James C. Burkee, Power, Politics, and the Missouri Synod: A Conflict that Changed American History (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2011).

Editors’ Note: An excerpt of Burkee’s book will appear in the Spring 2011 print issue of Lutheran Forum. Further reflections on Burkee’s book will be considered for posting on LF online: send your submissions to editor-at-lutheranforum-dot-org.

If it is not already known to readers, I am a wounded veteran. Not from military service in Vietnam or Kuwait or Iraq or Afghanistan, but from the civil war in American Lutheranism. James Burkee uncovers and describes the hidden history of this war in his forthcoming book. It took place as I was entering into adulthood; along with many others of my generation, it robbed me of my church and the future that I planned. Like a repressed trauma, I submit, that conflict continues to condition all of us, some more directly than others, in debilitating ways to this very day.

I might immediately explain, however, several ways in which I was not typical of my generation, which have kept me from the usual—triumphalistic—interpretations of what we experienced. I was an Easterner, who grew up in New Jersey with ethnic and religious pluralism the very air I breathed. And I was a child of the old Slovak synod, in which my father was a pastor, which had quite a different ethos than the Teutonic LCMS. I started out at Bard College, a bastion of East Coast radicalism, before discerning a call to the ministry and transferring to the LCMS’s Concordia system, first to Bronxville, then to Fort Wayne. So my theological agenda was very different from the beginning. I had already seen the future at Bard College: I had come back to the Christian faith from a close encounter with post-Christian paganism. I was therefore little interested in fighting a stupid battle over the preposterous dogma of biblical inerrancy. Any serious reader of the Bible—I had read and re-read the Bible from Genesis to Revelation three or four times in my freshman and sophomore years of college—is immediately dealing with discrepancies incapable of artificial harmonization, discrepancies which are rather clues to deeper understanding. These are unavoidable difficulties for us today, to be faced in critical theology, not magically or dogmatically ruled out of existence. Thus for me, already as an 18-year old who at Bard College had read Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism and Reinhold Niebhuhr’s The Nature and Destiny of Man, fundamentalism was as passé as impossible, a merely reactionary movement, not a live option; battling it theologically was a waste of time, when far more serious monsters—symbolized in Hitler, Hiroshima and Stalin—loomed on the horizon.

In what follows I want to share elements of my personal story in intersection with the plot and characters presented in Burkee’s book and its aftermath and make some reflections on them in the hope that others will be moved to chime in along the same lines. Truth be told, reading the page proofs of Burkee’s book was something like psychotherapy for me (and my wife Ellen): dredging up bitter and unhappy memories, reprocessing them in an adult light, coming to see what really happened during the Alice-in-Wonderland nightmare that we students were put through, perchance with Burkee’s help coming now to understand all the personalities in the melodrama that encompassed us. My sense is that a long overdue discussion of this history is needed among survivors. The two rival triumphalisms of Marquardt and Tietjen have dominated the ex post facto interpretation of the LCMS disaster; it is past time to face instead the absurdity and destructiveness of it all. Burkee’s book opens up this possibility. In what follows I hope to get that conversation launched.

Martin Marty contributes a Foreword. That in itself could be enough to discredit Burkee’s book in the eyes of right-wing triumphalists. Truth be told, I don’t often find myself agreeing these days with Martin Marty much about anything, but I wholeheartedly concur with a particular commendation he provides. Marty writes: “While previous histories of this conflict were partisan documents, often based on personal experience, author Burkee doggedly pursued long-neglected, seldom-noticed, and even guarded communications.” The result of this scrupulous research is that Burkee’s narrative of conspiracy and duplicity “was guided by what he heard from the secretly taped conversations of the conservatives and from what he read in many documents that he helped discover.” In other words, facts are facts for us all, even when they are bad facts. No one is privately entitled to their own facts. What we are responsible for is how we connect the facts that impose themselves on us to make a history out of them, a coherent story, a narrative interpretation. If it were to have no other merit than this, Burkee’s book will change American Lutheran history because of the bushel basket of bad facts it uncovers and forces us one and all to deal with.

To illustrate what I mean, here’s one little tidbit, not unrepresentative, from a taped conference call in the early 1970s: Herman Otten, editor of the muckraking tabloid Christian News, is pressing Jacob Preus, LCMS President elected with Otten’s endorsement in 1968, for public “heresy trials” of the Concordia Seminary Faculty as the properly “Biblical way” of dealing with “false doctrine.” Preus responds: “Hermann, you are an innocent soul, the way to succeed in this world is to be bad, not good… [G]et something on them about sex.”

