Battle of New Orleans

Were Adam and Eve real people whose taste of forbidden fruit tainted man forever with original sin? Did Jonah spend three days in the belly of a "great fish"? Did the Red Sea actually part for Moses and the Hebrews fleeing from Egypt? Last week in New Orleans, the 3,000,000-member Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod said yes to all those questions. By their votes, the delegates at the biennial L.C.M.S. convention made a crunching and almost unprecedented shift to the right, a shift that promises a major purge at the largest Lutheran seminary in the world.

The battle over the literal "inerrancy" of the Bible has been shaping up ever since 1969, when a grass-roots alliance of conservatives succeeded in electing the Rev. Jacob A.O. ("Jack") Preus as president of the denomination. Preus, a former professor of Greek and Latin as well as Scripture, is no simple fundamentalist; like other orthodox Missouri Synod theologians, he believes that some parts of the Bible are poetic or symbolic--such as the Book of Revelation. But he also believes that what the Bible presents as factual is factual, and he holds what could be called a theological domino theory: if a man denies the Red Sea story, his son may come to deny the Resurrection.

Since his election, Preus has been waging a war of attrition against a number of somewhat more liberal theologians at the synod's distinguished Concordia Theological Seminary of St. Louis, and particularly against its president, the Rev. Dr. John Tietjen. The progressive majority on Tietjen's faculty hold that the Bible is the inspired word of God because it has the power to bring men to salvation, but they believe that insistence on inerrancy can actually obscure the Gospels' message.

At the New Orleans convention, Preus and his conservatives were in complete control. The delegates started by re-electing Preus himself on the first ballot with 606 votes, 77 more than he needed for a majority. The convention next elected a seminary board that gave Preus forces a clear majority for the first time. Then after a series of raucous arguments and filibusters ("If we can't act like Christians, let's at least act like gentlemen!" cried one delegate), they voted to recognize a statement by Preus on the Bible as the church's official position on inerrancy and other issues. In their strongest action, by a vote of 574-451, the delegates repudiated the scriptural views of the seminary progressives as "false doctrine."

A bitter fight apparently lies ahead for Concordia's faculty. Tenured dissenters who do not resign may find themselves facing church heresy trials. Church officials, in turn, could well face civil suits from dismissed teachers, and the seminary risks losing its accreditation from the American Association of Theological Schools. "Some professors will fight to the bitter end," Preus told TIME, "but if we don't act, the church will lose its doctrinal character."

Preus' insistence on this "doctrinal character" may also erode ecumenical relations with the more liberal Lutheran Church in America (3.1 million members) and the American Lutheran Church (2.5 million).

Indeed, with the Preus victory, the Missouri Synod Lutherans will stand quite alone--too scholarly to be fundamentalists, too fundamentalist for most mainstream Christian scholars. One disheartened young Chicago pastor, the Rev. Lonnie Precup, suggested that the Preus takeover was in fact quite un-Lutheran. "I thought," he said bitterly, quoting Martin Luther himself, "that neither Pope nor Council could bind our conscience."

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