CHRIST OF THE GOSPELS AGAIN
AVAILABLE
Christian News, Vol. 49, No. 9, February 28, 2011
Christ of the Gospels is now again available from Christian News. The price of the 236 page hardcover book will be listed in next week’s CN.
Reprinted here, is the foreword by Dr. Martin Scharleman and the preface by Dr. William Beck.
The CN editor has used the sections in “Christ of the Gospels” on the passion, death and resurrection of Christ for many years during midweek Lenten services. He knows of no better harmony of the Gospels to be read during Lent. Pastors who want to use these readings in their Lenten Services may contact Christian News at cnmail@fidnet.com.
Foreword
Irenaeus, one of the early church fathers, argued that there had to be four Gospels because there were four regions, north, east, south, and west, and also four winds. The church was scattered in all four directions, he went on to say, and so it had to have four Gospels to serve as four pillars supporting the life of the church.
But when the church kept using the expression “The four-fold Gospel,” it asserted that the four Gospels were basically one. The first man to try to make one of the four Gospels was Tatian, who around 150 A.D. prepared the Diatessaron. This life of Christ was read for centuries in the churches of Syria.
Many such unified accounts of the Gospel records have appeared since the days of Tatian. This present work is the result of many years of painstaking work and infinite care for details. And a great deal of consultation has gone into the making of this work. The undersigned had the privilege of serving on a special committee that reviewed the translation and the sequence of events presented in this volume. Where questions arose that could be handled in one of several ways, the final decision was left to the translator.
The reader will find here a reverent presentation of the life of Christ in the language of today. It will be a useful tool in the hands of pastors, teachers, and Sunday school workers. And it will certainly be welcomed as a handy volume in family devotions wherever parents and children want to gather around Him who was made man that we might be God’s children.
Martin H. Scharlemann
Director of the Graduate School
Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, Missouri
Preface
If Jesus were talking to us today, He wouldn’t use the strange words of long ago. He would talk to us in the language we use when we talk to one another. The purpose of this book is to let Jesus tell us His wonderful truths in our own language.
What He said and did was written down by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. And we have to read all four Gospels if we want the whole story of Jesus. Only Matthew and Luke tell us how Jesus was born. Only John tells us about the raising of Lazarus and the breakfast of the disciples with their risen Savior by the lake. Three of these writers, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, tell us about the Lord’s Supper. But all four tell us how He suffered, died, and rose again.
How do the four Gospels fit together? How do the many events follow one another in the life of Christ? What was the one life of Jesus that all four writers tell us about? These are the problems which I have tried to solve. Here you will find everything in the four Gospels fitted together in one flowing story. Here is the life of Jesus from the time He came down to the earth until He returned to His Father.
It is a thrilling story, something never seen “on land or sea.” It is the story of the Son of God who loved us and gave Himself for us. Here we meet Him face to face, let Him talk to us, and as He goes to give His lifeblood for us, we let Him tell us, “Your sins are forgiven.” And so He reaches with power into our lives, claims us as His own, never to let us go.
William F. Beck
--------
Jacob Preus, William Beck and “Mud Slinging”
“THE CHRIST OF THE GOSPELS”
Christian News, Vol. 49, No. 9, February 28, 2011
Christian News has just reprinted William F. Beck’s Christ of the Gospels, a harmony of the Gospels. It was first published by Concordia Publishing House in 1959. CPH published Beck’s New Testament - An American Translation in 1963. An LCMS convention asked CPH to publish the entire AAT. CPH said it would but then did not. CPH said that a $25,000 market survey showed that publishing the AAT would not be a profit making venture for CPH.
Liberals at Concordia Seminary, St. Louis wanted CPH to use the revised Standard Version of the Bible copyrighted by the National Council of Churches. Some liberals feared that if the LCMS had its own translation it would not help get the LCMS involved in the ecumenical movement. The ESV which CPH now uses is 91% RSV. Beck showed that most of the RSV translators rejected such doctrines as the deity of Christ. They changed the text in more than 1,000 places Beck said. After Beck lectured on the RSV, a group of confessional Lutheran pastors and laymen, including Pastor Paul Burgdorf and his son Pastor Lawrence Burgdorf, at Trinity Lutheran Church, New Haven, Missouri adopted a resolution warning against the “perversion of the RSV” (see photo on page 10).
Beck’s support of the CN editor also did not help gain Beck any support from Concordia Seminary, St. Louis and the LCMS bureaucracy. Christian News published some 250,000 copies of the AAT. CN was gaining support throughout the LCMS because of its “positive” work in publishing “the most accurate translation in modern English.” LCMS President Jacob Preus wanted Christian News to go out of existence. He widely distributed a report claiming that Beck was some Romanizer undermining the doctrine of justification by faith alone. Preus registered no complaint against the AAT when CPH published Beck’s New Testament. Jacob Preus only claimed to have found doctrinal error when CN published the AAT. If Preus could have stopped the sale of the AAT after CN had just paid the bill for another 50,000 copies, he could have destroyed CN financially.
A source closer to CPH reported that the real problem with the AAT and the reason CPH would not publish or use it is “Herman Otten.” If CPH published and promoted the AAT it would lend credibility to Christian News and be “a feather in it’s hat.” Otten’s response: “Now that is a real scholarly attitude.”
James Burkee writes in his Power, Politics, and the Missouri Synod:
For fear of damaging the movement, Otten still did not release the good on Preus, suggesting only that he was “two faced”.98 But he still pushed, as always, in print, Preus to retire:
Something has happened to the LCMS president. He needs our sympathy and prayers. Right now it appears that it would be best both for him and the LCMS to declare he will not seek re-election. This is exactly what we told him in the letter he is using as evidence for his charge that CN is guilty of “blackmail.”99
This mudslinging went both ways. Preus first threatened to reveal what many already knew by then, that Otten and his informants secretly tape recorded conversations. Otten responded that Preus was only offended by the tactic when he was its victim:
While you have severely faulted us for using tape recordings, we fail to see what else we can do to support a report in which a person denies saying something which we reported he said. . . We then published a statement from a tape recording made at a speech which you gave in Lisle, Illinois where you said exactly what we had reported.100
Preus wrote in December that he had more dirt on Otten: a Preus informant told him that Otten had applied for a call in a West German church body.101 Using a favorite Otten approach, he asked, “Is this true?”102 Finally, in a move that caused Otten considerable hardship, Preus pulled synod support from William Beck’s An American Translation (AAT) of the Bible. “Bible Beck,” an eccentric Otten enthusiast who worked in a freezing office to keep his mind alert, translating the Bible with fingerless gloves and without socks, had his New Testament translation published by synod’s CPH in 1963.103 Preus now claimed it doctrinally deficient and pulled his support. Otten felt the pinch, having just paid the bill for 50,000 copies of AAT he now had to sell.104
x x x
Don’t expect to read anything about Beck’s “The Christ of the Gospels” from CPH or the organized conservatives who hailed Jack Preus and follow Paul McCain. When Burkee went through CN’s files on Jack Preus, he should also have checked letters in CN’s files from Paul McCain. He would have found another double-talking bureaucrat. Jack Preus said he was considering asking CPH to stop all promotion of Beck’s work.
End notes
98 “Investigate Christian News,” CN, January 1, 1979; Otten, CN Encyclopedia 2, 1448.
99 “Missouri Synod President Preus in Dispute with Conservatives”; Otten, CN Encyclopedia 2, 1449.
100 “Herman Otten to J.A.O. Preus (unsigned), December 16, 1978, JAOP, Otten/CN.
101 The West German church is the Selbstandige Evagelisch-Lutherische Kirche.
102 J.A.O. Preus to Herman Otten, December 15, 1978, JAOP, Otten/CN.
103 Marie Meyer interviews.
104 “President Preus Says AAT Bible Published During Liberal Period,” CN, February 5, 1979; Otten, CN Encyclopedia 2, 1450.
Friday, February 25, 2011
Wednesday, February 16, 2011
A Fifty Year Battle vs Intellectual Laziness and Snobbery
A FIFTY YEAR BATTLE VS INTELLECTUAL LAZINESS AND SNOBBERY
Christian News, Vol. 49, No. 8, February 21, 2011
“A Fifty Year Battle vs. Intellectual Laziness” is the subtitle of Bonhoeffer and King – Their Life and Theology Documented in Christian News 1963-2011.” The 320 page book was just published by Lutheran News Inc. It is available from Christian News for $11.95 plus $4.00 s/h.
