"GREATEST LUTHERAN FACULTY ON EARTH"

Study the Facts and Evidence
“GREATEST LUTHERAN FACULTY ON EARTH”
Christian News, June 6, 2011, Vol. 49, No. 21

The Best Seminary Commencement Speech I’ve Ever Heard,” a story posted by CPH’s Paul McCain on his “Cyberbrethren: A Lutheran Blog” on May 24 has the commencement speech LCMS President Matthew Harrison delivered at the recent commencement at Concordia Theological Seminary, Ft. Wayne, Indiana where the faculty awarded Harrison an honorary doctorate. McCain, like a typical bureaucrat, knows what to say to keep his position.


Dr. Harrison began: “I want to share with you – especially with the faculty of this august institution – the same words I just shared with the faculty of the St. Louis Seminary; you are the greatest Lutheran faculty on earth. And I want there to be absolutely no doubt that when I say that to one of the two faculties, I really meant it.”


“Once Again – The World’s Finest Seminary,” was the five column headline of a full page story in the March 18, 1974 Christian News. The subtitle was “Support Concordia Seminary.” It had photos of a rally of more than 1500 who gathered at the seminary when 45 out of 50 faculty and staff members left the seminary taking most of the students with them. The editorial concluded: “For the first time in a good number of years members of the LCMS can enthusiastically encourage students to enter the ministry and attend Concordia. They won’t be brainwashed by liberal professors. Those now teaching at Concordia are both scriptural and scholarly. Concordia now has the potential of once again becoming the finest seminary in the world.” The editor risked getting into difficulty with his friends at what is now Concordia Seminary, Ft. Wayne, formerly Springfield, Illinois. At the time fund raisers for both LCMS seminaries asked CN for its subscription list in order that they could find names of conservative laymen who might support the seminaries. CN gave the fundraisers its list without charge even though it meant some of our supporters could be sending less to CN.


Unfortunately, today CN can no longer call either Concordia Seminary, St. Louis or Concordia Seminary, Ft. Wayne, “the world’s finest seminary” or “the greatest Lutheran faculty on earth” as President Harrison now says.


Anyone who regularly reads Christian News should be familiar with enough facts which disqualify calling either seminary the “world’s finest seminary” or “the greatest Lutheran faculty on earth.”
What about the faculties of the seminaries of the WELS, ELS and CLC? The editor knows little about them other than what he reads in their seminary publications. These publications take a far more confessional Lutheran stand than the journals of either LCMS seminary. The journals of the LCMS seminaries praise Dieterich Bonhoeffer as a great, faithful Lutheran theologian faithful to “the Word of God.” The St. Louis seminary even says Bonhoeffer is the most important Lutheran theologian since Martin Luther. CN has shown for almost 50 years that Dietrich Bonhoeffer denied the resurrection of Christ, said Genesis was a myth and demythologized the Bible even more than Rudolf Bultman. All the documentation anyone needs is in CN’s recent book Bonhoeffer and King: Their Life and Theology Documented in Christian News 1963-2011, which those who want to be politically correct in the LCMS avoid mentioning. Both seminaries have invited such liberals as Martin Marty, Richard Neuhaus, Carl Braaten, Gerhard Forde, Herbert Chilstrom, Robert Jenson, Richard Koenig, Leonard Sweet, Walter Wangerin, Thomas Troeger and a host of others to speak without generally giving those who oppose their anti-scriptural theology and the pro-abortion and pro-homosexual position of their denominations an opportunity to respond and question them. Seldom, in recent years, has either seminary invited someone who took a public stand against the anti-scriptural position of Seminex to speak while those who backed Seminex like Walter Schoedel, Charles Mueller, Richard Neuhaus, Martin Marty, Carl Braaten, Richard Koenig, and others are welcomed and praised as great Lutheran theologians.


When the Concordia Theological Quarterly of the Ft. Wayne seminary published an essay it attributed to Dr. John Johnson, now president of Concordia University Chicago, it refused to publish a retraction and apology when Professor Nathan Jastram, chairman of the theology department of Concordia Wisconsin, in great detail documented the fact that almost the entire essay was plagiarized. Jastram’s honesty and courage killed any chances of him getting elected president of the Ft. Wayne seminary. The Concordia Journal of the St. Louis seminary published a eulogy of Father Richard Neuhaus by Atlantic District President David Benke even though Neuhaus denied the inerrancy of the Bible, justification by faith alone, supported universalism and Bultmann’s demythologizing of the Bible ever since his student days at the St. Louis seminary. The St. Louis journal publishes reviews by such liberals and higher critics of the Bible as Matthew Becker, Henry Rowold and Robert Holst. It praised the artwork of He Qi, a Chinese artist who taught at the Communist controlled Nanking seminary and refused to condemn the mass murderer and adulterer Mao Tse Tung and confess that Jesus Christ is the only way to heaven and non-Christians are lost.


The St. Louis seminary, to this day, refuses to accept the ruling of the LCMS’s highest judicial court, its Board of Appeals that the seminary failed to show just cause for refusing to certify the CN editor for the ministry when he told nothing but the truth about what was being taught by various liberal professors at the seminary.


Today neither LCMS seminary qualifies for being “the World’s Finest Seminary.” Neither has “the greatest Lutheran faculty on earth.” CN does not hesitate to disagree with the new administration of the LCMS when it makes such claims about the LCMS’s seminaries and when it has nothing but praise for the LCMS’s Council of Presidents, a group whose majority has a long liberal, pro-Seminex record and which has found that Jesus First leader Charles Mueller, Sr., has always been an orthodox Lutheran, while the editor of Christian News is an unrepentant liar because he said Jesus First leader Mueller wants the LCMS’s clergy roster to be open to those like Matthew Becker who promote the ordination of women and evolution.


The facts and evidence show that neither LCMS seminary has “the greatest Lutheran faculty on earth.”