ROMANISM.
133. Jacobs and Haas on Ordination, etc.—With respect to the doctrine that the public office of the ministry originates in, and is transferred by, the local congregation, Dr. Jacobs declared: "Nothing can be clearer than the antagonism of our great Lutheran divines to this position, nor anything be more convincing than their arguments against it." (Gerberding, The Lutheran Pastor, 73.) Luther's language on this question, Jacobs maintains, is "not guarded with the same care as that of the later dogmaticians." (74.) According to Jacobs the right to call a minister "belongs neither to the minister alone nor to the laity alone, but to both in due order." (Summary of Christian Faith, 427. 424.) Dr. J.A.W. Haas: "The transference theory has been developed in antithesis to Rome, and in it Lutherans have agreed with the Reformed." It "makes the ministry an organ growing out of the congregation, which ill befits the divine origin of the ministry." "In it the main accent is placed on the vocation, of which ordination is the attestation." (Gerberding, l.c., 77.) Ordination, Dr. Haas declares, is "the prerogative of the whole Church." It includes "the separation for the ministry with invocation of blessing and consecration under divine approval." For this reason "ordination is not repeated." (112.) "This realism of a divine gift [in ordination] was apparently not held by Luther…. He declares the right of all believers to the office, because of the spiritual priesthood, and sees the consecration (Weihe) in the call. 'Ordo est ministerium et vocatio ministrorum ecclesiae.'" (116.)
134. Gerberding and Fry on the Ministry.—In his Lutheran Pastor Dr. G.H. Gerberding, professor at the seminary of the General Council at Maywood (Chicago), declares: It is clear "that this transference theory is not held by our older theologians. Neither have we been able to find any ground for it in Holy Scripture. Where is there a single proof that the congregation, made up of believing priests, does on that account possess the right to exercise the ordinary functions of the ministry? Where is the proof that the ministry is created by the congregation? Where is it written that the minister is amenable to the congregation? If the congregation of laymen alone makes the minister, then it can also unmake, or depose, him from his office. The whole theory is unscriptural and unhistoric. Only the fanatical sects, which have a low view of the means of grace, can, with any consistency, hold such a view." (82.) Again: "This [the outward call] does not come from the ministry alone. Neither does it come from the laity alone. It must come from the Church. But the Church is neither the ministry without the people nor the people without the ministry…. Christ, then, exercises His power to call men into the ministry through the Church [ministers and laymen]. The Church may exist either in the congregation or in the representative Church [synod], made up of ministers and lay representatives of congregations. Either the congregation, as defined above, not without a pastor, or the representative body, made up also of pastors and people, has a right to extend the outward call." (86.) "The transference theory is unscriptural and not consistent with the Lutheran doctrine of the means of grace." (110.) "It is unscriptural and un-Lutheran to hold that the meaning and use of ordination consists essentially in this that it publicly attests and satisfies the validity of the call." (110.) Ordination "conveys the special grace needed for the special work of the ministry." (120.) In his Pastor's Guide, 1915, Dr. J. Fry, professor at the seminary of the General Council in Mount Airy, Philadelphia, teaches: The call to the ministry "must come from God, from the Church [synod] and from a particular place or congregation." (5.) "Of all these qualifications [required for the ministry] the Church [synod] must be the judge, and in her synodical organization and authority must extend the call to the ministry." (6.) "A pastor serving a parish of more than one congregation has no right to resign one congregation and retain the others without the consent of the president of the synod to which the parish belongs." (14.) "The call should also specify that either party desiring to withdraw from the agreement [between the pastor and congregation] must give three months' notice to that effect to the other party. This provision will do away with the very objectionable custom in some congregations of holding annual elections for a pastor." (9.) "The power to decide and impose penalties belongs to the pastor and church council." (92.) Dr. Fry regards "the pastor and church council as the highest authority in all congregational matters." (98.) All of these tenets are corruptions of the Scriptural and evangelical doctrines as proclaimed again by Luther. Consistently developed, their terminus is Rome. However, in the atmosphere of American liberty, where State and Church are separated and the will of the former is not foisted on the latter, Romanistic tendencies cannot thrive, nor did they ever to any extent succeed in practise in the Lutheran Church, a Church whose fundamental articles are the doctrines of justification by faith alone and absolute spiritual freedom from every human authority.
SYNERGISM.