The book begins with 10 pages of more than a 100 quotes from articles in the book. Some show that Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Luther King rejected the Resurrection of Christ and said that the Bible contains myth and fiction.
Who Really Wrote the Bible?
The editor says in the preface to this book:
The great LCMS Bonhoeffer and King praising scholars should be telling their students to read Who Really Wrote the Bible? And Why It Should Be Taken Seriously Again by Eyal Rav-Noy and Gil Weinreich.
Eyal Rav-Noy, a native of Israel, is director of the Jewish Learning Academy, where he specializes in textual analysis and biblical criticism. He shows that skeptics like Bonhoeffer who rejected the Mosaic authorship of the first five books of the Bible are guilty of “intellectual laziness.”
How dare a mere country pastor like the editor of Christian News challenge the great scholars in all of the major denominations, including the Roman Catholic Church and Orthodox Church, who accept the prevailing view about Bonhoeffer and King? Jewish scholars Eyal Rav-Noy and Gil Weinreich write in Who Really Wrote The Bible?:
“We argue that most contemporary biblical criticism is a fraud, an exercise in futility, and a model of lemming-like conformity. On balance, the academic study of the Bible has not contributed to a better understanding of the text. Rather, the field seems to be devoted to the circular task of proving itself correct” (27).
“Despite this rather pompous dismissal of any dissent, it is the academic critics of the single authorship of the Bible who are short on objective evidence, and it is the documentary hypothesis that is unscholarly and cannot withstand logical scrutiny” (24).
This book maintains that the best evidence clearly shows that both Bonhoeffer and King repudiated the resurrection of Christ and the historic Christian faith regardless of the prevailing opinion among the great scholars. One chapter in Who Really wrote the Bible? is titled “Intellectual Laziness” and another “Creation, Plagues and a Talking Donkey: The Bible Critics Make Asses of Themselves.” The same could be said about the great Bonhoeffer and King champions who refuse to read the kind of evidence arrayed in this book. The book exposes the intellectual laziness of the Bonhoeffer and King defenders in the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod who refuse to read Christian News even though it was sent to their church. The subtitle of the book is “A Fifty Year Battle vs. Intellectual Laziness.”
LCMS professors are members of LCMS congregations receiving CN. There is no excuse for any real scholar in the LCMS to say that he never saw any evidence that Bonhoeffer and King rejected the historic Christian faith. Articles in CN referring to Bonhoeffer and King cover almost 50 years. This explains frequent use of various quotations. Some of what CN has published about King and Bonhoeffer was repeated several times.
This book on Bonhoeffer and King not only shows that their theology is not Christian but also exposes the lack of true scholarship of professors, church bureaucrats, and others who insist that the theology of Bonhoeffer and King was Christian and that Bonhoeffer was the greatest Lutheran since Martin Luther.
Intellectual Snobbishness
Bonhoeffer and King could also be subtitled: “A Fifty Year Battle vs Intellectual Snobbishness.”
One of the first articles in the book in the section on King is “Religious Socialism” by Kurt Marquart. It appeared in the January 11, 1965 Lutheran News (now Christian News). Marquart wrote that “for intellectual snobs of course facts contained in books they dislike simply don’t exist; Orwells’ memory Holy you know!” (p. 151). Part I of the speech the CN editor prepared to be presented at Concordia University Wisconsin, after quoting Marquart, has a section on “intellectual snobs.” CN noted that the “intellectual snobs”:
1. Refused to read articles by Marquart and others in Christian News which took issue with their liberal and social gospel views.
2. Refused to examine the evidence William Beck presented exposing the errors of the Revised Standard Version of the Bible and showing that the AAT was far more reliable and in better modern English.
3. Refused to consider the mass of evidence CN has presented exposing the errors of the ESV which is 91% RSV.
4. Refused to allow Christian News to be distributed to seminarians.
5. Refused to consider evidence that theological liberalism is defended and promoted in their denomination.
6. Refused to consider the evidence that Jesus First Leader Charles Mueller supported the anti-scriptural theological position of Seminex and wants the LCMS to be open for those who promoted evolution and the ordination of women.
7. Refused to consider the evidence that there is no scientific evidence to support the kind of recovered memory therapy practiced by Concordia Seminary, St. Louis Professor Joseph Barbour which led him to get the daughter of a member of the seminary staff to believe her father raped her and sacrificed babies to the devil.
8. Refuse to debate in any arena those who insist there is no evidence that the Germans during WWII exterminated six million Jews, most of them in gas chambers.
9. Ignore the evidence that Bonhoeffer and King rejected such basic Christian doctrines as the virgin birth and resurrection of Christ.
The record shows that Christian News has a long history of battling intellectual laziness and snobbery. The index in the last volume of each of the 48 volumes of Christian News and the index in the Christian News Encyclopedia and each of most of the books CN has published have thousands of citations.
During their student days, Herman Otten and Kurt Marquart, attempted to show their professors how far such theologians as Barth, Emil Brunner, Soren Kierkegaard, Nyrgen, Aulen, Reinhold, and Richard Niebuhr, and others had departed from historic Christianity. Most professors refused to read such books as the Neo-Modernism by Cornelius Van Til, Thy Word is Truth by Edward Young, The Word Shall Stand by Olav Valen Sendstad, The Five Books of Moses and the Unity of Isaiah by Oswald T. Allis, Christianity and Liberalism, the Origins of Paul’s Religion and the Virgin Birth of Christ by J. Gresham Machen.
Most did not read the vast array of scholarly journals in the seminary library, which William Beck, translator of An American Translation of the Bible, devoured in his efforts to find the best text. When CN challenged the liberals on the faculty to answer Robert Dick Wilson’s questions in Is the Higher Criticism Scholarly, they remained silent.
Most of the members of the LCMS bureaucracy refuse to read the mass of evidence the CN editor compiled in the 1961 and 1962 State of the Church Book of Documentation which documented the anti-scriptural theology of such LCMS theologians considered “shining stars” as Martin Marty and Jaroslav Pelikan.
During its early years, CN published many articles showing the harmful effects of smoking at a time which a large percentage of pastors and professors were smoking and refused to read what CN was publishing about smoking. In recent years, CN has said very little about smoking and a good fitness program since numerous other publications now oppose smoking and promote a healthy lifestyle. When CN first began battling against abortion and homosexuality, many critics who refused to read what CN was actually saying, maintained that CN was once again just stirring up controversy.
When CN insisted that a good response to declining church growth would be for churches to return to what the Bible, Martin Luther and most denominations until the 1930s taught about birth control and family life, the intellectual snobs ignored what CN was publishing.
When CN showed that C.F.W. Walther’s defense of the rights of laymen and congregationalism was scriptural, the hyper-euro intellectual snobs refused to read CN’s mass of evidence showing that Walther’s position was scriptural and debate CN on the matter.
When CN showed that Israel First Millennialism and Christian Zionism is contrary to Scripture, many Fundamentalists ignored CN and refused to consider what CN was publishing.
When CN showed 50 years ago that evolution is an anti-scriptural, anti-scientific myth, the intellectual snobs refused to read what CN published.
When CN published 160 pages of the Talmud to show that this book, which orthodox Jews consider the very Word of God and their highest authority, says Jesus is a bastard and Mary is a whore and that the Romans killed billions of Jews in one day at a time when there were only a few million Jews in the world, the intellectual snobs considered CN anti-Semitic.
When Christian News exposed the rank liberalism, syncretism, and universalism prevailing within both modern Protestantism and Roman Catholicism the intellectual snobs paid little attention.
When CN noted that a high percentage of Roman Catholic churchmen, including Pope Paul VI were homosexuals, CN was ignored.
When CN told the truth about the mass murders committed by Stalin and Mao, the intellectual snobs called CN a “McCarthyite.” When CN pleaded that churches observe Captive Nations Sunday most of them at first ignored CN.
CN plans to continue its long battle vs. intellectual laziness and snobbery regardless of the organized tunnel vision conservatives who want CN to close and let the LCMS bureaucracy handle matters. Bonhoeffer and King is one more book in CN’s 50 year battle for free speech and against intellectual laziness and snobbery. Read it and then ask CPH, both LCMS seminaries and the LCMS bureaucracy why they praise Bonhoeffer and King who denied the resurrection of Christ.
