The American Spectator
"When a church allows humans to usurp the authority rightfully belonging to the Bible, it becomes vulnerable to the prevailing social causes of the day. Evidence of this is as close as the nearest Protestant mainline church."
"Rarely if ever in American religious history has a Christian church body been able to repulse a concerted attempt by professional theologians to lead that church into the darkness of theological liberalism.
"But that was what happened fifty years ago when theologically conservative laity and pastors rescued the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod from such a fate. In 1974, 90 percent of the faculty (forty-five out of fifty professors) at the denomination’s foremost seminary, Concordia Seminary, and approximately 80 percent of the students walked off the St. Louis campus and into “exile” to start their own theologically liberal institution. Eventually, the group took about two hundred of the church body’s six thousand congregations with them, thus forming the Association of Evangelical Lutheran Churches.
"It is a story with all the drama one would expect from a modern church splintering in plain sight. It featured tempestuous church conventions, rebellious student convocations, pompous faculty orations, protests and press conferences, and all the militant accouterments — black armbands and the like — one would expect of a winner-take-all showdown in the tumultuous 1970s. It ended with a theatrical exodus event that included a mock funeral for the seminary, boarded-up arches and gateways, the planting of memorial crosses on campus grounds, defiant speeches, and a triumphal march away from the campus into self-imposed exile.
The Theological Tempest
"In a time when churches split over positions on sexual proclivities or thinly disguised political issues, if there is a silver lining to this particular ecclesiastical fissure, it is that, in a bizarre way, it is refreshing to see a church body fracturing over what the church should be about in the first place, that is, theology — or, more specifically, biblical interpretation.
"That’s how this squabble started. It stemmed from the adoption of a hermeneutical method called historical criticism by certain members of the faculty of Concordia Seminary.
"Historical criticism is a product of the Enlightenment, the age when science and reason were in ascendancy. It focuses on biblical hermeneutics, treating God’s written Word as though it is to be interpreted as a merely human document that is in principle no different from any other piece of ancient writing. By rejecting the notion of divine inspiration, historical criticism undermines the Bible’s authority, denies its miracles, and dismisses its historical accounts.
"This method is a cornerstone of liberal theology and is widely utilized in the hermeneutical practices of mainline Protestants, including Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Methodists, and liberal Baptists and Lutherans. The Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod had avoided its taint until, in the early 1960s, reports began to filter through pastoral and lay ranks that certain professors at the seminary had embraced this interpretive method. Some professors were giving speeches and publishing papers asserting a troubling notion: that the Scriptures are not God’s written Word verbally inspired by the Holy Spirit but, rather, are self-contradictory.
