Lutherans at War

"The Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod we have known is dead. The institution that has given us life is no more. Its structures are hopelessly corrupt. Its leadership is morally bankrupt. Its rank-and-file members have chosen to ignore and overlook evil."

Wearing flowing white ecclesiastical robes, the Rev. John Tietjen, leader of the Missouri Synod's breakaway liberal faction, delivered that bitter eulogy last week from a pulpit set up in an auditorium at the O'Hare Inn near Chicago. It was what his 1,600 listeners wanted to hear. They were members of Evangelical Lutherans in Mission (E.L.I.M.), a dissident group that has been warring openly with the conservative hierarchy of the 2.8 million-member denomination. Tietjen's lament for the church underlined the fact that the Missouri Synod's conservative leadership is now firmly in command.

For more than a year, the Missouri Synod has been torn by an ever deepening division between the church's conservatives, who hew to a strictly literal interpretation of the Bible, and its moderate liberals, who more readily use modern methods of biblical criticism and tend to view some supposedly historical passages (the Garden of Eden story, for example) as religious myth. At the Synod's convention in New Orleans last year, the conservatives consolidated their hold on the denomination by returning the Rev. Jacob A.O. ("Jack") Preus to the church's presidency and winning a majority on the board of its keystone theological school, Concordia Seminary of St. Louis.

Last January, the Concordia board suspended John Tietjen as the seminary's president on charges that included the fostering of heresy (TIME, Feb. 4). The action incited a wholesale student and faculty rebellion and prompted the rebels to establish a liberal-oriented Seminary in Exile (Seminex) that almost stripped the official seminary of teachers and students. Evangelical Lutherans in Mission, founded a year ago, has become the organizational voice of the dissidents and the funding channel for the breakaway seminary.

But instead of reeling from the dissidents' vigorous challenge, the Synod's conservatives have recovered remarkably. This week, as registration begins at Concordia, no fewer than 170 full-time students are expected to enroll in the standard master of divinity program, along with 20 other graduate students; that total is well above the most optimistic predictions after the split last winter, even though far below the 650 enrolled before the controversy began. Acting President Ralph A. Bohlmann, who has been Preus' theological aide-de-camp, has fielded a full-time faculty of 18 (compared with four last spring). Meanwhile, the Missouri Synod's other official theological school, Concordia Seminary of Springfield, Ill., has an aggressive new president, the Rev. Robert D. Preus--Jack's brother and a conservative with impressive intellectual credentials. It also has its biggest incoming class (118) in years. All this suggests a strong allegiance to old-line traditionalism, even among younger Lutherans.

Nonetheless, the liberals' Seminex, which continues to use the classrooms of the Society of Jesus at St. Louis University and those of the United Church of Christ's Eden Seminary, is holding its own. Nearly all of last year's underclassmen will return, as well as 70 newcomers, for a total enrollment of 408. Though the conservatives pressured congregations against accepting Seminex's 124 May graduates, 77 have already been placed in church work (only 21, however, have thus far been ordained). As for E.L.I.M.,. though it claims heavy clerical backing (1,827 members out of 5,100 North American clergy), financial support comes from only 296 of the Missouri Synod's 6,100 parishes. Still, it is enough: after subsidizing Seminex's first semester last spring, E.L.I.M. ended the fiscal year with a surplus of $230,000.

At last week's Chicago meeting, E.L.I.M. delegates generally agreed to stay and fight within the church rather than break with it in open schism--at least until conservatives actively move to throw them out. Respected Church Historian Martin Marty--a board member of E.L.I.M.--argued that before that could happen, the detested conservative leadership might simply fall apart, largely because of its inherent divisiveness. "I don't believe the two official seminaries will survive," he says. "They will have to combine. The financial devastation will start showing soon. Careers are gone, families are divided. Any congregation that gets active in this situation is destroyed."

The conservatives, of course, take an opposite view, especially in the wake of Concordia's astonishing rebound. Seminex, predicts Church President Preus, "will wither away in a couple of years." Preus dismisses talk of any actual schism. "E.L.I.M. is mainly a clergy movement," he observes. "There will not be any split, primarily because the lay people are not cranked up." Moreover, Preus insists, he is not going to do anything "to stir things up further." With the conservatives' firm grip on the seminaries, "there's no reason for heresy hunts in the parishes."

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