Wauwawhat? (Part Two)

In my last post I noted that I sympathize with the goals of the Wauwatosa school. It sought to restore the primacy of exegesis even when doing systematic theology. It did not so much seek to overturn the conclusions of Missouri’s systematic theology as to add depth to it by making sure that it was not making use of a facile interpretation of a biblical passage but that it fully understood the context. But even as I praise it, I must say that to some degree that its more recent advocates have done injustice to the state of affairs in which Wauwatosa developed. Ironically I find myself having less trouble with the Wauwatosa theology itself than some of its would-be heirs, just as those of the Wauwatosa school objected less to the 19th century C.F.W. Walther than to his heirs in the early 20th century.


Most discussions of the Wauwatosa theology fail to consider the whole context of education in the early twentieth century. For one thing, the history given in the first volume of Northwestern Publishing House’s collected works of the Wauwatosa school is a little misleading. It correctly chronicles how much time the seminarians at the Missouri Synod’s Saint Louis seminary devoted to mastering the Latin of the Baier-Walther Compendium, but it fails to recognize that most Missouri Synod pastors were not trained there in the synod’s first sixty years or so, but at its practical seminary (which migrated from Fort Wayne, Indiana, to Saint Louis to Springfield, Illinois, and would eventually return to Fort Wayne) and its pre-seminary partner schools in Germany. It was only in the early twentieth century that the synod thought it might be better if more of its ministers were given the highly academic training of Saint Louis than the more practical training of Springfield. To accomplish that, though, the Missouri Synod realized that it would have to drop some of its practices (such as the heavy use of Latin in the classroom) that proved too big of an obstacle to all but the best students.

And thus it is easier to understand the reason that the Wauwatosa school declined to copy Missouri’s model of education in its entirety. While the Missouri Synod still retained a more practical route of training for its ministers, the Wisconsin had only one option: six years of Gymnasium (the equivalent of a boarding high school and junior college) followed by seminary. Thus, it made little sense to foster a seminary curriculum that even the larger Missouri Synod found too impractical for most of its pastors and was revising even for its more academically minded students. And yet the histories gloss over this reason for why the Wauwatosa seminary developed the way it did.

In addition, the histories of the Wauwatosa theology seem blissfully ignorant of the larger picture of educational trends in the late nineteenth century. A mere state away from Wauwatosa was Augsburg College, which under the tutelage of Georg Sverdrup and the Lutheran Free Church sought both a more exegetical approach to theology and a broader cultural education than the traditional model provided, enamored as it was with Greco-Roman antiquity. And yet the late Leigh Jordahl in his doctoral dissertation argues that Wauwatosa was one of a kind in breaking from the Latin theological model. (Jordahl, trained in Norwegian-American circles, ought to have known better.) On a more global scale there was an intense debate on the direction education should go. Was academic specialization to be preferred to the teaching of a common curriculum? Should education be founded on practical truth rather than abstract theory? Indeed, was anything that was not in some way practical untrue? Was it possible to speed up learning by presenting abstractions (e.g., by giving entire paradigms of grammatical forms at once) rather than by having students learn more intuitively?

None of this lessens the value of the Wauwatosa theology. But it seems ironic that those who love Wauwatosa’s emphasis on understanding historical context seem to have overlooked some of the historical context of Wauwatosa.