Wauwawhat? (Part Four)

I have a life besides that of a blogger—including that of parish pastor and adjunct professor. The latter really caught up with me this past month as I was forced to spend much time preparing to use a new textbook in my Latin class and had to let my blogging slide. Your patience is appreciated. Here are my long awaited comments on Köhler’s article.

Köhler’s article "Legalism Among Us" (originally titled "Gesetzlich Wesen unter uns") appeared in installments in 1914 and 1915 in the Theologische Quartalschrift and was translated and printed in The Wauwatosa Theology 2:229-282; the pagination in this blog will refer to the latter. Köhler makes four arguments: “Legalism among Christians consists in that they take the motives and forms of their actions from the law instead of letting them flow from the gospel” (p. 229). “This behavior manifests itself in the Lutheran church chiefly and principally in bravado of orthodoxy” (p. 229). “Where these factors gain the upper hand in every phase of ongoing church life and become a condition to the point of style, the decline sets in, evident externally when we adopt all kinds of unhealthy traits copied from the sectarian churches” (p. 230). The only antidote is repentance “brought about when again we search more deeply into the gospel and cling to it all the more incessantly” (p. 230).


Köhler is not arguing that the confessional Lutherans of his day were teaching a salvation by works. It is not that kind of a crass legalism, but rather a more subtle kind, one where the law rather than the gospel motivates Christian behavior. Köhler notes that this legalism appears in more than one form. Among the Reformed and the Pietists the legalism appears as a stress upon sanctification, but among Lutherans it often comes in the form of “bragging about orthodoxy” (p. 239). Köhler is not opposed to orthodox teaching, but he knows that the goal of orthodox teaching is not itself, but to preach faith in Christ (pp. 239-240). When orthodoxy becomes more of an intellectual exercise used to congratulate its adherents than to lead to a genuine life of repentance and faith, it makes people factious and more eager to dispute over words rather than facts (p. 239). The result is intellectualism, which turns “the words of Scripture, especially of the gospel, into a law for which one demands rational assent” (p. 241, emphasis in the original) and an unhealthy traditionalism that elevates an inherited system above the Scriptures. While the legalism of the Reformed usually leads to doctrinal indifferentism in that they stress godly living over doctrine, legalism among Lutherans tends toward sectarianism (p. 247).

He has much to say about the way that legalism was shaping late 19th and early 20th century Lutheranism that I cannot fully explore in this essay: on giving (p. 277), on administration (p. 269-279), and dialogue with other Christians (pp. 248-249, 279-281). But rather than summarize more of the essay, I would rather have you read it on your own so that I can devote the rest of this blog to considering its ongoing relevance.

Köhler keenly saw that people tend to fall into legalism in those matters that they are most concerned about. Those who stress godly living will be tempted to become legalistic about sanctification. Those who stress the pure teaching of God’s Word will be tempted to become legalistic about orthodoxy. There is nothing wrong with sanctification or orthodoxy. In fact, we should have more of both. But legalism introduces bravado rather than the substance. To underscore the bravado, those who are doing the boasting will have to do everything they can to distinguish themselves from the great unwashed. For those who stress sanctification, it will mean inventing all sorts of rules (e.g., no card playing). For those who stress orthodoxy, it will mean an unthinking traditionalism removed from the Scriptures. Ironically, though, legalists end up with less than they had hoped to gain. Sanctification-based legalists in the end are less sanctified; they don’t play cards, but they bicker and lack the other virtues. Orthodoxy-based legalists in the end are less orthodox; they don’t exactly teach false doctrine, but they know the Homiletisches Real-Lexikon better than they know the Scriptures and they use their knowledge to find fault with others rather than to teach the faith.

Köhler also noted how often the church lurches from one legalism to another without recovering the gospel. In effect that is what happened to the Missouri Synod in the middle of the twentieth century, as some of its theologians argued against its parochialism. If previously the synod had been legalistic about being orthodox, many became legalistic about being unorthodox. In fact, I know several pastors whose theological thinking goes no further than “I’m for whatever most undercuts traditional morality or articles of faith and will call anyone who differs from me a legalist.” Of course, that is a legalism all of its own—a blind unthinking anti-traditionalism that, unlike the legalism of orthodoxy, doesn’t even have the virtue of teaching God’s truth.

