Wielding the Sword of the Spirit: Volume One: The Doctrine and Practice of Church Fellowship in the Missouri Synod (1838-1867) by Peter Prange. Published by Joh. Ph. Koehler Press, Wauwatosa, WI, 2021. Hardcover 425 pages. $39.99. ISBN: 978-171634457

God’s Word provides us with many unchanging principles. Two of those principles are the directions to “separate from people who impenitently persist in sin or false teaching” and to “patiently instruct Christians who have fallen into error through weakness or lack of knowledge.” Knowing how to evangelically apply these two principles in a timely way is one of the most difficult problems in pastoral theology. These two principles are unchanging, but the specific applications of the principles may vary with circumstances. Wielding the Sword of the Spirit helps Christians wrestle with this dilemma by presenting the fellowship practices of C.F.W. Walther and the Missouri Synod between 1838 and 1867 as a test case. Since an evaluation of specific practices cannot be divorced from the context and circumstances that provoked them, the bulk of this book is a thorough survey of inter-Lutheran relationships (or, all too often, inter-Lutheran battles) during this thirty-year period which was so formative for American Lutheranism. Interspersed between the historical episodes are reflections on how successful Walther was in balancing his two concerns of strongly confronting the perpetrators of false teaching and patiently trying to win the victims who were caught in errors due to their weakness or lack of knowledge. A goal of the book is to get its readers to ponder how we can strive to find balance in the dealing with the same issues today. This book is a very helpful resource to help Christians wrestle with these questions.

The Historical Setting

C.F.W. Walther occupied center stage in the history of the doctrine and practice of church fellowship in American Lutheranism in the 19^th century. He did this as the leader of the Missouri Synod, beginning in 1847, and as the leader of the Evangelical Lutheran Synodical Conference of North America (aka Synodical Conference) beginning in 1872. Between the year 1838, when he and his fellow Saxon immigrants left Germany under the corrupt leadership of Bishop Martin Stephan, and 1882, when he and his fellow Synodical Conference delegates refused to recognize brotherly fellowship with Professor F.A. Schmidt and the Norwegian Synod, Walther lived and breathed the principles and practice of church fellowship as he struggled to clarify fellowship relations between groups of German immigrants who were streaming into America. This task involved establishing and clarifying the Missouri Synod’s relationship with other synods founded by the immigrants in America and with the churches and mission societies whom the Saxons had left behind in Europe.

Volume One of this two-part history covers the years from the Saxon immigration to Missouri in 1838-1839 until 1867, just before the founding of the General Council. It charts the history of the Missourians’ doctrine and practice of church fellowship during their first thirty years in America. It also provides an in-depth account of how they came to the positions they held on important matters of theology. Some of the chief episodes on this journey include:

• the internal struggles among the Saxon immigrants after they deposed their bishop Martin Stephan for sexual and financial misconduct;

• attempts to establish fellowship with Johannes Graubau and the Buffalo Synod;

• relations with the Ohio Synod and other Eastern Lutherans;

• the creation and dissolution of the relationship with Wilhelm Loehe and the pastors whom he sent to aid the Missouri Synod;

• and the creation and the eventual tearing apart of the Missouri Synod’s relationship with the Norwegian Synod.

Telling the story of these various episodes is complicated by the fact that they are not chronologically successive episodes but were often overlapping and intertwining events.

The Internal Struggles of the Saxon Immigrants

This section is less about establishing or preserving fellowship ties and more about doctrinal and spiritual struggles among the Saxons themselves. Among the topics in this section are:

• the fellowship crisis in Germany brought on by doctrinal deterioration due to rationalism and by the government-enforced union of Lutheran and Reformed churches in Prussia;

• the hardships the immigrants faced in trying to establish a new home on the wild frontier;

• and the struggles of the Saxon immigrants to reach a biblical understanding of the doctrines of church and ministry after it had became necessary for them to depose their tyrannical and immoral bishop.

Here we will limit our discussion to the fellowship lessons learned during these struggles.

As a result of the battle against Stephan, the Saxons broke free from the false belief that they were the one true church on earth. Because of their strong fellowship practices, the Missouri Synod has often been falsely accused of believing that they were the one true church, but this has never been true during their post-Stephan history.