Multiply that effect a hundred times over by the time you finish reading the mass of evidence reported in Burkee’s book. These are bad facts that like wounds thob with fresh pain for those of us who lived this history. Marty acknowledges in the Foreword that he was called to serve on Burkee’s dissertation committee at Northwestern University as an external reader and expert witness; he tells us that he was regarded by the committee as “a ‘moderate’ observer [of the LCMS conflict], though having no personal stake as an employee of the Synod.” Well, not quite. Marty had no financial stake as an employee, but he certainly had a personal stake. He was no mere spectator, but as an LCMS clergyman and prominent public theologian at the University of Chicago he played no little role in the war of words in that time and since that time. Yet Burkee’s narrative reveals an obsequious Marty at one point assuring Synod President Jacob Preus that in all his published works heretofore he had never attacked “inerrancy.” Marty was not only a player, but one who colluded in the “moderate” tactics of evasion and obfuscation, not small element in the plotline of the tragicomedy Burkee reconstructs for us all painfully to re-live.

Burkee’s story first intersects with mine at the Anaheim convention in 1975, when by a 56% majority vote, he reports, the conservatives “voted to close Concordia Senior College in Fort Wayne, Indiana—widely regarded as a feeder school for Seminex—and disperse its faculty.” As a senior at CSC in 1974, and editor of the student newspaper, I prepared an editorial calling on graduates to attend the new St. Louis seminary-in-exile. The College president called me into his office. He pleaded with me not to publish the editorial, because he was trying to save the college and my editorial would damage the cause. As I recall, we then ran three opinion pieces side by side on the choices before us, Springfield, Concordia, and Seminex, like it was business-as-usual among chums debating personal preferences, instead of 21-year-olds confronted with a massive denominational meltdown. I deferred to the president’s judgment, much to my later regret, since his hopes of saving the Senior College already seemed to me manifestly delusionary. The Senior College had been the one great experience—educationally, emotionally, socially, spiritually—of my life to that point. Here was what I had been looking for, a serious attempt to meet the intellectual challenges to the Christian faith in the contemporary world. Its destruction was for me “apocalypse now.”

With that little piece of my history on the table, let me try in what follows to be somewhat more candid than Marty about my continuing investment in the history which Burkee newly confronts us with. For example: all my life I have had a love-hate relation with my Seminex professor, Ed Schroeder. While I eagerly learned from him the theology embedded in the Lutheran confessional writings, from the beginning I could not share the antinomian tendencies at work in his adaptation of Werner Elert’s theology. I was far more impressed with Bonhoeffer’s approach to Lutheran ethics, not to mention the principled stand it led him to discern and to take against Nazism (quite unlike Elert). As a result of this theological tension, Schroeder and I have quarreled and made up in a regular rhyme through the years. Recently he contacted me in full mode of righteous indignation, having discovered a blog comment I made last year about victims of the Otten-Preus conspiracy-purge having spent their entire lives in one huge reaction, “trying to prove they never came from Missouri.” Admittedly, I was in this piece of sarcasm thinking of Schroeder (among others), even though I hadn’t named names. And he called me on it, demanding on pain of my salvation either proof of the charge or repentance. I declined to repent and was too embarrassed to say, “Thou art the man!” But upon reading Burkee’s book, I publicly confess now to seeing in a new light him and his faculty colleagues living out their lives in one huge reaction. If Preus’s brand of Machiavellian duplicity and abuse in tandem with Herman Otten’s xenophobic, racist, sexist, crude, and vulgar extremism—amply documented from the horse’s mouth in Burkee’s book—was what one actually got from self-righteous upholders of the “third use of the Law,” we can and should cut Schroeder and his “Gospel reductionism” some slack.

Indeed, Schroeder and his colleagues were right on all the major issues: biblical criticism is a fact of life today every bit as much as the heliocentric solar system; social justice is a gospel concern, if we are with the Bible preaching the gospel of the kingdom, not Gnostic flight to heaven for a handful of true believers; the ordination of women is matter of Christian freedom and missiological judgment; at the heart of Lutheran theology is the justification of the ungodly in the resurrection of the Crucified, the righteousness of God that prevails wherever and whenever the Spirit raises those dead to God to repentance and faith; the church is there wherever this message is effectively at work, thus the Gospel is the actual basis for ecumenical endeavor to overcome Christian disunity by a process of doctrinal dialogue admitting of degrees of fellowship. Moreover, when one contrasts these positions with what Burkee uncovers as the actual alternative being advocated at the time in the yellow journalism of Otten’s Christian News, namely, of “John Birch society extremism,” one can understand the provocation my teachers felt, and forgive, or at least contextualize, the one-sidedness of Seminex theology.