Christian News, Vol. 49, No. 8, February 21, 2011
“A Fifty Year Battle vs. Intellectual Laziness” is the subtitle of Bonhoeffer and King – Their Life and Theology Documented in Christian News 1963-2011.” The 320 page book was just published by Lutheran News Inc. It is available from Christian News for $11.95 plus $4.00 s/h.
The book begins with 10 pages of more than a 100 quotes from articles in the book. Some show that Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Luther King rejected the Resurrection of Christ and said that the Bible contains myth and fiction.
Who Really Wrote the Bible?
The editor says in the preface to this book:
The great LCMS Bonhoeffer and King praising scholars should be telling their students to read Who Really Wrote the Bible? And Why It Should Be Taken Seriously Again by Eyal Rav-Noy and Gil Weinreich.
Eyal Rav-Noy, a native of Israel, is director of the Jewish Learning Academy, where he specializes in textual analysis and biblical criticism. He shows that skeptics like Bonhoeffer who rejected the Mosaic authorship of the first five books of the Bible are guilty of “intellectual laziness.”
How dare a mere country pastor like the editor of Christian News challenge the great scholars in all of the major denominations, including the Roman Catholic Church and Orthodox Church, who accept the prevailing view about Bonhoeffer and King? Jewish scholars Eyal Rav-Noy and Gil Weinreich write in Who Really Wrote The Bible?:
“We argue that most contemporary biblical criticism is a fraud, an exercise in futility, and a model of lemming-like conformity. On balance, the academic study of the Bible has not contributed to a better understanding of the text. Rather, the field seems to be devoted to the circular task of proving itself correct” (27).
“Despite this rather pompous dismissal of any dissent, it is the academic critics of the single authorship of the Bible who are short on objective evidence, and it is the documentary hypothesis that is unscholarly and cannot withstand logical scrutiny” (24).
This book maintains that the best evidence clearly shows that both Bonhoeffer and King repudiated the resurrection of Christ and the historic Christian faith regardless of the prevailing opinion among the great scholars. One chapter in Who Really wrote the Bible? is titled “Intellectual Laziness” and another “Creation, Plagues and a Talking Donkey: The Bible Critics Make Asses of Themselves.” The same could be said about the great Bonhoeffer and King champions who refuse to read the kind of evidence arrayed in this book. The book exposes the intellectual laziness of the Bonhoeffer and King defenders in the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod who refuse to read Christian News even though it was sent to their church. The subtitle of the book is “A Fifty Year Battle vs. Intellectual Laziness.”
LCMS professors are members of LCMS congregations receiving CN. There is no excuse for any real scholar in the LCMS to say that he never saw any evidence that Bonhoeffer and King rejected the historic Christian faith. Articles in CN referring to Bonhoeffer and King cover almost 50 years. This explains frequent use of various quotations. Some of what CN has published about King and Bonhoeffer was repeated several times.
This book on Bonhoeffer and King not only shows that their theology is not Christian but also exposes the lack of true scholarship of professors, church bureaucrats, and others who insist that the theology of Bonhoeffer and King was Christian and that Bonhoeffer was the greatest Lutheran since Martin Luther.
Intellectual Snobbishness
Bonhoeffer and King could also be subtitled: “A Fifty Year Battle vs Intellectual Snobbishness.”
One of the first articles in the book in the section on King is “Religious Socialism” by Kurt Marquart. It appeared in the January 11, 1965 Lutheran News (now Christian News). Marquart wrote that “for intellectual snobs of course facts contained in books they dislike simply don’t exist; Orwells’ memory Holy you know!” (p. 151). Part I of the speech the CN editor prepared to be presented at Concordia University Wisconsin, after quoting Marquart, has a section on “intellectual snobs.” CN noted that the “intellectual snobs”:
1. Refused to read articles by Marquart and others in Christian News which took issue with their liberal and social gospel views.
2. Refused to examine the evidence William Beck presented exposing the errors of the Revised Standard Version of the Bible and showing that the AAT was far more reliable and in better modern English.
3. Refused to consider the mass of evidence CN has presented exposing the errors of the ESV which is 91% RSV.
4. Refused to allow Christian News to be distributed to seminarians.
5. Refused to consider evidence that theological liberalism is defended and promoted in their denomination.
6. Refused to consider the evidence that Jesus First Leader Charles Mueller supported the anti-scriptural theological position of Seminex and wants the LCMS to be open for those who promoted evolution and the ordination of women.
7. Refused to consider the evidence that there is no scientific evidence to support the kind of recovered memory therapy practiced by Concordia Seminary, St. Louis Professor Joseph Barbour which led him to get the daughter of a member of the seminary staff to believe her father raped her and sacrificed babies to the devil.
8. Refuse to debate in any arena those who insist there is no evidence that the Germans during WWII exterminated six million Jews, most of them in gas chambers.
9. Ignore the evidence that Bonhoeffer and King rejected such basic Christian doctrines as the virgin birth and resurrection of Christ.
The record shows that Christian News has a long history of battling intellectual laziness and snobbery. The index in the last volume of each of the 48 volumes of Christian News and the index in the Christian News Encyclopedia and each of most of the books CN has published have thousands of citations.
During their student days, Herman Otten and Kurt Marquart, attempted to show their professors how far such theologians as Barth, Emil Brunner, Soren Kierkegaard, Nyrgen, Aulen, Reinhold, and Richard Niebuhr, and others had departed from historic Christianity. Most professors refused to read such books as the Neo-Modernism by Cornelius Van Til, Thy Word is Truth by Edward Young, The Word Shall Stand by Olav Valen Sendstad, The Five Books of Moses and the Unity of Isaiah by Oswald T. Allis, Christianity and Liberalism, the Origins of Paul’s Religion and the Virgin Birth of Christ by J. Gresham Machen.
Most did not read the vast array of scholarly journals in the seminary library, which William Beck, translator of An American Translation of the Bible, devoured in his efforts to find the best text. When CN challenged the liberals on the faculty to answer Robert Dick Wilson’s questions in Is the Higher Criticism Scholarly, they remained silent.
Most of the members of the LCMS bureaucracy refuse to read the mass of evidence the CN editor compiled in the 1961 and 1962 State of the Church Book of Documentation which documented the anti-scriptural theology of such LCMS theologians considered “shining stars” as Martin Marty and Jaroslav Pelikan.
During its early years, CN published many articles showing the harmful effects of smoking at a time which a large percentage of pastors and professors were smoking and refused to read what CN was publishing about smoking. In recent years, CN has said very little about smoking and a good fitness program since numerous other publications now oppose smoking and promote a healthy lifestyle. When CN first began battling against abortion and homosexuality, many critics who refused to read what CN was actually saying, maintained that CN was once again just stirring up controversy.
When CN insisted that a good response to declining church growth would be for churches to return to what the Bible, Martin Luther and most denominations until the 1930s taught about birth control and family life, the intellectual snobs ignored what CN was publishing.
When CN showed that C.F.W. Walther’s defense of the rights of laymen and congregationalism was scriptural, the hyper-euro intellectual snobs refused to read CN’s mass of evidence showing that Walther’s position was scriptural and debate CN on the matter.
When CN showed that Israel First Millennialism and Christian Zionism is contrary to Scripture, many Fundamentalists ignored CN and refused to consider what CN was publishing.
When CN showed 50 years ago that evolution is an anti-scriptural, anti-scientific myth, the intellectual snobs refused to read what CN published.
When CN published 160 pages of the Talmud to show that this book, which orthodox Jews consider the very Word of God and their highest authority, says Jesus is a bastard and Mary is a whore and that the Romans killed billions of Jews in one day at a time when there were only a few million Jews in the world, the intellectual snobs considered CN anti-Semitic.
When Christian News exposed the rank liberalism, syncretism, and universalism prevailing within both modern Protestantism and Roman Catholicism the intellectual snobs paid little attention.
When CN noted that a high percentage of Roman Catholic churchmen, including Pope Paul VI were homosexuals, CN was ignored.
When CN told the truth about the mass murders committed by Stalin and Mao, the intellectual snobs called CN a “McCarthyite.” When CN pleaded that churches observe Captive Nations Sunday most of them at first ignored CN.
