Authority Vested. A Story of Identity and Change in the Lutheran Church--Missouri Synod. By Mary Todd. Foreword by Martin E. Marty. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000. xvi and 336 pages. Paper. $20.

Ralph W. Klein

Christ Seminary-Seminex Professor of Old Testament at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago, and Editor of Currents in Theology and Mission.

This is a history of the LCMS, told by a woman (and a onetime writer for Currents) and focusing on the twin questions of authority in general and the debate about the ordination of women in particular. It grows out of and expands upon her doctoral dissertation accepted at the University of Illinois at Chicago: "'Not in God's Lifetime': The Question of the Ordination of Women in the Lutheran Church--Missouri Synod. Todd currently serves as associate professor of history and director of the Honors Program at Concordia University (LCMS) in River Forest, Illinois. She is a loyal and critical insider.

She notes how the synod has identified with the issue of verbal scriptural inerrancy as a mark of its identity in its own struggle to reconcile orthodox Lutheranism with twentieth-century concerns. Its opposition to women's ordination is based on a literal biblical understanding of gender roles, especially male headship and female subordination. In fact, Todd charges, the ban on the ordination of women and the insistence on inerrancy are inextricably entwined. The synod's identity depends on absolute adherence to the fusion of these two principles.

Todd divides the history of this Lutheran denomination into three periods, the first two of which are dominated by the shadows of two theologians: C. F. W. Walther and Francis Pieper. The third was marked by a struggle over whether the synod would define itself by repristinating its earlier leaders' teachings or by extending the theological legacy of its first century into modern America. Here falls the Concordia crisis and the birth of Seminex, but here also falls the quarter century after Seminex and the issues of authority and women's ordination as discussed--or avoided--today.

She begins the story in Saxony of the early 1830s, where anti-rationalist and pietistic tendencies came together in Pastor Martin Stephan of Dresden. The Prussian Union of 1817 was King Frederick William III's effort to combine the Lutheran and Reformed Protestants, an event that forms the Egypt of Missouri's myth. Stephan gathered around himself a circle of young pastors who would eventually become the nucleus of the clergy who founded the synod in 1847. Stephan was also an authoritarian and managed to get himself elected bishop as he crossed the Atlantic with like-minded immigrants in 1839. High-handed administration, questionable financial dealings, and, finally, sexual misconduct were Stephan's undoing. At sixty-two he was excommunicated and deposed and then rowed across the Mississippi into Illinois, where he died seven years later.

In response, some of the leaders of the group that settled in St. Louis and Perry County, Missouri, thought they were not a church at all and should head back to Germany, but then Walther argued, at Altenburg, Missouri, that the church consisted of the totality of believers, and this brought a sense of legitimacy to the immigrant community and the opportunity to begin anew. Todd believes, however, that the remaining clergy's dogged refusal to make a frank confession of their collaboration in advancing the Stephanite episcopacy allies them with the hierarchical model of ministry Stephan established and intended. It also left the ministry itself in a perpetual state of redefinition.

When the Missouri Synod was founded in 1847, in Chicago, it resoundingly affirmed the position of clergy in leadership. The only office open to a layperson was that of treasurer. Todd tells the story of the widespread Lutheran debates about ministry in the nineteenth century in which the participants asked no quarter and gave none. J. A. A. Grabau of the Buffalo synod called the Saxons "heretics and false prophets preaching to mobs" and "a synod of abomination and a Temple of Babel." The Saxons returned the fire by calling Grabau and his followers "papists and tyrants." But until he died in 1887 Walther was the whole show in Missouri--president of the church body, president of one of its seminaries, and the synod's chief theologian. At the end of the nineteenth century, the Missouri Synod was an ethnic enclave that looked to one leader for direction and course. The early crisis had been resolved by compromises on definitions of church and ministry. Once that crisis was past there would be no more compromises.

Throughout its history Missouri has struggled to define the offices of pastor and of parochial school teacher. Where did the latter fit when the synod allowed for only two kinds of people--pastors and the laity? Women teachers were a special "problem," with one theologian (George Stoeckhardt) opining that women could teach as long as it was only to young children and provided that teaching would not be their life's goal. An article by Paul Kretzmann in the first volume (1930) of the Concordia Theological Monthly--of which Currents is a kind of errant/faithful child--insisted: "God has placed the business of the Church in the hands of men, and therefore any and every attempt of a woman publicly to influence these affairs is a usurpation of rights which cannot be squared with God's plain command and prohibition." There were brief counter movements, such as the statement of the forty-four in 1945, which protested the synod's insularity. Unfortunately, under pressure from John Behnken, the synodical president, the "forty-four" agreed to withdraw their statement, but not recant it. The statement had challenged the elevation of synodical resolutions over the authority of Scripture, and the ready reliance on the synod's historic position against "unionism," which granted new authority to tradition itself. A chance for an open discussion of differences was missed.

The death of Francis Pieper in 1931 marked the end of an era when one person spoke for the synod. Pieper had narrowed the confessional base of the synod through his insistence on an inerrant Bible, and his demand for total conformity before initiating church fellowship destroyed the possibility for any ecumenical liaisons. Missouri bobbed and weaved over the roles of women teachers, deaconesses, and a women's auxiliary, eventually yielding to the inevitable but always reaffirming "biblical" prescriptions that limited women's service.