135. Synergistic Teaching on Conversion.—In his Confessional Principle, 1911, Dr. T.B. Schmauk rejects Melanchthon's aliqua causa discriminis in homine, some kind of discriminating cause in man. Schmauk writes: "Several qualities and motives in Melanchthon's nature, including his humanist outlook on free will, and his tendency to emphasize the necessity of good works, contributed to inspire him with erroneous views, when the evangelical doctrine began to be wrought out more expansively, and led him to find the cause for the actual variation in the working of God's grace in man, its object. This subtle synergistic spirit attacks the very foundation of Lutheranism, flows out into almost every doctrine, and weakens the Church at every point. And it was practically this weakness which the great multitude of Melanchthon's scholars, who become the leaders of the generation of which we are speaking, absorbed, and which rendered it difficult to return, finally, and after years of struggle, to the solid ground once more recovered in the Formula of Concord." (611; L. u. W. 1912, 33.) Evidently, this is sound Lutheranism; and similar testimonies were occasionally heard within the General Council throughout its history. (L. u. W. 1904, 273: Rev. Rembe; 1917, 473: Rev. G.H. Schnur.) But it was the song of rare birds. The synergistic note was struck much more frequently and emphatically. For making his anti-synergistic utterances Schmauk was called to order by Dr. Gerberding. And in 1916 Schmauk himself opened the Lutheran Church Review to L.S. Keyser, the zealous exponent of synergism within the General Synod, who wrote: "Faith's experience always includes the fact that, while the ability of faith is divinely conferred, the exercise of that ability is never coerced, but belongs to the domain of liberty…. The same is true of all volitions: the ability to will is divinely implanted; the act itself belongs to the sphere of freedom. The ability to repent is from God; the use of that ability belongs to man's liberty." "The Scriptures never command men to regenerate; they always put that category in the passive voice, 'Except any one be born again'; but the Bible again and again commands men to repent and believe, putting the verbs in the active voice, imperative mood. What inconsistent commands these would be if man possessed no freedom in the exercise of repentance and faith!" "God's fiat of the individual's election unto salvation must have been decided upon in foresight and foreknowledge of the whole content of faith, including both its divine enablement and its human element of freedom." (65.) Similar views on man's freedom and responsibility were expressed by Dr. Haas in Trends of Thought, 1915. In his book, The Way of Life, 1917, Dr. Gerberding explains: "After prevenient grace, however, begins to make itself felt, then the will begins to take part. It must now assume an attitude, and meet the question: Shall I yield to these holy influences or not? One or the other of the two courses must be pursued. There must be a yielding to the heavenly strivings or a resistance. To resist at this point requires a positive act of the will. This act man can put forth by his own strength. On the other hand, with the help of that grace already at work in his heart, he can refuse to put forth that act of his will, and thus remain non-resistant." According to Gerberding man "may be said, negatively, to help towards his conversion." (167 ff.; L. u. W. 1917, 214.) Prior to 1901 Rev. C. Blecher, by order of the pastoral conference of Connecticut, belonging to the Council, published a pamphlet which was recommended for the widest possible distribution by the Lutherische Herold. In it Blecher, in direct opposition to the Formula of Concord, Art. 11, section 60 ff., maintains: Two persons are never in equal guilt when the one resists the grace of God from inherited blindness and weakness, like Peter, while the other resists contumaciously and purposely, like Judas." (L. u. W. 1901, 65; 1902, 144.) In 1900 Dr. Seiss had maintained in the Lutheran: "Conversion is largely one's own act. God first makes it possible; but then the responsibility rests upon ourselves to determine whether or not we will comply with the truth brought to our understanding." (L. u. W. 1900, 243. 246.) Misstating historical facts and revealing his own synergistic attitude, Dr. G.W. Sandt wrote editorially in the Lutheran of March 27, 1919, concerning Dr. Stellhorn's polemics against the Missouri Synod: "When the controversy with Missouri was at its height, he [Stellhorn] could do no other but cast his soul into it and stand for the defense of the universal call to grace and salvation as over against the special call as Calvin and others teach it. He resented the charge of synergism which came from his opponents, and renounced it as strongly as any Missourian could."