CN plans to continue its long battle vs. intellectual laziness and snobbery regardless of the organized tunnel vision conservatives who want CN to close and let the LCMS bureaucracy handle matters. Bonhoeffer and King is one more book in CN’s 50 year battle for free speech and against intellectual laziness and snobbery. Read it and then ask CPH, both LCMS seminaries and the LCMS bureaucracy why they praise Bonhoeffer and King who denied the resurrection of Christ.
Thursday, February 10, 2011
Marquart Not Bonhoeffer
Marquart Not Bonhoeffer
Vol. 49, No. 7, February 14, 2011
The Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod schools in the LCMS’s Concordia University System both LCMS seminaries and Concordia Publishing House should be promoting the writings of Kurt Marquart and not Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Pastor Herman Otten said during the speech he presented on February 3 at Concordia University Wisconsin.
Concordia Publishing House has been prominently displaying Bonhoeffer’s books. A full page in the latest CPH catalog features 10 books by Bonhoeffer. Concordia Semi-nary, St. Louis has said that Bonhoeffer is perhaps the greatest Lutheran theologian since Martin Luther. The Lutheran Witness claims that Bonhoeffer was a confessional Lutheran and Martin Luther King a “committed Christian.” Bonhoeffer and King – Their Life and Theology Documented in Christian News 1963-2010 shows that both Bonhoeffer and King denied such Christian doctrines as the resurrection of Christ and claimed the Bible contained myths. The subtitle of the book is “A Fifty Year Battle vs. Intellectual laziness.” It is now available from Christian News for $11.95.
Otten noted that Concordia University Wisconsin awarded Kurt Marquart a D.D. degree. The move was enthusiastically endorsed by LCMS President A.L. Barry and Dr. Edwin Suelflow, former president of the South Wisconsin District and member of the CUW Board of Regents.
Fight for the Faith
The title of the CN editor’s speech is “A Twenty-First Century Platform for Concordia University, Wisconsin, Other Schools In the Concordia University System, and the Youth of America – FIGHT FOR THE FAITH.” Part I appeared in the February 7, 2010 Christian News. It was distributed at CUW when the editor spoke. Part II was also distributed. It will appear in Christian News when space permits.
The editor listed sixteen reasons why a Twenty-First Reformation is needed. He mentioned the worldwide uprising against sex abuse within the Church, particularly the Roman Catholic Church. He displayed the cover of the 1300 page The Rite of Sodomy by a Roman Catholic scholar who shows that leading Roman Catholic Bishops, including Pope Paul VI, were homosexuals. Otten noted that even Roman Catholic scholars estimated that half of the Roman Catholic priests and seminarians may be homosexuals. Otten said that “Christendom today is in a far greater need of a Reformation than it was 500 years ago.” He showed that the destructive notions of biblical higher criticism have infiltrated not only most of modern Protestantism but Roman Catholicism as well. He had photos of the covers of Rome’s Jerusalem Bible and massive Jerome Biblical Commentary reviewed in Christian News together with the 15 volume 15 million word New Catholic Encyclopedia which say the Bible contains myths, fiction and legend.
He showed articles from the Christian Century reporting that both the Christian Century and the Wisconsin Council of Churches were sponsoring another seminar by Jesus Seminar scholar Marcus Borg. The Jesus Seminar says that Jesus never said about 80% of the statements attributed to him in the Bible. It claims that Jesus Christ was not born of a virgin and did not rise from the dead.
The Christian Century and Martin Marty
The editor told the students and faculty that anyone who wants to check the record of the Christian Century should check the index of the Christian News Encyclopedia. It shows some 75 citations for the pro-abortion and pro-homosexual Christian Century. One of the covers of the Christian Century Otten had showed “A Muslim, A Christian, and A Jew in Ministry Together.” The Christian Century maintains Jews, Muslims, and Christians all worship the same God.
Dr. Martin Marty, who has been associated with the Christian Century for more than 50 years and says he agrees with the editorial position of the Christian Century, recently spoke at Concordia University Wisconsin. When Marty spoke at a theological symposium at Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, a group of California laymen including a California congressman attempted to arrange a debate between Otten and Marty at the seminary. Neither the seminary nor Marty were interested in any such debate. Otten accepted the invitation to debate. Marty was to argue why Lutheran seminarians should attend an ELCA seminary and Otten why they should attend an LCMS seminary. Then each was to be given an opportunity to question the other on anything either wrote.
Kurt Marquart opposed Marty’s liberal theology for some 50 years. Otten told the students and faculty:
This evening dear students and faculty members of Concordia University Wisconsin, I tell you the same thing I told those from former Captive Nations. You made the right choice attending or teaching at a confessional Lutheran University, which clearly proclaims the central doctrine of the Christian faith, justification by faith alone in the saving merits of Jesus Christ and the other fundamentals of historic Christianity, the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, the virgin birth, deity, vicarious satisfaction, bodily resurrection of Christ, the inerrancy and historicity of the entire Bible in all matters, a school which also affirms a six 24 hour day creation, a young earth, and teaches that Christianity is the only faith which is founded on solid historic evidence and not myth and fairy tale. In this age of relativism and universalism, when many deny objective, propositional truth and say your god is whatever you make him, you are attending a school which insists that Jesus Christ is the only way to heaven and all other religions are false and lead only to Hell as Jesus says (John 14:6), “I am the way, the truth and the life, no man comes to the Father except by me.” Peter confesses (Acts 4:12), the Athanasian Creed affirms: “Whosoever will be saved, before all things it is necessary that he hold the Catholic (i.e., universal Christian) faith. Which faith except everyone do keep whole and undefiled, without doubt he shall perish everlastingly. And the catholic faith is this, that we worship one God in Trinity and Trinity in Unity.” “This is the catholic faith; except a man believe faithfully and firmly, he cannot be saved.” All schools in the Concordia University System are expected to affirm the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod’s Statement on Faith and Scriptural and Confessional Principals affirmed by the LCMS in 1973 at the height of its great Battle for the Bible: “We believe that Jesus Christ is the only way to heaven and that all who die without saving faith in Him are eternally damned.” Today some fail to recognize that the LCMS’s great Battle for the Bible involved far more than the inerrancy of the Bible, the ordination of women, evolution, homosexuality, the historicity of Genesis and Jonah, but also the vicarious satisfaction of Christ, the teaching that Jesus paid the ransom price to God the Father for the sins of all, and the doctrine that Jesus Christ is the only way to heaven was also involved.
Otten urged the students and faculty not to waste time and to make good use of their library. He noted that Nicholas Carr in his recently released book What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains: The Shallows, writes: “The Net’s cacophony of stimuli short-circuits both conscious and unconscious thoughts, preventing our minds from either thinking deeply or creatively.”
Birth Control and Real Church Growth
In a section on “Birth Control and Real Church Growth” the editor noted that “Christian News has often said in this day of all kinds of church growth schemes that the best answer to improving church growth is a return to what the Bible, Martin Luther and the founding fathers teach about birth control. Time did not permit him to show the photos of “The Young Family” in this issue (p. 8). “Pro-abstinence ‘Love Fest’ to feature Bristol Palen,” a story from LCMS news on page 1 of the February 7 Christian News reports that Bristol Palen will be speaking at a Lutheran church on pro-abstinence. Otten says that having Dr. and Mrs. Young speak at CUS schools would be a great encouragement for youth to want many children and raise them as solid Christians. Otten emphasized that there should be no sex outside marriage and that the LCMS, unlike other major denominations, is showing true love when it insists that homosexuality is a sin and that homosexuals who make it public that they are homosexuals should not be communed or permitted to serve as pastors. Otten claims that those who commune and ordain homosexuals are encouraging them to continue in their sinful lifestyle and continue on the road to hell.
Faculties No Warrens of Trembling Rabbits
Otten reminded the faculty that Kurt Marquart said that seminary faculties “should not be warrens of cowering rabbits but men of God speaking their convictions regardless of image.” He listed some of the overtures the faculty of Concordia Seminary, Ft. Wayne submitted to LCMS conventions when Marquart was on the faculty. Since very few LCMS congregations now submit overtures to LCMS conventions Otten listed some suggestions for overtures the faculty of CUS could consider submitting to the next LCMS convention.