Todd devotes a chapter to the issue of women's suffrage in the church. In 1969 the synod affirmed the right of women to vote even though only ten percent of congregations allowed women to attend voters' meetings and only one percent gave them the right to vote. She concludes: "The primary contested issue in the history of the Missouri Synod has always been the authority--of scripture, of synod, of the congregation, of the pastoral office, of woman, of man." She ends the chapter with a sharp question: "Is the prohibition of women from the pastoral office scripturally mandated--because the Bible says so--or synodically mandated--because the synod says so--or is it because the synod says the Bible says so?" Missouri has a funny note in its constitution: matters of doctrine are decided by the Word of God and all other matters by majority vote. Guess how you find out what the Word of God means?

Missouri representatives, it turns out, were part of the pan-Lutheran discussion of the ordination of women in the 60s. While it is unlikely that Missouri would have joined the LCA and ALC in affirming women's ordination at that time, its theologians on that commission agreed that nothing in Scripture prevented this move. But then came the Denver convention in 1969, the election of Jacob Preus as president, the restaffing of all boards and commissions, and the beginning of the investigation that led to the formation of Christ Seminary-Seminex. Martin Scharlemann eventually threw a monkey wrench into the discussion about women's ordination by insisting on the "order of creation." Scharlemann himself was either a turncoat or notoriously inconsistent. He had come to public attention in Missouri as an advocate of historical criticism in biblical studies. Later, some say because of frustration over not being elected president of Concordia Seminary, he denounced historical criticism, became a spokesperson for the reactionary leadership of the synod, and was appointed acting president when forty-five of us were dismissed from Concordia Seminary in 1974. In 1971 the Missouri Synod Civil War was already in full flower, and one reactionary voice revealingly lumped a lot of issues together: "Some individuals today are advocating the use of elements other than those ordained by God for His holy institutions, such as the use of (a) Coke and pizza, donuts and coffee, etc., for the eucharist, (b) homosexuals or lesbians for marriage, (c) women for ordination to the holy ministry."

In 1974, the year in which Seminex was formed, a synodical Task Force on Women held its first meeting. The Task Force decided to avoid the question of the ordination of women, beginning a pattern by which loyal Missouri women deferred to the denomination's contention that the ordination of women was not to be discussed. The synodically-compliant chair of that Task Force, without consulting her fellow members, even tried to get a synodical convention to disband her own Task Force. By 1981, Jacob Preus, who led the attack on the Concordia faculty, retired from the synodical presidency and was succeeded by Ralph Bohlman. Bohlmann had been part of the five right wing minority members of the Concordia faculty and had in fact drafted "A Statement of Scriptural and Confessional Principles" that was designed to undermine his colleagues during the Preus investigation. Not surprisingly the convention that elected him also scuttled fellowship with the American Lutheran Church. Bohlmann, who was later defeated because of fears he might not be conservative enough vis a vis women and other issues, ironically becomes a major source for Todd in the remainder of the book when she seeks a "moderate" voice in Missouri. In 1984 Bohlmann had appointed a President's Commission on Women that was comprised solely of women. It turns out that all the members of the Commission were opposed to women's ordination and did not want to talk about it. Meanwhile the all-male Commission on Theology and Church Relations issued a report in 1985 that called--not for women's ordination--but for their subordination. When Alvin Barry, the current president of the LCMS, surprisingly retained the President's Commission on Women he told it to focus on women's issues and listed a number of issues for them to consider, specifically not including women's service in the church. (No presiding bishop in the ELCA would dare to do that--thank God!) Todd concludes that the women of Missouri often present the greatest obstacle to change. The Lutheran Women's Missionary League, the synod's women's auxiliary, for instance, declined to take a position on women's ordination in 1991 because it was a political question, and "the LWML desires to remain apolitical." Of course, many women, faced by such reaction have simply left. I have been amazed as I have talked to LSTC women students and ordained women in the ELCA how many of them hail somewhere in their life from Missouri. Missouri is losing some of its best and brightest.

Todd argues that Missouri's self-proclaimed defense of Lutheran confessional principles should require it to admit that the ordination of women is an adiaphoron, a matter of evangelical freedom. She thinks, however, that three additional factors are at stake: the synod's understanding of Scripture, its understanding of the pastoral office of ministry, and its understanding of women. The synod's prohibition of women from the pastoral office remains its most visible commitment to its stand on inerrancy. When the CTCR based its findings on a timeless order of creation hierarchy, one woman commented: "Nobody believes that anymore!" Four interrelated issues remain problematic for the synod: ministry, women, scripture, and church polity.

Todd argues that it was through the founding of a synod of like-minded congregations that Walther was able to reclaim for the clergy some of the status and authority they had ceded in the Stephan aftermath. The absence of women in the debate over women's service has been striking. The CTCR declared in 1985 that a call to public ministry is denied to women by "a command of the Lord." Todd adds: "They do not cite where that command might be found." By introducing the principle of "order of creation" into its doctrine of ministry they reaffirmed the notion of hierarchy that was supposedly sent into exile with Stephan. Todd notes that the founding fathers (so) of Missouri fled doctrinal and cultural conformity in Germany only to impose a conformity to the fundamentalist Americanizing of Christianity. She ends her book plaintively: Is a return to a genuine catholic and confessional posture possible? How inclusive will Missouri's mission and vision be?

Early on Todd laments that in the LCMS there is neither a professional female theological voice nor a visible feminist minority. Happily, her own person and scholarly work are a partial rebuttal to this deficiency.

© 2000 Ralph W. Klein