136. Synergistic Predestination.—Synergism in the doctrine of conversion naturally leads to synergistic teaching on predestination. Moreover, the doctrine of predestination is, as it were, the bacteriological test whether one's Lutheran blood is really and absolutely free from synergistic infection also in the doctrines of conversion and justification. However, also in these tests as to the doctrinal purity of the General Council the results, as a rule, were negative. In his Summary of Christian Faith, 1905, Dr. H.E. Jacobs gives the following presentation of the doctrine of predestination: "Since God has not predestinated all that He has foreknown ('for all that the perverse, wicked will of the devil and of men purposes and desires to do and will do, God sees and knows before,' ib.), but, in His inexplicable will, has allowed a certain measure of freedom and contingency in His creatures, and afforded them a degree of moral responsibility, knowing from all eternity what will be the result of their use of this trust, He also has determined how in every case their decision and activity will be treated." "When, therefore, God has willed that He will be determined in a certain decision by the free decision of a creature, that freedom of the creature will certainly be guaranteed in the result; but what in the exercise of this freedom the decision of the creature will be, as well as the determination of His will concerning it, He knows from all eternity, and makes His plans accordingly." "The fulfilment or non-fulfilment of the proviso or condition is contained in the foreknowledge which determined the free destination." (556 f.) According to Jacobs, then, Predestination depends on the divine foreknowledge of the use that man will make of the freedom with which God has entrusted him. Plainly synergistic doctrine!
LIBERALISTIC TRENDS.
137. Rejecting Verbal Inspiration.—Even the doctrines of the verbal inspiration and the complete inerrancy of the Holy Scriptures have been assailed by prominent representatives of the General Council and the Lutheran Church Review. Dr. H.E. Jacobs, in his introduction to Biblical Criticism (1903) by Dr. J.A.W. Haas, states: "It is, therefore, the Word and not the words; the divine substance and not the particular human form in which that substance is clothed; the divine truth and not the human language, with all its limitations, which, in accommodation to human finiteness, the Holy Spirit employs, that is 'the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth.'" (18.) "Nevertheless, the subordination of the words of Holy Scripture to the Word in no way diminishes the need of the most reverent handling and the most careful judgment of the words themselves when considered in the place which they are intended to serve." (19.) "A text from Genesis and one from John, one from the Psalms, and another from Romans, cannot stand upon the same footing…. Many a precious passage in the Old Testament can no longer be used as the sincere expression of Christian faith in the light of the clearer revelation of the Gospel." (21.) "There are few theorists who would assign the same degree of inspiration to the statistics and rolls in Ezra or Chronicles as to those parts of the New Testament for whose reading the dying ask when all other earthly words have lost their interest. Even the distinction between the Petrine and the Pauline theology, which the Tuebingen school so greatly exaggerated, contains within it an element of truth, when the difference is found to be one of degree, but not one of kind." (21.) "The time has come when, in antagonism to such [radical] criticism, the Church must offer a restatement of its doctrine of the Holy Scriptures. The theories of our dogmaticians are not the confessional declarations of our Church. The Augsburg Confession contains no statement on this topic." (26.) "It is only the Formula of Concord that gives an official utterance…. But it formulates no definition either of revelation or inspiration. It simply presents to us in the Scriptures an inerrant and infallible judge concerning all religious truth…. Religious truth, it declares, 'is to be received only as revealed in God's Word," and for this Word we turn to the Scriptures." (27.) "For the truths made known by such revelation we are referred to a record. But that such a certain and indubitable record should be made, another supernatural act is necessary, and this is inspiration. This includes everything that is necessary to render the record an infallible standard of all religious truth." (27.) "If the verbal theory of inspiration mean that every word and letter are inspired, so that the writer was purely passive and performed a merely mechanical office, as 'the pen of the Holy Ghost,' this, we hold, is an assumption for which we have no warrant…. All we need to know is that in the Holy Scriptures we have a complete, clear, and unerring record of revealed truth, that is made the standard, for all time, of religious teaching." (28.) Evidently, then, Drs. Jacobs and Haas do not believe that the Holy Scriptures everywhere are inspired and free from error.
138. Bible Fallible in Scientific Matters.—Dr. J. Stump, professor in the seminary of the General Council in Chicago, supporting Dr. Jacobs, maintained in the Lutheran Church Review of January, 1904: One cannot speak of a confessional Lutheran doctrine of inspiration. Quenstedt's doctrine of verbal inspiration is mechanical and in conflict with all that we know of the Holy Ghost's activity; it cannot be proven from the Scriptures, nor indeed is it necessary. Stump considers the Bible free from error in its religious teachings, but not in its astronomical, geological, physical, and similar statements. To quote literally: "The holy writers were not inspired, however, to be 'teachers of astronomy, or geology, or physics,' and no number of contradictions in this sphere would shake our confidence in the absolute authority of Holy Scripture as the infallible test of theological truth, and inerrant guide in all matters of faith and practise." "The dogmaticians were led to maintain it [the verbal inspiration] by the exigency of the times and the stress of their severe dialectics. [The interest of the dogmaticians was to present the clear doctrine of the Scriptures on inspiration.] And as a result of their doctrines, they were logically obliged to claim the absolute impossibility of any kind of error or inaccuracy whatsoever in the Scriptures, even in unimportant externals; and further more to claim that the Scriptures are not only the sole and infallible guide in matters of religion, but also an infallible guide in matters of human science so far as they touched upon any part of science's domain, —claims which a careful examination of the Scriptures and the purpose for which they were written do not bear out." (L. u. W. 1904, 85.) It was in agreement with these views when the Lutheran, prior to 1904, maintained that the Bible must be explained according to the modern sciences.