Because they themselves had been duped by Stephan and had blindly followed him in weakness and ignorance, Walther and his followers developed a sympathy and understanding for the victims of false teachers which was reflected in their subsequent dealings with other groups and individuals. This was perhaps the most important outcome of this sad period.

After Stephan’s flagrant sins were exposed, he was deposed from the office of bishop by his fellow clergy, who did not involve the congregation in this process as much as they should have. After being removed from his office, Stephan was removed from the colony by being rowed across the Mississippi River and dumped on the Illinois side. This has sometimes been called a rather unevangelical way of terminating church fellowship, but it was something quite different than that. The spiritual and secular power had been thoroughly muddled by Stephan. His exile from the colony was the removal of a financial and moral threat to the community. Stephan actually got kid-gloves treatment according to the spirit of the times in the state of Missouri. In the 1838 Missouri Mormon War, Joseph Smith and the Mormons who supported him were violently expelled from Missouri by the actions of mobs and militia, and matters got even worse for Smith in Nauvoo a few years later. Stephan was probably relatively happy to be rowed across the river rather than having to deal with the mob.

Grabau and the Buffalo Synod

In 1839, as the Saxons were arriving in Missouri, another group of immigrants fleeing the enforced union of Lutheran and Reformed churches in Prussia arrived in Buffalo, New York, under the leadership of Johannes Grabau. These Prussians founded an additional outpost near Milwaukee. The Saxons and Prussians seemed to be natural allies who would gravitate toward each other. They shared similar bad experiences with the state churches in Europe, and Grabau’s views on a hierarchical ministry in the church were similar to Stephan’s in Missouri. But when the Saxon’s broke free of Stephan’s views on the nature of the ministry and on the use of the means of grace in the church, a collision became inevitable. When Grabau presented his views to the Missourians in a document called the Hirtenbrief, the Missourians at first procrastinated on their response to avoid torpedoing the hopes of fellowship. When the Missourians then responded with moderate criticism that they hoped would lead to further discussion, Grabau responded with very harsh charges of false doctrine against the Missourians, and it was all downhill from there. There were genuine, serious differences of doctrine between the parties, but the situation was enflamed by Grabau’s lack of tact and evangelical pastoral practice, and by the willingness of pastors with ties to Missouri to serve some of the refugees from Grabau’s legalistic brand of church discipline. As the situation intensified, there was anger and misunderstanding from both sides. In general Grabau bears a greater share of the blame for this, but as is an ever-present danger in such conflicts, both sides let personal pique cloud the process. A notable case occurred in 1856 when Walther appeared unannounced at Grabau’s congregation, loudly joined in the hymns and received absolution from Grabau to the chagrin of the pastoral candidate who accompanied him. Even patient peacemakers have their bad day when they let irritation at the provocations of their opponents get the best of them.

The whole tragic affair came to its sad end after conferences in the late 1860s when most of Grabau’s followers went over to the Missouri Synod.

Role of Wilhelm Loehe in the Formation of the Missouri Synod

And the Separation That Led to the Formation of the Iowa Synod

This is one of the saddest stories in American Lutheranism. It began with a common effort to spread the gospel in America and ended in a tragic breakup.

As the Missourians got their own doctrinal house in order, they began to take steps toward the founding of a synod. They hoped this would be a union of confessional Lutherans that extended beyond their own group. They developed contacts especially in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan. The new paper Der Lutheraner fostered these contacts. Some of the confessional Lutherans who were drawn to his movement were individuals within the long-established eastern Lutheranism, but many were newly arrived missionaries sent by Wilhelm Loehe, who had a missionary training school in Neuendetellsau in Bavaria. By the time of the founding of the Missouri Synod in 1847 Loehe had sent 23 men to America. By 1853 when the Missourians relationship with Loehe ended, he had sent 82 candidates to America. When the Ohio Synod and other eastern synods did not take an adequate stand on the confessional issues, the Loehe men were drawn toward the Saxons. When the Missouri Synod was founded in 1847 by fourteen congregations from Illinois, Indiana, Missouri, Michigan, New York and Ohio, Loehe men and other refuges from the Ohio Synod and other eastern Lutherans provided a major portion of the pastors. Loehe men also contributed to the explosive growth of the Missouri Synod in its first decade. Loehe, who provided pastors not only to North America but to South America and Australia, was a great missionary who never left home. Loehe also played a significant role in the founding of the seminary at Fort Wayne. He was the earliest, best, and most generous friend of the Missouri Synod.

