Walther’s 200th Birthday
Hebrews 13:7
Rev. Cameron A. MacKenzie, PhD, professor, Concordia Theological Seminary, Fort Wayne, Indiana
Sermon
Fifty years ago, “Walther” was a household name in The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod. After all, the synodical youth group was called the Walther League. Today, however, the league is long gone, and for many so is the man for whom it was named, Carl Ferdinand Wilhelm Walther. In fact, there are probably some here today who are wondering why in the world we’re devoting a service to commemorating a man nobody knows!
Well, our text for this morning tells us why. “Remember,” it says, “remember . . . those who spoke to you the word of God.” And nobody has spoken the Word of God more faithfully in the Missouri Synod than C. F. W. Walther. So today we are remembering him.
At one point in the history of our church body, everybody knew who Walther was; still today, our pastors, theologians, and seminary students study him. In his own times, Walther was the individual most identified with our Synod—its first president, professor and president of Concordia Seminary in St. Louis, founding editor of Der Lutheraner (the predecessor to today’s Lutheran Witness), and head pastor of four—that’s right!—four Lutheran congregations in St. Louis. He wrote and he spoke and, in so doing, provided theological leadership that still marks the Missouri Synod. Yes, C. F. W. Walther is well worth remembering in our church.
It would be easy, therefore, to spend the next several minutes—or hours—talking about Walther’s accomplishments, but our text suggests something different. “Imitate their faith,” it says. That’s not quite the same as just listing their achievements.
But if we want to imitate Walther’s faith, we need to see that faith in action. Faith in the heart is invisible; the words and deeds that reveal a man’s deepest convictions are not. So let’s look at Walther’s faith by considering two episodes from his life, one from the beginning of his career and the other from its end. Together they show us the man and reveal that
Walther’s Faith Is Worth Imitating.
I.
Like many Americans in the nineteenth century, Walther was an immigrant to this country. Unlike most of the others, Walther came looking for religious liberty, not just the chance to make a good living. In fact, back in the old country, still a young man in his twenties, Walther was already making a good living as a pastor in a little town in Germany. But in 1838, he resigned his call, left his people, and set sail for America. Why? What was his motivation?
Just this. Walther had become convinced that the Lutheran Church in his homeland was totally corrupt and beyond saving. The time to leave Sodom and Gomorrah had come. As his brother-in-law and fellow pastor put it, “Whoever does not emigrate is no Christian.”1
So is this what we should imitate? A faith bold enough to forsake the comforts of home for the wilds of America? Not quite. Walther’s boldness quickly dissipated and turned into despair just months after his arrival in the United States, for the man whom Walther, and about seven hundred others, had followed from Germany to Missouri was caught up in a scandal of the sort that one finds in Hollywood and Washington today. Unfortunately, their leader wasn’t an actor or a politician. He was a Lutheran pastor who had convinced Walther and the others to leave their homeland. It was his evaluation of the Lutheran Church that they had accepted; it was his career as a pastor that the authorities had been threatening, not Walther’s.
As the scandal unfolded, the immigrants acted promptly to expel their leader, but now the second-guessing and recriminations began. Here they were in America all right, but should they have left Germany in the first place? After all, nobody was threatening Walther’s call; he was still preaching the Gospel every Sunday in the old country. But then he had quit the congregation to which God had sent him for a place to which a charlatan and hypocrite had led him. To make matters worse, Walther had encouraged others to come too.
And how were the immigrants doing? Not very well. They were hungry and sick and dying! In fact, one of the ships on which they had traveled had gone down in the ocean with no survivors. Men, women, and children now dead.
All this led to some severe soul-searching in young Pastor Walther, and he didn’t like what he found. In a letter to his brother, he confessed his shame and guilt: “My conscience blames me for all the adulteries which occurred among us. It calls me a kidnapper, a robber of the well-to-do among us, a murderer of those buried at sea and of the numerous victims here, a member of a sect, a hireling, an idolater.”2 Walther’s conscience was working overtime, and he was blaming himself for what had happened. Instead of a bold faith in his heart, Walther was confronting his sin—ugly, shameful, damnable sin! So that when we set about imitating this man, let’s remember what we see here: a sinner, not a hero; a son of Adam, not a saint. In fact, someone just like you, just like me, someone who needed a Savior, desperately.