Yet it was one-sided, indeed myopic from the perspective of my own theological agenda, as mentioned earlier. Burkee’s book delivers any number of skillful portraits of the “elite” personalities of the LCMS tragicomedy. Two in particular intersected with my life in this connection. On many pages, we meet the roaring young lion in his agitprop days, Richard John Neuhaus, “Missouri’s revolutionary for civil rights,” boasting of public demonstrations “precisely in order to antagonize conservatives in church and society,” including a dramatic floor debate with his conservative father, staged at the Synod convention in 1965 for all to see. Neuhaus was frequently in the “cross hairs” of Otten’s Christian News. We also discover John Tietjen dismissing with contempt the theological issues raised in the controversy in order to present himself as a figure of the crucified Christ—sharing , ironically, with his antipode Otten, “the Luther syndrome:” a passive-aggressive combination of inflexible self-certitude with the cultivation of a public martyr’s image. Of the two, Neuhaus proved capable in time of self-critical change, Tietjen not, though in the triumphalist narrative of the religious Left, Neuhaus’s change was regarded as a betrayal while Tietjen’s stubbornness was celebrated as heroic.

My own way in life has decisively intersected with these two personalities. Drinking fully of the Seminex cup, I was off in Tietjen’s footsteps after completing my M.Div. at Seminex to Union Theological Seminary, NY, with the announced intention of reconciling Luther and Marx. I had long since left behind Elertianism and was now devouring everything Paul Tillich had ever written. This is when I first met Richard John Neuhaus, who had recently visited Seminex and denounced the school in Forum Letter as a hodgepodge of theological confusion. Neuhaus held monthly soirees for the Lutheran clergy in his Manhattan apartment. He patiently listened as I, a first-year graduate student at UTS, explained my project of reconciling Luther and Marx via Tillich; he curtly commented: “That doesn’t sound very promising.” I was, to be sure, not a little offended and swore him off as a traitor to the cause, a “neo-con” turning his back on the revolution. But his words proved prophetic.

At UTS, I met something quite different than the school of Niebuhr and Tillich that I had imagined. I met in nuce the future of the ELCA in the form of new left feminist and gay theologians denouncing the Christian tradition in toto as patriarchal and misogynist, rejecting Marxian class analysis as too narrow, theologically arguing that experience and reason are respectively the source and norm of theology. It was in this maelstrom that I first discovered Karl Barth and his post-critical conception of theology as church dogmatics. Tillich’s systematic apologetics became less and less compelling to me. By the time I met Richard John Neuhaus again five years later, I had moved some distance in his direction. Working for the LCA’s Department of Church in Society, I had written a background study, Christian Faith and the Nuclear Morass, which made the elementary but devastating (to the contemporaneous religious Left) point that nuclear weapons cannot be disinvented, that we are stuck with this capability for universal destruction, that the inherent deterrence of universally assured destruction is something that must be managed mutually, if humanity is to survive. I was now for the first time attacked by my erstwhile Seminex friends for siding with Reagan against the Nuclear Freezers, the most theologically astute of which were advocating unilateral nuclear disarmament on the part of the “Christian” West. This was, in my view, unserious posturing, in regard to the most dangerous matter in the world. But Neuhaus read my piece, praised it in the Forum Letter, and the next thing I knew I was having dinner in his apartment. He fed me with so much Scotch and Ouzo on that occasion that I passed out when I stood up to go home and spent the night on his couch. It was the beginning of, shall we say, a complicated relationship that would last till his dying day.

About the same time, I reconnected with John Tietjen at a weekend conference for pastors somewhere in upstate New York. He was proud of the Seminex boy who had made good. But I took the opportunity to tell him about my many reservations concerning the “New Lutheran Church,” then in process of formation. For Tietjen, the ELCA would be the salvation history purpose that God had in mind to make good on the LCMS calamity. Accordingly, he repeatedly assured me that my fears were misplaced, that the Lutheranism which I was increasingly making my own would not only be preserved in the new church but having a leading role. It turned into quite a donnybrook as I went through the list of problems: biblical language about God, the notorious close vote in the Commission for a New Lutheran Church in which the Trinity barely survived, the quota system, the abolition of the ministerium, the abandonment of the two kingdoms doctrine in pop liberation theology, the retreat from evangelism and overseas mission, the preoccupation with partisan political stances in the democratic public arena, the abuse of world hunger funds to finance lobbying and bureaucracy, the abandonment of long-standing pan-Lutheran opposition to abortion on demand, etc. My memory is of the two of us squared off in facing chairs, surrounded by a crowd of spectators, till the wee hours. I was reduced to bearing witness: “We are headed in different directions.” He was reduced to contradicting me, “No, we are not.” I wrote a very negative assessment of his triumphalist memoir in "Exodus from Lutheranism: An Argument with John Tietjen's New Book," Lutheran Forum 25/3 (August 1991): 26-32. My break with Seminex/Evangelical Lutherans in Mission (ELIM) ideology was now public and complete.

