Peter J. Thuesen Predestination, The American Ca

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.The principal historian of the controversy, Hans Haug, conservatively estimated that it produced upward of 25,000 printed pages.93The rhetorical volume of the many articles, tracts, and books was equally elevated.“May God have mercy on our American Lutheran Zion,” Walther exclaimed in one tract, for God has imposed upon Lutherans the diffi cult task of contending for one of the “most mysterious doctrines of His Word.”This divinely appointed mission was particularly perilous because of the temptation to reconcile biblical teachings with human reason.“O beware!then, dear reader,” Walther warned, “of such desire to reconcile!” 94 Rhetoricon the other side was similarly overwrought.“Beware, O Lutheran Church of America, beware!” declared an unsigned statement by several prominent pastors who had jumped ship from Missouri to Ohio: “Missouri, so highly favored and blessed.has fallen into great error,” an error “which in veryfact annuls the universal love of God.”95The statement’s warning was noteworthy given its publication fully two decades after the outbreak of the initial controversy.It appeared in 1897 in an 802-page indictment, The Error of Modern Missouri, largely authored by Schmidt and by Friedrich W.Stellhorn, a leading defector from Missouri to Ohio and the husband of Walther’s niece.The book included nearly 250 pages of quotations from dozens of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century dogmaticians to back up what Schmidt lauded as the “orthodox shibboleth” of intuitu fi dei.Containing little that was new, the book echoed New England’s Beecher clan in lamenting the “unevangelical onesidedness and harshness” of the Augustinian doctrines of absolute predestination and irresistible grace.“It was likewise a strange self-deception,” Stellhorn wrote,“when Augustine imagined that his doctrine agreed with the Scriptures.”The anonymously written conclusion of The Error leveled the more novel and infl ammatory charge that Missouri was like the “Israel of old” in rejecting Christ.The alleged proof was in the Missourians’ fi xation on God’s decree of election in eternity, rather than on the merits of Christ, as given in and apprehended by faith.96Outside of midwestern enclaves, the Sündfl uth (literally, sin fl ood: the biblical deluge), as one waggish tract described the torrent of polemical publications, was bewildering if not amusing to the few Protestants who noticed the controversy.97 The Congregational Andover Review carried a report on the confl ict by “a Lutheran observer” who noted that the Formula of Concord “contained the shibboleth of neither party, and its word-ing is such that both claimed it for their views.” The author also pointed out that most of the controversy’s key battles had already been fought in New England decades earlier.98 Lutheran editors in Germany, infl uenced by 162Predestinationthe more pervasive rationalism of theology on the Continent, could barely conceal their disdain for Walther and his allies.A Bavarian church newspaper concluded that Missouri had debased itself by becoming a sect rather than a church.A north German periodical ridiculed Missouri’s theology as a “Talmudically-petrifi ed Lutheranism,” a charge refl ecting some critics’perception that Walther was a Zitatentheologe (quotation theologian).99Yet more striking than the barbs from across the Atlantic were the efforts by Walther and his opponents to win the hearts and minds of the laity back home.To achieve this goal, linguistic barriers had to be overcome.While the Missouri Synod’s constitution required the exclusive use of German in synodical proceedings, the older and more assimilated Joint Synod of Ohio had a large English-speaking constituency.100 In order to reach fence-sitting English congregations in the feud over predestination, Missouri theologians felt compelled to make their case in English as well as German.Consequently, the most important Missouri tracts appeared in both languages.The use of Latin terminology in the controversy also became a bone of contention, with Walther accusing his foes of deliberately seeking to confuse “poor farmers”with scholastic distinctions resembling those of the papists.101Indeed, theologians on both sides took pains to dispel the assumption that predestination was a subject too esoteric for the average layperson to comprehend.“Nothing is easier for a pious Christian than to know and to decide this,” Walther wrote.“He only must take care not to leave his Lutheran castle and not to be decoyed upon the slippery soil of human reason.” Walther, whose tract promised on its title page “plain, trustworthy advice for pious Christians,” insisted that laypeople should memorize key passages from the Formula of Concord as a ready defense against both Calvinism and rationalism.102 On the other side, in a tract similarly billed as a“plain and clear answer for every Lutheran Christian,” Stellhorn retorted that the Missourians were the real rationalists in spurning Lutheran dogmatic tradition in favor of their own idiosyncratic interpretations of scripture.“Even the humblest Christian,” he declared, could understand that Missouri’s election “unto faith” made God into an arbitrary sovereign whoblindly rescued a few persons from the fallen mass of humankind.103CONSEQUENCES OF THE CONTROVERSYIronically, predestination, which Walther once called “the most consola-tory of all doctrines,” deprived him of comfort in the last decade of his lifeas he fretted over the future of Lutheran confessionalism.104 He confi ded to a layman in 1881 that “since the deplorable predestination controversy Catholics and Lutherans163has arisen, I cry and plead day and night upon my knees to God, that He will not suffer me to fall into error.” 105 Walther’s preoccupation with the controversy was probably the main reason for his failure to produce the multivolume systematic theology that colleagues had urged him to write.106Besides sapping his energy, the controversy left him bitter and alienated from many of his onetime allies.He was especially grieved and angered that Schmidt, his former student, had lumped the Missourians together with the Calvinists, “the vilest heretics that ever lived.” 107 Walther’s intense revulsion at being labeled a Calvinist stemmed in part from his youthful opposition to unionism with Reformed Protestants in Germany, but beneath this lay his abiding suspicion that Calvinism and rationalism were of a piece in seeking, through “sophistry” and “subtlety,” to explain the glorious mysteriesof predestination and the Eucharist.108 To his dying day on 7 May 1887, he believed that true Lutheran theology rested not on human reason but on the divine light of scripture.His parishioners in St.Louis honored his commitment to scripture in the mausoleum they erected, at the substantial cost of $9,000, fi ve years after his death.Above his tomb, a life-size, Italian marble statue of him holds the Book of Concord, resting it on a Bible situated atop a 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