Otten said:
Publish Marquart Writings
10. Publish Marquart writings. The 2010-2011 CPH resource catalog has a full page promoting some 10 books by Dietrich Bonhoeffer and one book about him. It lists no books about Kurt Marquart and only one book by him, Confessional Lutheran Dogmatics, The Church and Her Fellowship, Ministry and Governance. The hundreds of Marquart writings listed in Marquart’s Legacy should be published in a series of volumes. They have more popular appeal and are far more helpful than Bonhoeffer’s writings, which undermine historic Christianity. Marquart wrote an entire series for a Lutheran youth publication. Your faculty could petition the next LCMS convention to ask CPH to publish Marquart’s writings and rather than giving Bonhoeffer so much space in CPH’s display room, give Marquart’s writings the prominence they deserve. The book on Bonhoeffer and King Christian News plans to publish will clearly show that Bohnoeffer denied such doctrines as the resurrection of Christ.
A Twenty-First Century Reformation
Above all as the 500th Anniversary of the Reformation approaches in 2017, faculties in CUS should call for a 21st Century Formula of Concord and 21st Century Reformation. CN has published many reasons for such a 21st Century Reformation and 21st Century Formula of Concord. Unfortunately, among the tunnel vision minded organized conservatives and in the LCMS bureaucracy little interest has been expressed in a 21st Century Reformation and Formula of Concord which speaks to the issues of our day. My book, Walter Maier Still Speaks – Missouri and the World Should Listen, includes a tentative 20th Century Formula of Concord (pp. 296-316), I presented to the International Council of Churches meeting at the University of British Columbia. Sections on Baptism, the Lord’s Supper, Millennialism, etc. could be added. There is no reason why your theology department with its solid Lutheran chairman could not get the ball rolling for such a 21st Century Formula of Concord. It certainly would arouse more interest than something coming from a person who has just been a country pastor since he graduated from the St. Louis seminary in 1957.
Set Up a Series of Debates
The Concordia University Wisconsin press release announcing my appearance here this evening quotes CUW President Patrick Ferry as saying: “Concordia is a place where dialog, discussion, and debate are encouraged.” Every school in CUS and the LCMS’ seminaries should arrange for a series of friendly debates. Dr. Burkee, in his Power, Politics, and the Missouri Synod, which once again I encourage you to read, mentions: “My mother, Jan, who met my father for their first date, of all places, at a lecture by Herman Otten at her San Diego church, has been a life-long source of inspiration and encouragement. So too has my wife, Susan, for over twenty years.” This may have been at the time I spoke in some churches in Southern California which invited a liberal ALC theologian and me to debate the doctrinal and practical issues facing all of Christendom. Most of the 600 who attended the debate remained the entire four hours. Debates should now be held at CUS schools. First on evolution and creation, then on higher criticism of the Bible, the J-E-D-P hypothesis, etc. Debates draw the interest of students and faculty. A good start would be to have a debate on creation vs. evolution by such an outspoken defender of evolution as Dr. Matthew Becker of Valparaiso University and Dr. David Menton of the Creation Museum of Answers in Genesis or Dr. David Kaufmann of the Creation Research Society. When I was invited to participate in a debate at Westminster College on Satanism with Michael Aquino, Ph.D., the intellectual leader of the Satanists, the cite of the debate had to be moved to the schools largest auditorium because of the interest. Christian News has never opposed having a liberal such as Martin Marty speak at a CUS school provided that an articulate, intelligent, confessional spokesman familiar with the liberal’s position is given opportunity to show where the liberal, evolutionist, pro-abortionist, pro-homosexual, etc., is wrong and time to question him. Not even the 6 million figure of the Holocaust should be considered beyond debate. Our CUS youth should be taught to examine the evidence and not swallow hoaxes as fact just because a thousand books and hundreds of movies portray the hoax as fact. They should not become like such cultists as the Mormons or Jehovah’s Witnesses, who refuse to examine the evidence that their religion is founded on fiction and myth.
Just because almost all seminaries, including the LCMS’s, now praise Dietrich Bonhoeffer as a great Christian martyr doesn’t mean it is true. Let’s have debates at CUS schools on whether or not Bonhoeffer and Martin Luther King, Jr. are the great Christians the vast majority of Christian seminaries now claim. My new book on Bonhoeffer and King exposes the lack of scholarship of those who champion Bonhoeffer and King as great Christians who set a fine example for youth in both faith and practice. At the present time the most outspoken critics of Christian News who want CN to close up shop, are those hyper-euros who want the LCMS to return to the hierarchical church government the founding fathers of the LCMS left behind in Europe. Lets have a debate between John Pless of our Ft. Wayne seminary, who is a leader of the Loehe Society, and Jack Cascione, a leader of the Walther Conference. Loehe with his hierarchical notions opposed Walther’s congregationalism and defense of the rights of laymen.
In Part I of my presentation I noted that the real hero, God’s chief instrument in the LCMS’s great Battle for the Bible, about which Dr. Burkee writes in his book, was no one in the LCMS bureaucracy, no double talking LCMS president, no seminary president, no professor or anyone whose salary came from the LCMS. It was no one associated with any of the organized conservative groups working behind the scenes, planning political strategy and voting guides. “It was a highly, intellectually gifted and articulate refugee from communism. It was no ‘Johnny-come-lately.’ It was a young, highly dedicated and Christ centered, spiritually minded student who had just left his teenage years. He was ‘the brain’ behind a few students who protested in the 1950’s against theological liberalism, evolution and universalism creeping into the LCMS, particularly at Concordia Seminary, St. Louis.”
I know of no one in the LCMS since the days of Walter Maier who was more highly recognized outside the LCMS than Kurt Marquart. When Marquart appeared on the Manion Forum of Dean Clarence Manion of the Notre Dame School of Law, Dean Manion commented (Manion Forum, December 3, 1967): “My friends, in my 13 years at this microphone, I have never heard a more precise and learned analysis of the conflict now raging between Communism and organized religion, namely, the churches of all denomination.”
Al Schmidt, who taught at Concordia Seminary, Ft. Wayne, with Marquart, wrote: “His presentations are understood and admired in contexts outside of the church. For several years, Kurt and I were members of the Board of Directors of the Allen County Right to Life organization in Fort Wayne. This group had a lot of Catholic members, but when Kurt spoke, the people listened. Many times I heard them say: ‘He surely knows how to discern the major issues.’ He was liked so well they even elected him as president of the organization.”
Crisis in Christendom – Seminex Ablaze, p. 130.
When Kurt Marquart died, Hon. Tom McVeigh of the Australian parliament referred to him as “America’s gift to Australia” (Christian News, January 8, 2007. “He came to us on the ‘Darling downs, Australia, like a great searchlight from across the Pacific Ocean.”
I wish that this evening he would be speaking to you instead of me, and that then every school in the Concordia University System would invite him to speak. What a tragedy that when Kurt Marquart was running for the presidency of the LCMS shortly after your school awarded him a doctorate, the organized, tunnel vision conservatives refused to support him for LCMS president. When Christian News tried to get these organized conservatives to back Dr. Marquart for president, they totally ignored Christian News. They did not share Dr. Marquart’s broad vision, including his promotion of a Twentieth Century Formula of Concord and Reformation. Their focus was often only on the LCMS. Dr. Marquart, who was always a strong champion of C.F.W. Walther and his defense of congregationalism and the rights of laymen, lost the support of the Loehe supporting hyper-euros in the LCMS when he opposed their sacerdotalism.
The organized conservatives ignored the wishes of many congregations. They were not going to support someone who made it clear that if he were elected president, evolutionists and supporters of the theology of Seminex and women pastors, would get removed from the LCMS. Marquart wrote in his statement for the Lutheran Witness when he was on the LCMS presidential ballot:
“The single most crucial issue facing our Synod, in my view, is the progressive loss of doctrinal unity. There is, for instance, the acceptance of evolution by some within the Concordia University System and there is the neo-Pentecostalism of ‘Renewal in Missouri.’” (Lutheran Witness, May, 2004. Christian News, May 17, 2004).
Now finally, as one who has had all his years in the ministry not been sitting in some ivory tower but baptizing infants, confirming youth and adults, being with them in their dying moments and finally made that walk with them to the grave, permit me to tell you that these issues we have been talking about concern the most important matters all men must face: “Where did I come from; why am I here and where am I going.” May God grant that all of you here, students and faculty trust only in the merits of Christ for your eternal salvation and in Him who said: “I am the resurrection and life, he that liveth and believeth in Me though he were dead yet shall he live.” Each day as I take my regular 4 a.m. morning walk (formerly run), I have a program of first praying Luther’s morning prayer, then for my wife, myself and each one of my seven children, their spouses, and all the grandchildren, etc. Then I go into a pattern of singing in my mind some of the hundreds of hymns I have memorized during my years in the pastoral ministry, many of them on my former 16 mile weekly run to the Christian News printer in Washington, Missouri to set up Christian News. About the time I pass a cemetery on the border of Camp Trinity, I’m praying the last verses of “O God, Thou Faithful God” TLH, 395.