But that hardly implies full agreement with Neuhaus, whom I followed neither into neo-conservatism nor into Roman Catholicism. Even less did it mean reconciliation with the thugs and/or ideologues who took over the Missouri Synod. Robert Preus was one such ideologue. Burkee writes of his “cozy” relation with Otten, when Robert replaced his brother Jacob as chief secret conspirator with Otten, after Otten and Jacob became estranged. Robert Preus was at least a scholar. His two-volume Theology of Post-Reformation Lutheranism is as long on information as it is short on insight, but it is virtually the only resource English speaking Lutherans have for an important period in their history. But like other “Bible-believing” ideologues, Robert Preus never got past the simplistic domino theory of Biblical interpretation, to wit, that if we give up an historical Adam and Eve or an historical Jonah in the whale, the whole Bible becomes dubious. Certainly a certain 17th century theology, namely Cartesianism, becomes dubious along with the rationalist philosophy in which it is entangled. In contrast with Robert Preus, who was willing to deal with the gutter-rat Otten for the sake of the “Bible-believing” cause, Burkee tells of a brief flirtation of the conservative theologian John Warwick Montgomery with the conspirators. Montgomery, however, backed off when he saw their collusion with Otten, whom he described as a racist “kook” and sharply censured for “conflating theological and political conservativsm.”

To be sure, there was a real issue here, and the evasiveness of LCMS liberals, who repeatedly denied that anything had changed in the approach to the Bible, only fueled the suspicion and indignation of conservatives. Persistently thinking in the simplistic way of the domino theory, Preus invited me to be a speaker in Fort Wayne at their annual conference on the Lutheran Confessions sometime in the early 1990s, when, as editor of Lutheran Forum, I was a leader in the loyal (at the time) opposition to the directions being taken in the incipient ELCA. That was a bizarre experience. Preus, in a preface to my lecture dripping with sarcasm about ELCA “pastorettes,” introduced me as a “prodigal son,” implying that I was coming home. To cheers and jeers of the audience I asked, “Where then is robe? My golden ring? My fatted calf?” In my lecture, I went on to disabuse one and all of any notion that I was coming home to the LCMS. Not long ago, I got involved in blog debates with a couple of contemporaries in Preus’s line, Paul McCain and Jack Kilcrease. Sadly, nothing has really changed. Within moments, they had me debating the historicity of Adam and Eve. I hope reading Burkee’s book, however, forces some change in the thinking of these LCMS triumphalists. For all I care, they can continue to hold to an historical Adam and Eve if that is what they want, so long as they come to see that it cannot have been a holy God who caused or blessed this most unholy collusion of Otten and the Preuses.

The more serious point is that the right-wing triumphalist claim to have preserved Lutheranism in the LCMS proves as bogus as Tietjen’s assurances that it would be preserved in the ELCA. Burkee reports on a conservative consultation with the fundamentalist Reformed theologian Francis Schaeffer, who proclaimed to the assembly of allegedly orthodox Lutherans: “denominational loyalties [are] being superseded…,” supplanted by a new ecumenism among those who adhere to God’s “verbalized, propositional communication” in the inspired and inerrant Bible. Certainly, reaching back to Francis Pieper’s 1932 “Brief Statement,” which officially introduced the doctrine of inerrancy into the LCMS, meaning that the Bible is “infallible in history, geography and other secular matters,” Preus had theological precedent for his 1972 “A Statement,” which made the very use of historical criticism heretical, thus giving Preus the standing to go after the St. Louis faculty. But that’s it for theology, not to mention anything resembling the real theology of the Lutheran Reformation, for which the Word of God is the resurrection of the Crucified bespeaking the justification of the ungodly by faith alone in Christ alone. One is hard pressed to find in Burkee’s account much more theology among the conservatives than shallow sloganeering on the level of “Saving gospel, not social gospel,” and the like. Instead, as Burkee puts it, LCMS conservatives “marched lock step with American fundamentalism and evangelicalism” in a “war of ideologues” involving “social and political views as much as religious beliefs.” Of course, as a result if not as a provocation in the first place, the “liberals” had done the very same thing.

Burkee’s book is due to be available from Fortress in Feburary. I have written an academic review essay on Burkee’s book that will appear in Lutheran Quarterly. In the meantime, I hope in the foregoing autobiographical reflections to have begun a “buzz” which will ensure a wide reading of it, and also to have begun a conversation among survivors of American Lutheranism’s civil war who are no longer captive to the hitherto predominant and competing triumphalisms. My hope is that through this is we can contribute to the reconfiguration of American Lutheranism.

Paul R. Hinlicky is the Tise Professor of Lutheran Studies at Roanoke College in Salem, Virginia.