Sadly, this relationship, which began with such promise and blessing, ended when doctrinal differences emerged due to different positions on church and ministry, confessional subscription, open questions, and millennialism. An 1851 visit by Walther and Wyneken initially seemed to be successful at preventing a breach, but within two years a flareup at Loehe’s mission school at Saginaw, Michigan, led to a schism. Most Loehe men stayed with the Missouri Synod, but a few Loehe men migrated to Iowa to found the Iowa Synod. The Missouri and Iowa Synods set out on increasingly divergent paths. There was not a formal break of fellowship at this time, but further efforts to re-establish the relationship failed.

We cannot discuss all the doctrinal issues involved. That is another topic for another day. But what are some of the lessons concerning fellowship that can be drawn from this affair?

Throughout this period Walther regularly stressed the duty of Christians to give a strong testimony against the false teaching in their church before leaving the erring church. Loehe was a protesting member of the Bavarian state church. In 1851 Walther encouraged Loehe not to leave the state church, since Loehe was taking a strong stand against altar fellowship with the Reformed, and it seemed progress was being made in the efforts against unionism.

In a rather remarkable example of the extent that Walther was willing to go to carry out the duty to give a clear testimony to erring churches, during his 1851 trip to Germany Walther ended up preaching in a Union church. Once when Walther was asked to preach for a pastor who thought that he could continue to be a Lutheran in a Union church, Walther refused. When the man persisted, Walther said he could accept the invitation only if he was allowed to denounce the Union from the pulpit, thinking that this was an impossible condition. To Walther’s shock and dismay the man agreed to these conditions, and Walther was stuck, so he preached an anti-Union sermon in a Union church. This was a departure from the usual practice but not from the principle.

Walther made a good faith effort to prevent the breach with Loehe, but as much Walther and Wyneken supported Loehe in his struggle with the state church, their meetings with Loehe made it clear that a doctrinal difference was developing between them and Loehe which could not be fully resolved. They were not yet willing to say that it called for an immediate end of fellowship since conversations with Loehe had led to a different impression of his views than they had supposed from his writings. The cordial but indecisive meetings in Germany which failed to bring about a reconciliation kept the door open to further talks, but the death of the Loehe’s wife at an early age and his dedication to raising his young children, which made it impossible for him to come to America to see the situation first hand, and the anti-Missouri attitude of some of Loehe’s agents in America hindered reconciliation efforts. Further efforts to resolve the difference ultimately failed, and this story had a sad outcome for Loehe since the majority of the men whom Loehe sent to serve in America accepted Walther’s teaching on church and ministry and ended their working relationship with Loehe. A minority who sided with Loehe formed the Iowa Synod in 1854, in a territory where Missouri was not yet doing much work. The division in the 1850s was more a gradual parting of the ways than a sharp break. Later, however, Walther did write sharply against Loehe’s views, and the breach became wider.

The questions that so much confronted Walther then remain very much alive today: how long do we have a duty to stay and fight? When do we have a duty to leave?

Another issue to reflect on concerning this incident is the difficulty of distinguishing between patient discussion and procrastinating delay. This is especially a danger when a cooperative relationship is at stake. Both Loehe and Walther seemed to have realized the seriousness of the differences between them but hoped time could remove the need to deal with the differences.

The Free Conferences from 1856 to 1859

Walther promoted a series of free conferences to reach out to confessional Lutherans in eastern Lutheranism who subscribed to the Unaltered Augsburg Confession and who were taking a stand against the departure from the confessions within their church bodies. Walther was dealing with individuals whom he could recognize as weak brothers (or some of them even as rather strong brothers) searching for the truth. The confessional position of the nominally Lutheran General Synod and of its constituent districts was in flux and in confusion. Walther had sound reasons for new-found optimism because many pastors in the General Synod had just rejected the Definite Platform, which would have effectively annulled the Augsburg Confession, and reaffirmed their adherence to that confession. For this reason, in 1856 Walther suggested the calling of free conferences of such Lutherans as subscribed to the Unaltered Augsburg Confession without reservation to discuss the situation and to pave the way for a doctrinally united, truly Lutheran Church in North America.