The clash between the orthodox and the anti-orthodox came to a head in the Missouri Synod in the 1960’s and 1970’s. Perhaps one reason that some of the issues still smolder a half century later is because we have not confronted the issue of legalism head on. There are still some people for whom sound doctrine is a giant game of “gotcha” rather than a reveling in the mercy and love of God as revealed in Scripture. And those people keep others from taking doctrine seriously. Perhaps as we work on the Koinonia Project to bring about a deeper unity in synod, we can all do what Köhler rightly recognized as the only antidote to legalism: digging deeply into the gospel and clinging to it for all its worth.

Wauwawhat? (Part Three)

The Wauwatosa theologians not only revived biblical studies among confessional Lutherans, they also warned of the forms legalism could take in Lutheran circles. I will devote my next blog (the final one in the series) to paying final tribute to J.P. Köhler by looking in detail at an article he wrote against legalism and commenting on its continued relevance. But in today's blog I will talk about legalism inside and outside of Wauwatosa. As Köhler stated so well, legalism consists of deriving the power of the Christian life from the law rather than the gospel. Although confessional Lutherans might seem to be immune to legalism because we believe that we are saved by trusting in Christ rather than by doing the works of the law, there is an insidious means by which legalism can creep back into the church: preserving sound doctrine (noble task though it is) substitutes for believing it; in other words, we are tempted to become proud of our work of preserving orthodoxy rather than cherish the teaching God has given us. Moreover, Köhler argues, we can easily fall into legalism by overemphasizing a particular structure or style of organization for the church or by preaching a sanctification empowered by the law rather than the gospel.


Köhler’s words spoke to a confessional Lutheranism of the early 20th century that was often orthodox but had lost its first love (Rev. 2:4). Orthodoxy had become a game of “gotcha” rather than a reveling in the truth that our merciful God had revealed to us. There was also a rather dour attitude towards life in general that revealed itself in all sorts of prohibitions from going to the movies to installing lightning rods on barns. “For them, life was meant to be endured,” quipped one person about people of that generation. The joy of the gospel wasn’t there.

Köhler’s words were welcome, but unfortunately the Wauwatosa theology was not able to escape a legalism of its own. Köhler’s words in “Legalism among Us” are a candid but loving admonition to the Wisconsin and Missouri Synods. However, there was a torrent in Wisconsin of the 1920’s of what can only be called legalistic anti-legalistic writings, as writer after writer (from the renowned exegete August Pieper to elementary school teachers) wrote scathing denunciations of the Wisconsin Synod. The Synod had wanted merely to see the prisoners in the Bastille set free, but it got Jacobin terror instead.

Three incidents in particular stand out. Two school teachers denounced their pastor as a false prophet for not condemning what they considered vices. A college faculty and its governing board disagreed over the proper discipline for a couple dozen students. A parish pastor wrote a ham-handed attack on life in the Wisconsin Synod, complaining about everything from confirmation instruction to synod structure. In each instance the advocates of Wauwatosa were on the more rigorist side of the question and operated with little charity towards their opponents.

As a result the era of the Wauwatosa theology came to a formal end. Köhler left the presidency of the seminary in 1930 (and the Wisconsin Synod in 1933) and lived somewhat reclusively for his last twenty years. A handful of congregations left the Wisconsin Synod to form the Protes’tant Conference, unusually punctuated in more than one sense. That conference publishes the journal Faith-Life, which tends to have insightful articles by Köhler, less than useful (and perhaps less than truthful) encomiums to Köhler’s great musical and artistic abilities, and scathing denunciations involving personalities and events long forgotten. When I went through a stack of Faith-Life issues about twenty years, one article in particular stuck in my mind. It described how Köhler had criticized August Pieper out of the blue by saying at a dinner, “Pieper, du bist Pommer!” (“Pieper, you are a Pomeranian!”) This had taken place long before Pieper and Köhler parted company. Now one cannot read very much of Faith-Life without realizing that its writers deem August Pieper to be the Darth Vader of the Wisconsin Synod—the formerly noble knight who went over to the dark side. But there was no explanation as to why Köhler had made the remark, what it meant, and whether it was justified. If the reader didn’t instantly understand and assent, it was proof positive that the reader was hopelessly in error.

