Robert H. Fischer, Donovan J. Palmquist, and John H. Tietjen: In Memory and in Hope

Ralph W. Klein

Christ Seminary-Seminex Professor of Old Testament

Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago

These also were godly men

Whose righteous deeds have not been forgotten....

The assembly declares their wisdom,

And the congregation proclaims their praise. Sirach 44:10, 15

In the first six months of 2004, death took from us three key players in LSTC’s recent history. I have been asked to take the measure of these men and their ministries and especially the ways in which their ministries shaped the ethos and advanced the mission of LSTC.

The oldest of these leaders and the person with the longest service at LSTC was Robert Fischer. He served as professor of church history at Maywood and LSTC from 1949 to1986. His roots were in the United Lutheran Church and Gettysburg College and Seminary; his doctorate was from Yale University, where he studied with Roland Bainton and others. There are twenty entries under his name at the JKM library, many of them essays in Festschriften or for ecumenical consultations, all of them reflecting his expertise in Luther himself and his passionate concern for the manifestation of the Lutheran heritage in the North American context. He could talk for hours about people like Franklin Clark Fry (the first president of the LCA) and William Passavant (who founded a number of social agencies, of which Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago is a descendant) or about the classroom at the old Chicago seminary that is now occupied by the bullpen at Wrigley Field. He translated Luther’s Large Catechism for the Tappert edition of The Book of Concord and at least one volume in the American Edition of Luther’s Works.

Bob was winding up his distinguished career in the classroom when I joined the LSTC faculty. His love for the church was prized by all and his careful historical work greatly benefited doctoral students and challenged them to greater precision. I only learned later about his earlier activities as founder and director of the seminary chorus at Maywood and about his considerable skills on the piano. When he and Edna Mae celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary a few years back, he brought out of retirement a male glee club that he had led for many years. As late as his eighty-second year, he was a teacher in his congregation’s vacation church school and the accompanist for their singing.

 At Bob’s retirement in 1986, William E. Lesher, then president of LSTC wrote: “The most important thing I learned from Robert Harley Fischer was that the church, though reliably fallible, is worthy of our love, sacrifice, and surrender. He never said it this way. He may never have intended this to be his message. But in the peculiar exchange between teacher and student, in which lessons taught are filtered through the experiences brought by the learner, it is the message I received and for which I have been immensely grateful throughout my ministry.” 

Warm, evangelical, loyal, quiet and unassuming, dedicated, loving, persistent, dignified—all these are adjectives about Bob Fischer that flow easily from the keyboard. In recent years I often met him at the Xerox machine where he was copying archival material dealing with people like Passavant or with institutions, like LSTC, of which he hoped to write a history. Just because he was retired did not mean he stopped learning or stopped teaching, let alone stopped being a historian.

Donovan Palmquist was a graduate of Augustana college and seminary in Rock Island, one of the founding institutions of LSTC, and an ordained member of the Augustana Synod before it was incorporated into the LCA and then the ELCA. His Augustana DNA made him a thoroughgoing supporter of theological education in general and LSTC in particular. He had an Augustana sense of church family that he embodied in every aspect of his life. He earned a Doctor of Ministry degree at LSTC, with an emphasis on urban ministry and its implications for the church’s strategy. He served parishes in Madison (Central Lutheran) and Milwaukee (campus ministry at the University of Wisconsin—Milwaukee, and Village Church, a highly diverse parish in a shopping center) and served as chair of the LSTC Board of Directors before he was called at mid-career to a ministry of fund-raising and stewardship at LSTC. He was not the first development person at the seminary, but during his fifteen-year tenure development work came of age as the indispensable life-support system of theological education. This meant not only eliciting annual contributions and conducting estate planning, but also working with the supporting synods in mutual ministry and mutual support. In the annual budget crunch at LSTC, we would often turn to Don and his colleagues to somehow come up with the extra five or ten percent that was crucial to achieve a balanced budget. It was under Don’s leadership that the first three endowed chairs were established, two of which came from the heritage of the Augustana Synod.

Don never forgot he was first of all a pastor. He loved to preach in the seminary chapel and one of his favorite quotations was taken from Dwight L. Moody: “I like my way of doing evangelism better than your way of not doing evangelism.” A dozen years ago Marilyn and I and Dottie and Don Palmquist took a study tour through Kenya and Tanzania, visiting indigenous pastors and ELCA missionaries. Don knew the history of these churches well and their relationships to North American and European mission efforts. He thrilled at the evidence of Christian growth and joy that were omnipresent; he grieved at the shameful effects of colonialism and poverty. Even as a Vice President for Development, he saw his work not so much as fund-raising, but helping people to live up to their calling so that the seminary could live up to its calling as well. After his retirement he continued as a consultant in development and worked tirelessly to maintain the Augustana heritage through conferences and through support for the Augustana chair and for the new chapel.

Don’s death was the least expected of the three. Plans were well underway for celebrating fifty years of marriage and ordination, when a heart problem showed up that required surgery. All seemed to go well with the surgery at first, but then there was a stroke and blood pressure that could no longer be sustained. At a time when he was looking forward to so much, God called him home, for good.