139. Other Symptoms of Liberalism.—As a rule, the inerrancy of the Holy Scriptures is denied in the interest of the theory of evolution, a doctrine absolutely incompatible with, and, consistently developed, destructive of, the very fundamentals of Lutheranism. The evolutionary doctrine, however, this antipode of Christian thought, which, wherever digested, has proved to be the beginning of the end of Christianity, was adopted also and publicly defended within the General Council. Rev. Brenner says: "I have heard General Council ministers say that they did not believe everything that is written in the Bible, and as they continued to explain their views, it became very evident that they were evolutionists." (L. u. W. 1917, 465.) Dr. T.E. Schmauk, the president of the General Council, declared in the Lutheran, April, 1912: "Evolution is the most wide-embracing, suggestive, and fascinating theory of things and life that ever has been offered. In innumerable cases it has been found to be in accord with nature and with history. In itself it is not a cause, but a process. Evolution as a partial process may be within Christianity." In 1915, in his book, Trends of Thought, Dr. J.A.W. Haas wrote: "If evolution as a biological theory remains within its limits and knows its sphere, it will not contradict the claims of Christianity. If we avoid a materialistic philosophy in biology, and if we do not make nature all-controlling, we can accept evolution as not in disagreement with Christianity." "But, on the other hand, Christianity must be careful not to demand as Biblical facts old hypotheses of species. It must differentiate between statement in popular religious language and the interpretation which tradition has put upon Biblical statement. In this tradition there are elements of past science which have unconsciously colored the Biblical account. Christianity must also treat its document historically, and not be disturbed if the temporal vessels of its religious truths are not shaped scientifically. Were they thus shaped, they would fail in their very purpose. It is general, popular, descriptive, childlike language, which is universal and lasting. But Christianity must make certain great reservations over against any theory of evolution. It must demand that the doctrines of a personal God, of the final spiritual character of life and its origin, and of the divine nature of man's spirit be not violated." "Christianity can allow an evolution as the continuation of creation." (L. u. W. 1915, 514.) The Lutheran, June 21, 1917, published an article of L.S. Keyser in which he maintains: "Evolution is God's method of developing that which He has previously created. The evolutionary process may have continued for millenniums upon millenniums until the introduction of life. Whether man's body was evolved or not, surely his soul must have been created. We should use two terms: creation and evolution. Together they afford an adequate explanation of the universe as it is to-day." (Lutheran Witness 1918, 372.) According to Lutherischer Herald, October 15, 1904, Dr. Pick, of the General Council, declared: "Harnack is all right." (L. u. W. 1904, 517. 564.) "Keeping company with liberals, we are not surprised that some of our ministers are liberals in both doctrine and practise," says Brenner in Dangerous Alliances, 1917. "What is to be thought of the orthodoxy of a General Council minister who says: 'God spoke to the Christians of that day through their experience no less clearly than through the words of St. Paul'? Lutheran, March 29, 1917, p. 7. What about the soundness of the faith of a D.D. who can recommend Hastings's Bible Dictionary as a reliable work of reference? Rev. M.S. Waters recommends a book that is full of the worst heresies; but the president of the New York and New England Synod, Rev. W.M. Horn, when his attention is called to the matter, bluntly declares: 'I will do nothing in the case referred to.' On request of the District Synod of Ohio, the president of the General Council appoints a committee, with Dr. Joseph Stump of the Chicago Seminary as chairman. The committee investigates. It reports that 'The General Council at this stage has no jurisdiction in the case.' The charges were not denied. This question has not been settled, and so far as we know, no effort has been made since the General Council met in Rock Island, two years ago, to settle it. On the evidence submitted to him, Dr. T.E. Schmauk, president of the General Council, stated in his report: 'I am convinced that the man's views are unevangelical and thoroughly subversive of the principles on which the General Council is founded.' Gen. Council Minutes, 1915, p. 23." (L. u. W. 1917, 465.)