This is a negative legacy left by the Wauwatosa theologians, one that mars an otherwise positive inheritance. I would urge that the experience teaches us that those who rail against a particular form of legalism should be wary lest they fall into another form of that same vice.

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.

Wauwawhat? (Part One)

In my next couple of blogs I will be writing about “the Wauwatosa theology.” It gets into some arcane history, but some of that history gets into more recent events in confessional Lutheranism. Even though I belong to the Missouri Synod (ca. 2.4 million members) instead of the Wisconsin Synod (ca. 390,000 members) where the Wauwatosa theology was centered, I cannot entirely ignore it because the Missouri Synod and the Wisconsin Synod were in fellowship with each other at the time and it had an effect on both denominations.


But what is the Wauwatosa theology? It refers to the emphases found in the Wisconsin Synod of approximately the 1910’s and 1920’s when that synod had its seminary in Wauwatosa and was under the leadership of J.P. Köhler. Although August Pieper and Johannes Schaller (and sometimes Hermann Meyer and Adolf Hönecke) are often mentioned as fellow Wauwatosa theologians, it was Köhler who was the driving force behind the movement. Although it would be incorrect to speak of a Wauwatosa theology as soon as he began teaching at the seminary in 1900, it was certainly well in place when he took over the presidency in 1920. The movement came to a formal end with the seminary’s move in 1929 and the end of Köhler’s presidency in 1930, although most in the Wisconsin Synod would say that its legacy remains.

At the heart of the Wauwatosa theology was a re-emphasis on exegetical theology (which explains the Scriptures verse by verse) and to a lesser extent historical theology (which is concerned with the history of the church and theology). This emphasis stood in distinction to the Missouri Synod at the time, which spent more time on systematic theology (which explains the teachings of the Scripture topic by topic) and practical theology (which teaches pastors how to apply doctrine in their parish life through preaching, teaching, pastoral care, and the like). In addition, the Wauwatosa movement criticized the Missouri Synod for its educational system that placed a premium on doing theology in Latin. This was due to the fact that nearly every systematic theology had been written in Latin until the nineteenth century and the early Missouri Synod found little to commend in the contemporary systematic theologies being published in German or English. Because many students were too busy struggling with the Latin in the Baier-Walther Compendium, the main systematics textbook, they had no time to devote to verse by verse exegesis of the Scripture.

Even before the Wauwatosa theology made its appearance, the Missouri Synod had realized that there was a problem and was correcting it. C.F.W. Walther (who is sometimes caricatured by historians of the Wauwatosa school as hostile to serious exegesis or at least uninterested in it) finagled a call to Georg Stöckhardt to teach exegetical theology at his seminary; indeed, Walther was far more eager than just about anyone to see more exegesis taught at his seminary. Köhler and his colleagues readily acknowledged their deep debt to Stöckhardt and to Walther, but some more recent chroniclers of the Wauwatosa movement are less willing to do so. Moreover, about the same time that the Wauwatosa school was forming, Franz Pieper wrote a systematic theology in German so that his students wouldn’t have to struggle with Latin theological texts any more, thus freeing up more time for other studies. (A generation later seminarians found the German as difficult as their forebears had found the Latin, and Pieper’s work was translated into English.) More exegetical courses were added with the result that today the total number of required exegetical courses in Missouri’s schools outnumbers the systematic ones and is close to that required by the Wisconsin Synod. The transition was also furthered along by a change in Missouri’s environment. In its first half century or so the synod was growing so quickly that the best form of education seemed to be to cover all the major theological topics as well as possible and to offer advice on how to preach them and then to let the seminarian read the Bible carefully verse by verse on his own once he was out in the parish. But now the synod was beginning to realize the value of a more rounded theological education.

I tend to think of myself as more of an exegete than a systematician, but systematics has been a close second love. It is not surprising then that I find much to commend in the Wauwatosa theology. I recommend the three volume collection of the Wauwatosa theology published by Northwestern Publishing House, the first of which has a quite detailed history of the movement. I also recommend John Schaller’s Biblical Christology as a fine example of systematic theology done with an exegetical bent. At the same time, though, I find that there are areas of that school that bear further investigation and perhaps even critique.