They are:
Let me depart this life
Confiding in my Savior;
Do Thou my soul receive
That it may live forever;
And let my body have
A quiet resting-place
Within a Christian grave;
And let it sleep in peace.
And on that solemn Day
When all the dead are waking,
Stretch o’er my grave Thy hand,
Thyself my slumbers breaking.
Then let me hear Thy voice,
Change Thou this earthly frame,
And bid me aye rejoice
With those who love Thy name.
Any athlete knows that as the years go on he becomes slower and weaker. There was a time that I could easily beat all of my children in running, biking, and swimming. A daughter, when she was about 6 complained about the heat while running with me on a hot summer day. She asked for an umbrella. Some years later she became the National College Marathon champion in Los Angeles. It won’t be long and her children will beat her even though she is a cross country and track coach. Now some of my grandchildren pass me in all events. Several times at the closing award banquet at an Iron Man triathlon, I’ve told the athletes, who come from all over the U.S. and a good number of other nations, that regardless of their training program, good nutrition, and all the gimmicks various groups pedal at such events, they are all going to slow down because of one three letter word: S-I-N. All men are sinners. The wages of sin is death. But thank God the Christian who trusts only in the merits of Jesus Christ has eternal life.
May you leave CUW after your years at the largest and best Lutheran University with a firm conviction of faith in Christ, His resurrection and eternal life in heaven forever with all those who love His name. Fight for the true Christian faith until the grave as Dr. Kurt Marquart did.
x x x
Both Parts I and Part II of the editor’s speech at Concordia University Wisconsin are in Bonhoeffer and King – Their Life and Theology Documented in Christian News 1963-2010. The subtitle is “A Fifty Year battle vs Intellectual Laziness.”
Vol. 49, No. 7, February 14, 2011
The Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod schools in the LCMS’s Concordia University System both LCMS seminaries and Concordia Publishing House should be promoting the writings of Kurt Marquart and not Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Pastor Herman Otten said during the speech he presented on February 3 at Concordia University Wisconsin.
Concordia Publishing House has been prominently displaying Bonhoeffer’s books. A full page in the latest CPH catalog features 10 books by Bonhoeffer. Concordia Semi-nary, St. Louis has said that Bonhoeffer is perhaps the greatest Lutheran theologian since Martin Luther. The Lutheran Witness claims that Bonhoeffer was a confessional Lutheran and Martin Luther King a “committed Christian.” Bonhoeffer and King – Their Life and Theology Documented in Christian News 1963-2010 shows that both Bonhoeffer and King denied such Christian doctrines as the resurrection of Christ and claimed the Bible contained myths. The subtitle of the book is “A Fifty Year Battle vs. Intellectual laziness.” It is now available from Christian News for $11.95.
Otten noted that Concordia University Wisconsin awarded Kurt Marquart a D.D. degree. The move was enthusiastically endorsed by LCMS President A.L. Barry and Dr. Edwin Suelflow, former president of the South Wisconsin District and member of the CUW Board of Regents.
Fight for the Faith
The title of the CN editor’s speech is “A Twenty-First Century Platform for Concordia University, Wisconsin, Other Schools In the Concordia University System, and the Youth of America – FIGHT FOR THE FAITH.” Part I appeared in the February 7, 2010 Christian News. It was distributed at CUW when the editor spoke. Part II was also distributed. It will appear in Christian News when space permits.
The editor listed sixteen reasons why a Twenty-First Reformation is needed. He mentioned the worldwide uprising against sex abuse within the Church, particularly the Roman Catholic Church. He displayed the cover of the 1300 page The Rite of Sodomy by a Roman Catholic scholar who shows that leading Roman Catholic Bishops, including Pope Paul VI, were homosexuals. Otten noted that even Roman Catholic scholars estimated that half of the Roman Catholic priests and seminarians may be homosexuals. Otten said that “Christendom today is in a far greater need of a Reformation than it was 500 years ago.” He showed that the destructive notions of biblical higher criticism have infiltrated not only most of modern Protestantism but Roman Catholicism as well. He had photos of the covers of Rome’s Jerusalem Bible and massive Jerome Biblical Commentary reviewed in Christian News together with the 15 volume 15 million word New Catholic Encyclopedia which say the Bible contains myths, fiction and legend.
He showed articles from the Christian Century reporting that both the Christian Century and the Wisconsin Council of Churches were sponsoring another seminar by Jesus Seminar scholar Marcus Borg. The Jesus Seminar says that Jesus never said about 80% of the statements attributed to him in the Bible. It claims that Jesus Christ was not born of a virgin and did not rise from the dead.
The Christian Century and Martin Marty
The editor told the students and faculty that anyone who wants to check the record of the Christian Century should check the index of the Christian News Encyclopedia. It shows some 75 citations for the pro-abortion and pro-homosexual Christian Century. One of the covers of the Christian Century Otten had showed “A Muslim, A Christian, and A Jew in Ministry Together.” The Christian Century maintains Jews, Muslims, and Christians all worship the same God.
Dr. Martin Marty, who has been associated with the Christian Century for more than 50 years and says he agrees with the editorial position of the Christian Century, recently spoke at Concordia University Wisconsin. When Marty spoke at a theological symposium at Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, a group of California laymen including a California congressman attempted to arrange a debate between Otten and Marty at the seminary. Neither the seminary nor Marty were interested in any such debate. Otten accepted the invitation to debate. Marty was to argue why Lutheran seminarians should attend an ELCA seminary and Otten why they should attend an LCMS seminary. Then each was to be given an opportunity to question the other on anything either wrote.
Kurt Marquart opposed Marty’s liberal theology for some 50 years. Otten told the students and faculty:
This evening dear students and faculty members of Concordia University Wisconsin, I tell you the same thing I told those from former Captive Nations. You made the right choice attending or teaching at a confessional Lutheran University, which clearly proclaims the central doctrine of the Christian faith, justification by faith alone in the saving merits of Jesus Christ and the other fundamentals of historic Christianity, the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, the virgin birth, deity, vicarious satisfaction, bodily resurrection of Christ, the inerrancy and historicity of the entire Bible in all matters, a school which also affirms a six 24 hour day creation, a young earth, and teaches that Christianity is the only faith which is founded on solid historic evidence and not myth and fairy tale. In this age of relativism and universalism, when many deny objective, propositional truth and say your god is whatever you make him, you are attending a school which insists that Jesus Christ is the only way to heaven and all other religions are false and lead only to Hell as Jesus says (John 14:6), “I am the way, the truth and the life, no man comes to the Father except by me.” Peter confesses (Acts 4:12), the Athanasian Creed affirms: “Whosoever will be saved, before all things it is necessary that he hold the Catholic (i.e., universal Christian) faith. Which faith except everyone do keep whole and undefiled, without doubt he shall perish everlastingly. And the catholic faith is this, that we worship one God in Trinity and Trinity in Unity.” “This is the catholic faith; except a man believe faithfully and firmly, he cannot be saved.” All schools in the Concordia University System are expected to affirm the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod’s Statement on Faith and Scriptural and Confessional Principals affirmed by the LCMS in 1973 at the height of its great Battle for the Bible: “We believe that Jesus Christ is the only way to heaven and that all who die without saving faith in Him are eternally damned.” Today some fail to recognize that the LCMS’s great Battle for the Bible involved far more than the inerrancy of the Bible, the ordination of women, evolution, homosexuality, the historicity of Genesis and Jonah, but also the vicarious satisfaction of Christ, the teaching that Jesus paid the ransom price to God the Father for the sins of all, and the doctrine that Jesus Christ is the only way to heaven was also involved.
Otten urged the students and faculty not to waste time and to make good use of their library. He noted that Nicholas Carr in his recently released book What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains: The Shallows, writes: “The Net’s cacophony of stimuli short-circuits both conscious and unconscious thoughts, preventing our minds from either thinking deeply or creatively.”
