1860 .......................................... 49 December 11, 186() ........................................... 65 January 8, 1861 . .. 79 January 22, 1861 .............................................. 90 February 19, 1861 .......................................... 111 March 5, 1861 . .. 124 June 11, 1861 . .. .. 136 June 25, 1861 . .. 147 July 23, 1861 .. .... .. ...... ..... ..... ..... ............ .. .. .. 160 August 6, 1861 . .. 176 Endnotes . 183 Discussion Questions ....................................... 201 PREFACE The image of the pastor or religious leader, his authority, function and role, is currently a lively topic for discussion, as church groups merge and emerge, as clergy are robed and disrobed, as town and gown and church and state issues erupt and disrupt the peace of the church and the parish. Therefore this translation of Carl Ferdinand Wilhelm Wal­ ther's essay, Das Gemeindewahlrecht, delineating the voting rights of the congregation, appears at an appropriate time. The Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod has not been immune to the church and ministry debate, harking back to what was perhaps the most serious confrontation in 1839- 1841 that had barely subsided when "the Missouri Synod" colony, as it was popularly known, landed in 1839 at Saint Louis, had laid its plans for development in Perry County, and was threatened with dissolution when its bishop, Martin Stephan, was deposed and when laymen, led by Carl Eduard Vehse, attempted to impose a thoroughly congregational church polity. Because C. F. W. Walther emerged at this time as the leader of the Saxons and convinced them of the legitimacy of the colony by providing them with a view of church polity that the Missouri Synod has since held-in theory, if not always in practice-the myth developed that this had always been Walther's view, leaving it only to the occasion of the April 1841 debate to be publicly unveiled. The evidence, however, clearly shows that Walther, like most of the Saxon colony and particularly the pastors, was seriously demoralized by the Stephan affair. Some pastors 8 Preface resigned, including Walther, and to all it appeared in the two years from May 1839 to April 1841 that the colony might break up. Walther's illness at this time, exacerbated if not caused by the depressed state of affairs, brought him to the home of his sister, whose husband was the Rev. E. G. W. Keyl. Until 1839 Walther seems to have been a loyal follower of Stephan and certainly gave no hint that he held the views on church and ministry which he advocated in 1841. His biographers are agreed that he arrived at those views while recuperating at the Keyls where he read Luther's writing intensively, much as he had done in 1831- 1832, also while convalescing. Parenthetically we might note that a half century later Christian Hochstetter in his history of the Missouri Synod speaks of differences between Stephan and Walther even before they came to America, differences which allegedly caused Stephan to suspect Walther and even assign a room­ mate to spy on Walther. No proof is supplied. Walther of­ fers no hint of this. That Walther was chosen to go from Saint Louis to Perry County to confront Stephan in 1839 may have stirred Hochstetter' s imagination and influenced his memory and interpretation five decades later. Consider that Hochstetter wrote just two decades after Leopold von Ranke attempted to write his famous history of the papacy wie es eigentlich gewesen and historians were just beginning to stress the importance of objectivity in historical writing. In any event, Walther in 1841 for the first time clearly enunciated the relation and relevance of the doctrine of the universal priesthood of believers for understanding the church and the organization of congregations, and, subse­ quent to the Altenburg debate, for the calling of pastors and the office of the ministry. Preface 9 Another mistaken theory is that Walther's views of church and ministry grew out of American democracy and that this largely determined the congregational polity of the Missouri Synod. Carl S. Mundinger in Government in the Missouri Synod: The Genesis of Decentralized Government in the Missouri Synod (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1947) has convincingly demonstrated that this could not have been the case, showing that the correlation between American political and economic democracy and Missouri Synod church polity is only apparent, however logical it may seem. Because Walther's essay, DasGemeindewahlrecht, deals with the important topics of church and ministry, because Wilhelm Loehe, Johannes Grabau, and others alleged that Walther had been influenced by the proponents of American , political and economic democracy, and because some present ·. day historians have adopted that view, a listing of Mun­ dinger' s major arguments against American origins for Wal­ ther's position is in order: 1. The Saxons were in America less than a year when Carl Eduard Vehse first proposed a totally congre­ gational church polity-far too little time to change the Saxons' opinion. 2. The Saxon Lutherans did not endorse John Locke and other supporters of empiricism and popular sovereignty. 3. All German Lutherans opposed use of the English and anything "American," because they believed there was an inherent relationship between lan­ guage and faith. 4. Walther and the Saxon Lutherans were not active in politics and therefore could not from that source have imbibed democratic theories. Preface 5. The Saxons tended to isolate themselves from the rest of American society. 6. Because the German pattern of church polity, supported by Grabau and Loehe, had been fol­ lowed for centuries, there was no demand for democracy in the church. We might add that, as compared with the United States, Europe was far behind in its attempts to establish democracy in government. 7. Scripture was the authority for matters of doctrine and conscience, not popular vote. 8. Laymen, led by Carl Eduard Vehse, were driven by the jolt of the Stephan affair to read Luther. The extreme congregationalism which they es­ poused was resisted by the pastors for a year and a half. Walther then, after reading Luther thor­ oughly, used that Lutheran and biblical doctrine of the universal priesthood and placed it in the context of the doctrine of the pastoral office. Luther's exposition of Seri pture, not American democracy, became the source for Missouri Syn­ od polity. How the Missouri Synod would have fared in a nondemocratic setting is quite another question. Religious pluralism flourished in the United States from the beginning to the present. All of American Protestantism enjoyed freedom such as it had never known in Europe. For the most part the church in the three hundred or more political territories of Germany was functioning as a department of I state rather than as an independent entity. While democracy developed in all American churches few if any expressed } their views on polity by means of stated scriptural principles. Walther's contribution was not merely to articulate the Bib- Preface 11 lical doctrine of the universal priesthood which Luther as well as other theologians had stressed, but Walther applied it in the unique American setting and in conjunction with the doctrine of the ministry. Thereby he provided the Missouri Synod with the organizational framework
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