And that’s what Walther found—thanks to the grace of God. In that same letter to his brother, he talked about obtaining rest and peace only in Christ Jesus. For God’s forgiveness in Christ was the only thing that enabled Walther to get past this confrontation with sin. Of course, Walther knew the Gospel already, but he also needed to hear it. So who would tell him?
Walther was convinced that he had sinned against the people of his congregation in Missouri by following a false prophet. So he went to them and confessed his sin. He even offered his resignation. But how did they respond? With righteous indignation and self-justifying wrath? Not at all. Instead, Walther wrote, “They assured me to a man that they forgave me everything from the bottom of their heart and with joy of conscience.”3 Usually, pastors are the ones pronouncing forgiveness, but in this case, God moved the people to forgive their pastor and so point their shepherd back to the Good Shepherd himself.
II.
It was not easy for Walther to get over the scandal and his feelings of guilt, but God was at work through his Word, and, at length, Walther recovered and went on to become the churchman and theologian we remember today. Still, he never forgot the lesson of those early years, that Christians live by Gospel—the message of God’s unconditional love in Jesus.
In a sense, it was this conviction that led to the second episode that we often hear as an example from Walther’s life that reveals his faith—this time from his last decade when he was in his late ’60s and ’70s. By that point, many of Walther’s great achievements were behind him. Among these was his success in bringing together the vast majority of Confessional Lutherans in America into a single church body known as the Synodical Conference. Within just a few years of its formation, though, the Synodical Conference experienced an enormous fight and broke apart. The fight was doctrinal, and at its center was C. F. W. Walther. Instead of enjoying his golden years and basking in the praise of his contemporaries, Walther had to write, debate, and preach, while former friends and students vilified him as a false prophet and a betrayer of Lutheranism.
So what was going on here? Why did Walther fight instead of compromise? What was at stake? Nothing less than the Gospel—that same message on which Walther had relied in his darkest hours. That same good news you and I need to hear over and over again was at risk in this controversy. Walther taught that God’s love in Christ was unconditional and that it extended back into the heart of God from all eternity, so that there was nothing in or about us that moved God to call, convert, and preserve us in the faith except his love for us in Jesus. Period. Others objected: “No, that’s not true. God chooses me when he sees something in me, like faith.” Or again, “God converts me and not others when I do something they don’t do, like softening my resistance to his call.”
So Walther thundered back: False! He insisted that the Gospel is comforting precisely because it is unconditional, and it’s sure because it’s based only on God’s love—and not at all and not any on me, a sinner.
Now, church fights are never pretty, and this one was exceptionally ugly. It had negative consequences that survived for generations. Nonetheless, Walther taught us something in this controversy worth remembering even today. We need to hang on to the Word of God at whatever cost. Jesus promised, “If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (Jn 8:31–32). So when we give up that Word even a little bit, we are actually giving up Jesus a little bit—and maybe a lot—and that means throwing doubt on our salvation! C. F. W. Walther knew this from personal experience, and he was not going to let it happen. The Gospel meant more to him than peace in the visible Church. God’s Word was more important than anything else.
So we can learn a great deal from the life of C. F. W. Walther. In spite of all the differences between his time and ours, there are things that never change. Satan still attacks God’s Word, and God’s people must be on their guard—they need to know this Word and be faithful to it. They need to speak up for it even when others may not want to hear it, and the cost of faithfulness may be great.
But even greater things are at stake in the Word of God, and Walther knew that too—personally. Not only when he was in such despair during his first year in America, but throughout all his life, Walther confessed himself “a poor miserable sinner.” That was true even during his last days and illness, when life was ebbing away. Something else was also true: God’s eternal promises in Jesus—and Walther relied on them. He prayed, “God be merciful to me!” and repeated the hymn “Jesus, Thy Blood and Righteousness.”4
Ultimately, that’s what it all came down to for Walther as well as for us—not our lives, perhaps marked by triumphs but certainly marred by sins, but Jesus, our Savior. With Walther and all the saints, we rely on him—living, dying, and rising again! And that, my friends, is a faith worth imitating.
Notes
1. As quoted in Walter A. Baepler, A Century of Grace: A History of the Missouri Synod 1847–1947 (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1947), 24.
2. C. F. W. Walther to Otto Herman Walther, May 4, 1840, in Carl S. Meyer, ed., Letters of C. F. W. Walther: A Selection (Philadelphia.: Fortress Press, 1969), 35.
3. Ibid., 44.
4. August R. Suelflow, Servant of the Word: The Life and Ministry of C. F. W. Walther (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 2000), 279.
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