Birth Control and Real Church Growth
In a section on “Birth Control and Real Church Growth” the editor noted that “Christian News has often said in this day of all kinds of church growth schemes that the best answer to improving church growth is a return to what the Bible, Martin Luther and the founding fathers teach about birth control. Time did not permit him to show the photos of “The Young Family” in this issue (p. 8). “Pro-abstinence ‘Love Fest’ to feature Bristol Palen,” a story from LCMS news on page 1 of the February 7 Christian News reports that Bristol Palen will be speaking at a Lutheran church on pro-abstinence. Otten says that having Dr. and Mrs. Young speak at CUS schools would be a great encouragement for youth to want many children and raise them as solid Christians. Otten emphasized that there should be no sex outside marriage and that the LCMS, unlike other major denominations, is showing true love when it insists that homosexuality is a sin and that homosexuals who make it public that they are homosexuals should not be communed or permitted to serve as pastors. Otten claims that those who commune and ordain homosexuals are encouraging them to continue in their sinful lifestyle and continue on the road to hell.
Faculties No Warrens of Trembling Rabbits
Otten reminded the faculty that Kurt Marquart said that seminary faculties “should not be warrens of cowering rabbits but men of God speaking their convictions regardless of image.” He listed some of the overtures the faculty of Concordia Seminary, Ft. Wayne submitted to LCMS conventions when Marquart was on the faculty. Since very few LCMS congregations now submit overtures to LCMS conventions Otten listed some suggestions for overtures the faculty of CUS could consider submitting to the next LCMS convention.
Otten said:
Publish Marquart Writings
10. Publish Marquart writings. The 2010-2011 CPH resource catalog has a full page promoting some 10 books by Dietrich Bonhoeffer and one book about him. It lists no books about Kurt Marquart and only one book by him, Confessional Lutheran Dogmatics, The Church and Her Fellowship, Ministry and Governance. The hundreds of Marquart writings listed in Marquart’s Legacy should be published in a series of volumes. They have more popular appeal and are far more helpful than Bonhoeffer’s writings, which undermine historic Christianity. Marquart wrote an entire series for a Lutheran youth publication. Your faculty could petition the next LCMS convention to ask CPH to publish Marquart’s writings and rather than giving Bonhoeffer so much space in CPH’s display room, give Marquart’s writings the prominence they deserve. The book on Bonhoeffer and King Christian News plans to publish will clearly show that Bohnoeffer denied such doctrines as the resurrection of Christ.
A Twenty-First Century Reformation
Above all as the 500th Anniversary of the Reformation approaches in 2017, faculties in CUS should call for a 21st Century Formula of Concord and 21st Century Reformation. CN has published many reasons for such a 21st Century Reformation and 21st Century Formula of Concord. Unfortunately, among the tunnel vision minded organized conservatives and in the LCMS bureaucracy little interest has been expressed in a 21st Century Reformation and Formula of Concord which speaks to the issues of our day. My book, Walter Maier Still Speaks – Missouri and the World Should Listen, includes a tentative 20th Century Formula of Concord (pp. 296-316), I presented to the International Council of Churches meeting at the University of British Columbia. Sections on Baptism, the Lord’s Supper, Millennialism, etc. could be added. There is no reason why your theology department with its solid Lutheran chairman could not get the ball rolling for such a 21st Century Formula of Concord. It certainly would arouse more interest than something coming from a person who has just been a country pastor since he graduated from the St. Louis seminary in 1957.
Set Up a Series of Debates
The Concordia University Wisconsin press release announcing my appearance here this evening quotes CUW President Patrick Ferry as saying: “Concordia is a place where dialog, discussion, and debate are encouraged.” Every school in CUS and the LCMS’ seminaries should arrange for a series of friendly debates. Dr. Burkee, in his Power, Politics, and the Missouri Synod, which once again I encourage you to read, mentions: “My mother, Jan, who met my father for their first date, of all places, at a lecture by Herman Otten at her San Diego church, has been a life-long source of inspiration and encouragement. So too has my wife, Susan, for over twenty years.” This may have been at the time I spoke in some churches in Southern California which invited a liberal ALC theologian and me to debate the doctrinal and practical issues facing all of Christendom. Most of the 600 who attended the debate remained the entire four hours. Debates should now be held at CUS schools. First on evolution and creation, then on higher criticism of the Bible, the J-E-D-P hypothesis, etc. Debates draw the interest of students and faculty. A good start would be to have a debate on creation vs. evolution by such an outspoken defender of evolution as Dr. Matthew Becker of Valparaiso University and Dr. David Menton of the Creation Museum of Answers in Genesis or Dr. David Kaufmann of the Creation Research Society. When I was invited to participate in a debate at Westminster College on Satanism with Michael Aquino, Ph.D., the intellectual leader of the Satanists, the cite of the debate had to be moved to the schools largest auditorium because of the interest. Christian News has never opposed having a liberal such as Martin Marty speak at a CUS school provided that an articulate, intelligent, confessional spokesman familiar with the liberal’s position is given opportunity to show where the liberal, evolutionist, pro-abortionist, pro-homosexual, etc., is wrong and time to question him. Not even the 6 million figure of the Holocaust should be considered beyond debate. Our CUS youth should be taught to examine the evidence and not swallow hoaxes as fact just because a thousand books and hundreds of movies portray the hoax as fact. They should not become like such cultists as the Mormons or Jehovah’s Witnesses, who refuse to examine the evidence that their religion is founded on fiction and myth.
Just because almost all seminaries, including the LCMS’s, now praise Dietrich Bonhoeffer as a great Christian martyr doesn’t mean it is true. Let’s have debates at CUS schools on whether or not Bonhoeffer and Martin Luther King, Jr. are the great Christians the vast majority of Christian seminaries now claim. My new book on Bonhoeffer and King exposes the lack of scholarship of those who champion Bonhoeffer and King as great Christians who set a fine example for youth in both faith and practice. At the present time the most outspoken critics of Christian News who want CN to close up shop, are those hyper-euros who want the LCMS to return to the hierarchical church government the founding fathers of the LCMS left behind in Europe. Lets have a debate between John Pless of our Ft. Wayne seminary, who is a leader of the Loehe Society, and Jack Cascione, a leader of the Walther Conference. Loehe with his hierarchical notions opposed Walther’s congregationalism and defense of the rights of laymen.
In Part I of my presentation I noted that the real hero, God’s chief instrument in the LCMS’s great Battle for the Bible, about which Dr. Burkee writes in his book, was no one in the LCMS bureaucracy, no double talking LCMS president, no seminary president, no professor or anyone whose salary came from the LCMS. It was no one associated with any of the organized conservative groups working behind the scenes, planning political strategy and voting guides. “It was a highly, intellectually gifted and articulate refugee from communism. It was no ‘Johnny-come-lately.’ It was a young, highly dedicated and Christ centered, spiritually minded student who had just left his teenage years. He was ‘the brain’ behind a few students who protested in the 1950’s against theological liberalism, evolution and universalism creeping into the LCMS, particularly at Concordia Seminary, St. Louis.”
I know of no one in the LCMS since the days of Walter Maier who was more highly recognized outside the LCMS than Kurt Marquart. When Marquart appeared on the Manion Forum of Dean Clarence Manion of the Notre Dame School of Law, Dean Manion commented (Manion Forum, December 3, 1967): “My friends, in my 13 years at this microphone, I have never heard a more precise and learned analysis of the conflict now raging between Communism and organized religion, namely, the churches of all denomination.”
Al Schmidt, who taught at Concordia Seminary, Ft. Wayne, with Marquart, wrote: “His presentations are understood and admired in contexts outside of the church. For several years, Kurt and I were members of the Board of Directors of the Allen County Right to Life organization in Fort Wayne. This group had a lot of Catholic members, but when Kurt spoke, the people listened. Many times I heard them say: ‘He surely knows how to discern the major issues.’ He was liked so well they even elected him as president of the organization.”
Crisis in Christendom – Seminex Ablaze, p. 130.
When Kurt Marquart died, Hon. Tom McVeigh of the Australian parliament referred to him as “America’s gift to Australia” (Christian News, January 8, 2007. “He came to us on the ‘Darling downs, Australia, like a great searchlight from across the Pacific Ocean.”