Although the movement eventually fizzled (though it did produces some results in individuals), it shows the extent to which Walther was willing to go to reach out to men who were taking a public stand against error in their church bodies. Since there was believed to be unity of confession among the participants based on acceptance of the Augsburg Confession, the meetings included prayer and devotions. In response to the suggestion that all attendees must immediately subscribe to the whole Book of Concord, Walther said that genuine Lutherans who are loyal to the Augsburg Confession do not all have sufficient knowledge rightly to subscribe to the whole Book of Concord since they were not familiar with all of it. Some in Missouri thought Walther was being too accommodating. Walther admitted that there was some risk in his approach, but some risk must be taken to rescue people.

The Norwegian Synod

In 1839, a momentous year for American Lutherans, Norwegian Lutherans arrived in Milwaukee. It was not till the 1850s and 1860s that the Missouri Synod developed ties with a Norwegian synod. In spite of the language difference, they cooperated in seminary training. Some of the issues that were hot topics were the role of lay ministry in the church and the church’s stance on slavery. Issues concerning objective justification and election loomed on the horizon. This story will be continued in Volume 2.

Concluding Thoughts

Wielding the Sword of the Spirit highlights how the early Missourians, shaped by a bitter struggle, gained and maintained a firm grip on the teachings of Scripture and the Lutheran Confessions while also carefully distinguishing between weak Christians, who lacked proper insight and instruction, and stubborn errorists, who denied the clear teachings of Scripture against better knowledge. When carefully considered in their historical context, Walther and his colleagues modeled a faithful and evangelical doctrine and practice of church fellowship that followed in the footsteps of Jesus, Paul, and Martin Luther. They wielded the sword of the Spirit vigorously and evangelically, while also striving to do their very best to “keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace” (Ephesians 4:3).

That is not to say that Walther was blameless in the way he conducted his necessary battles. He was patient and loving in his approach, but even Wyneken, his close friend and colleague, was disturbed that at times Walther became too personal in his attacks, as Luther had done. As with every sinful Christian, at times he faltered, but his constant return to the Word of God equipped him to fight the inevitable confessional battles he and his fellow Lutherans would face in a new land and to wield the sword of Spirit energetically and evangelically for the benefit of the church present and future.

This history also demonstrates that concern for doctrinal unity is not a barrier to efforts to win victims of error to the truth and to zealous outreach. Walther played a central role in promoting unity among confessional Lutherans in America and in other lands. A key factor both in the confessional gains and in the explosive growth of the Missouri Synod was Walther’s emphasis on grace alone and on objective justification.

Looking Ahead to Volume Two

Volume Two, planned for publication in 2022, will cover the years from 1868-1882, during which time the Missouri Synod established formal church fellowship with the Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Ohio Synods and helped found the Synodical Conference. It will focus especially on the Election Controversy that quickly divided the conference and inflicted a devastating effect on confessional Lutheranism in America and on the doctrine and practice of church fellowship on both sides of the controversy.

Together, these two volumes are meant to commemorate and celebrate the 150th anniversary of the Synodical Conference's founding and, Lord willing, to assist present-day Lutherans in thinking through the biblical doctrine of fellowship and its evangelical and truly ecumenical application to a world in desperate need of the gospel of forgiveness and eternal life in Christ.

The Author

Peter M. Prange serves as an associate pastor at New Life Ev. Lutheran Church in Kenosha and Somers, Wis. He has researched and written extensively on the history and doctrine of the Synodical Conference, with a special emphasis on the connection between C.F.W. Walther's theology and practice and the so-called Wauwatosa Theology that was the hallmark of the Wisconsin Synod's Wauwatosa seminary from 1900-1920.

The Review

There is so much information packed in this book that any summary is bound to be an oversimplification. The review has necessarily focused on the practice of fellowship principles not on a treatment of the doctrinal issues underlying them. For that, the reader is directed to turn to the book itself. For the same reason, the review does not footnote its assertions but directs the reader to a study of the text of the book itself and to other histories of the period. An article that offers a brief review of the historical events surrounding Walther's doctrine and practice of church fellowship in about thirty pages is "Walther and Fellowship" by the reviewer. A shorter version of it occurs in the Winter 2012 issue of the Wisconsin Lutheran Quarterly.

John F. Brug