I first met John H. Tietjen forty-five years ago, in 1959, on my internship in New York City, when he was a young pastor in New Jersey. I was without a clue that he would become president of Concordia Seminary where I would be teaching only ten years later. Concordia seemed poised in 1969 for a great leap forward, with a fifty person faculty and new vigorous leadership that embodied liturgical renewal and an ecumenical understanding of the Lutheran heritage. Tietjen’s inauguration at Concordia, unfortunately, coincided with a radical turn to the right in the leadership of the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod. He made clear to Jacob A. O. Preus, the President of the Missouri Synod, that the only way Preus could get at the Concordia faculty was through Tietjen.

He thus drew an evangelical line in the sand and dared Preus to step over it. He dismissed the biased Preus investigation of the seminary as “fault-finding” instead of “fact-finding,” and he helped teach us all that it was not merely academic freedom and institutional stability that were at stake, but that the sufficiency and freedom of the Gospel itself were on the line in the Preus vendetta. After five years of turmoil and frequent vindication of Tietjen, a politically elected Board suspended Tietjen as president on January 20, 1974.

The overwhelming majority of both students and faculty rallied to his cause and within a month what became known as Christ Seminary-Seminex had emerged as an independent Lutheran seminary in St. Louis, housed at first at St. Louis University (Roman Catholic) and Eden Seminary (United Church of Christ). Seminex began with four hundred students and forty-five faculty members, and John became our president again as soon as his dismissal at Concordia was complete. John’s own reflections on these events can be read in his Memoirs in Exile: Confessional Hope and Institutional Conflict (1990).

For the next nine years Seminex flourished in St. Louis, but its supporting church body, the Association of Evangelical Lutheran Churches, called for Lutheran union as soon as possible (John had written a doctoral dissertation at Union Seminary about which paths might lead to Lutheran unity) and John soon became an articulate spokesperson on the committee of seventy that was selected to put together what we now know as the ELCA. Seminex was always at risk financially and even in the buildings in which it was housed (our best building become uninhabitable in one bitter cold January freeze), and John was convinced that the ELCA needed only eight seminaries at most, and surely not a ninth.

Through extended negotiations, John sought a graceful exit for Seminex, leading finally to the deployment of its resources: ten professors and an administrative computer to LSTC, four professors to Pacific Lutheran in Berkeley, and two professors and the Seminex library to the Lutheran Seminary Program in the Southwest, in Austin, Texas. For our first five years in Chicago and the other locations, Seminex paid its own faculty. With the dawn of the ELCA, Seminex became a wholly owned subsidiary of LSTC, and its need for a president was over. A decision by the LSTC Board later recognized John Tietjen as a founder of LSTC.

What next for John Tiejten? He was elected the first bishop of the Metropolitan Chicago Synod, but resigned shortly thereafter because of conflict with the Synod council. This time of unemployment provided opportunity for John to pull his memoirs together, and he then offered himself for a parish call. For more than a decade he served as pastor of Trinity Lutheran Church in downtown Fort Worth, where he regularly supervised LSTC interns and chaired the synod’s candidacy committee. After two decades of creative turmoil, he found peace and joy deep in the heart of Texas.

These three saints enliven the tapestry of the history of LSTC. Different as they were in personality, from three different predecessor church bodies of the ELCA, they also had much in common. All three were already retired. All three are directly responsible for named chairs at LSTC. Kurt K. Hendel is the Bernard, Fischer, Westberg Distinguished Professor of Reformation Church History, donated by members of Grace Lutheran Church in LaGrange, Illinois, and Mark P. Bangert is the John H. Tietjen Professor of Pastoral Ministry: Worship and Church Music, a position funded by the family and friends of Tietjen. Donovan Palmquist was the principal leader in assembling the funds for the Augustana Heritage Chair in Global Mission and Evangelism. All three of our departed brothers were complemented by innovative and dedicated spouses (Edna Mae Fischer, Dottie Palmquist, and Ernestine Tietjen) and by loved and loving children and grandchildren. Because the trajectory of their final illnesses were so clear, colleagues, family and friends gathered together with Robert Fischer in LaGrange and with John Tietjen in Fort Worth for celebrations of ministry and accompaniment on the final journey, in a sense for proleptic funerals, shortly before their deaths.

All three committed themselves into God’s hands as sheep of God’s fold, lambs of God’s flock, sinners of God’s own redeeming. The righteous deeds of these godly men dare not be forgotten by us. As we declare their wisdom and proclaim their praise, we need the same grace they cherished to preserve their heritage and to mimic their accomplishments in our own time of service. Their passing fills us with gratitude and with obligation to go and follow their examples.

O merciful Savior, receive them into the arms of your mercy, into the blessed rest of everlasting peace, and into the glorious company of the saints in light!

Ralph W. Klein, Christ Seminary-Seminex Professor of Old Testament, joined the faculty of Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, in 1968, after declining a short-term appointment in 1966 to teach during the final year of Augustana Seminary. He was one of the ten Seminex faculty members deployed to LSTC in 1983 and served as Dean of the Seminary from 1988 to 1999. He was a colleague and deep admirer of each of the three leaders eulogized in this article.