I wish that this evening he would be speaking to you instead of me, and that then every school in the Concordia University System would invite him to speak. What a tragedy that when Kurt Marquart was running for the presidency of the LCMS shortly after your school awarded him a doctorate, the organized, tunnel vision conservatives refused to support him for LCMS president. When Christian News tried to get these organized conservatives to back Dr. Marquart for president, they totally ignored Christian News. They did not share Dr. Marquart’s broad vision, including his promotion of a Twentieth Century Formula of Concord and Reformation. Their focus was often only on the LCMS. Dr. Marquart, who was always a strong champion of C.F.W. Walther and his defense of congregationalism and the rights of laymen, lost the support of the Loehe supporting hyper-euros in the LCMS when he opposed their sacerdotalism.
The organized conservatives ignored the wishes of many congregations. They were not going to support someone who made it clear that if he were elected president, evolutionists and supporters of the theology of Seminex and women pastors, would get removed from the LCMS. Marquart wrote in his statement for the Lutheran Witness when he was on the LCMS presidential ballot:
“The single most crucial issue facing our Synod, in my view, is the progressive loss of doctrinal unity. There is, for instance, the acceptance of evolution by some within the Concordia University System and there is the neo-Pentecostalism of ‘Renewal in Missouri.’” (Lutheran Witness, May, 2004. Christian News, May 17, 2004).
Now finally, as one who has had all his years in the ministry not been sitting in some ivory tower but baptizing infants, confirming youth and adults, being with them in their dying moments and finally made that walk with them to the grave, permit me to tell you that these issues we have been talking about concern the most important matters all men must face: “Where did I come from; why am I here and where am I going.” May God grant that all of you here, students and faculty trust only in the merits of Christ for your eternal salvation and in Him who said: “I am the resurrection and life, he that liveth and believeth in Me though he were dead yet shall he live.” Each day as I take my regular 4 a.m. morning walk (formerly run), I have a program of first praying Luther’s morning prayer, then for my wife, myself and each one of my seven children, their spouses, and all the grandchildren, etc. Then I go into a pattern of singing in my mind some of the hundreds of hymns I have memorized during my years in the pastoral ministry, many of them on my former 16 mile weekly run to the Christian News printer in Washington, Missouri to set up Christian News. About the time I pass a cemetery on the border of Camp Trinity, I’m praying the last verses of “O God, Thou Faithful God” TLH, 395.
They are:
Let me depart this life
Confiding in my Savior;
Do Thou my soul receive
That it may live forever;
And let my body have
A quiet resting-place
Within a Christian grave;
And let it sleep in peace.
And on that solemn Day
When all the dead are waking,
Stretch o’er my grave Thy hand,
Thyself my slumbers breaking.
Then let me hear Thy voice,
Change Thou this earthly frame,
And bid me aye rejoice
With those who love Thy name.
Any athlete knows that as the years go on he becomes slower and weaker. There was a time that I could easily beat all of my children in running, biking, and swimming. A daughter, when she was about 6 complained about the heat while running with me on a hot summer day. She asked for an umbrella. Some years later she became the National College Marathon champion in Los Angeles. It won’t be long and her children will beat her even though she is a cross country and track coach. Now some of my grandchildren pass me in all events. Several times at the closing award banquet at an Iron Man triathlon, I’ve told the athletes, who come from all over the U.S. and a good number of other nations, that regardless of their training program, good nutrition, and all the gimmicks various groups pedal at such events, they are all going to slow down because of one three letter word: S-I-N. All men are sinners. The wages of sin is death. But thank God the Christian who trusts only in the merits of Jesus Christ has eternal life.
May you leave CUW after your years at the largest and best Lutheran University with a firm conviction of faith in Christ, His resurrection and eternal life in heaven forever with all those who love His name. Fight for the true Christian faith until the grave as Dr. Kurt Marquart did.
x x x
Both Parts I and Part II of the editor’s speech at Concordia University Wisconsin are in Bonhoeffer and King – Their Life and Theology Documented in Christian News 1963-2010. The subtitle is “A Fifty Year battle vs Intellectual Laziness.”
Thursday, February 3, 2011
CN's IN HOUSE TRAINING AT MISSOURIAN
CN’s IN HOUSE TRAINING AT MISSOURIAN
Christian News, Vol. 49, No. 6, February 7, 2011
While the editor never attended any school of journalism, the editor did get valuable “in house” training at the Missourian Publishers, the publishers of the Washington Missourian. This newspaper may have won more awards in many categories than any other newspaper in Missouri. The Missourian has been publishing CN ever since its first few mimeographed issues. At times it has also printed such Lutheran papers as The Lutheran Witness, the St. Louis Lutheran, and The Worldwide Evangelist.
Missourian Publisher and Editor James Miller, who died in 1989 entered the Missouri Hall of Journalism in its first class together with Joseph Pulitzer of the St. Louis Post Dispatch. Mr. Miller and the editor were good friends. They had many talks on numerous subjects when both arrived at the Missourian around 5:30 a.m. each day CN went to press current Missourian Editor Bill Miller wrote in “A Man of Courage, Discipline” in the February 12, 2003 Missourian: “The Missourian is marking an anniversary this month. Christian News is marking the same anniversary. It has been 40 years of a printing and friendship partnership.” The Missourian Editor, a former president of the Missouri Press Association, wrote that the CN editor “is the most disciplined person this writer has ever met.” When the editor had the closing prayer at a banquet of the Missouri Press Association he concluded by asking all the writers to sing America-the Beautiful “Why Christian News,” speech the CN editor presented to a meeting of Lutheran Editors and Publishers at Concordia Publishing House at the invitation of the editor of ELCA’s Lutheran, who was president of the group that year, concluded: “WHY CHRISTIAN NEWS? If you Lutheran journalists on the staffs of official Lutheran publications continue to support abortion or remain silent about this tremendous sin, the Lutherans surely need an independent publication in which warns that abortion is sinful and which exposes the fact that thousands of unborn infants are being killed in ‘Lutheran’ hospitals.” The LCMS’s Concordia Publishing House even published a book by a member of the Lutheran Witness staff supporting abortion. The editor’s entire speech on “Why Christian News” presented at CPH is in The Christian News Encyclopedia, pp. 457-468. “Stop CPH from Publishing Pro-Abortion Book” is on page 11 of The Christian News Encyclopedia.
Christian News, Vol. 49, No. 6, February 7, 2011
While the editor never attended any school of journalism, the editor did get valuable “in house” training at the Missourian Publishers, the publishers of the Washington Missourian. This newspaper may have won more awards in many categories than any other newspaper in Missouri. The Missourian has been publishing CN ever since its first few mimeographed issues. At times it has also printed such Lutheran papers as The Lutheran Witness, the St. Louis Lutheran, and The Worldwide Evangelist.
Missourian Publisher and Editor James Miller, who died in 1989 entered the Missouri Hall of Journalism in its first class together with Joseph Pulitzer of the St. Louis Post Dispatch. Mr. Miller and the editor were good friends. They had many talks on numerous subjects when both arrived at the Missourian around 5:30 a.m. each day CN went to press current Missourian Editor Bill Miller wrote in “A Man of Courage, Discipline” in the February 12, 2003 Missourian: “The Missourian is marking an anniversary this month. Christian News is marking the same anniversary. It has been 40 years of a printing and friendship partnership.” The Missourian Editor, a former president of the Missouri Press Association, wrote that the CN editor “is the most disciplined person this writer has ever met.” When the editor had the closing prayer at a banquet of the Missouri Press Association he concluded by asking all the writers to sing America-the Beautiful “Why Christian News,” speech the CN editor presented to a meeting of Lutheran Editors and Publishers at Concordia Publishing House at the invitation of the editor of ELCA’s Lutheran, who was president of the group that year, concluded: “WHY CHRISTIAN NEWS? If you Lutheran journalists on the staffs of official Lutheran publications continue to support abortion or remain silent about this tremendous sin, the Lutherans surely need an independent publication in which warns that abortion is sinful and which exposes the fact that thousands of unborn infants are being killed in ‘Lutheran’ hospitals.” The LCMS’s Concordia Publishing House even published a book by a member of the Lutheran Witness staff supporting abortion. The editor’s entire speech on “Why Christian News” presented at CPH is in The Christian News Encyclopedia, pp. 457-468. “Stop CPH from Publishing Pro-Abortion Book” is on page 11 of The Christian News Encyclopedia.
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