A Royal Ambiguity: Part I

St. Peter wrote about sacrificial Christian identity, but a disgruntled Saxon lawyer turned a Liberal theologian's concepts into the foundation of LCMS polity

Few Bible passages have done more institutional work in the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod (LCMS) than 1 Peter 2:9:

“But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for His own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of Him who called you out of darkness into His marvelous light.”

The verse appears in LCMS convention essays, pastoral columns, lay empowerment literature, house organs, and synodical teaching with remarkable regularity. It is deployed to affirm the priesthood of all believers and to justify functionally repositioning possession of the Keys to the laity. Within that transfer, the laity is exhorted to “speak the Gospel and forgiveness in their daily vocations”, thereby cloaking themselves with an authority that should belong exclusively to pastors.

The typical presentation quotes Luther and C.F.W. Walther at length, celebrates the spiritual priesthood, and urges the baptized to exercise that priestly identity. As pastoral encouragement, this is unobjectionable. As theology, it needs more attention, because 1 Peter 2:9 has quite a career in the LCMS and the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod (WELS). The time and distance between what Peter wrote and what Missouri has made of it have produced many unintended consequences.

Peering into Peter’s Paper

Peter’s “royal priesthood” is not an ecclesiological statement or position about church governance. Nor is it a statement about who holds the Keys, or how ministerial authority is distributed, or what laypeople may do in relation to the pastoral office. It is simply and only a declaration of identity and vocation: baptized Christians are a priestly people insofar as their lives are informed and characterized by sacrifice, prayer, proclamation, and the bearing of God’s gifts and promises into a watching, but cynical and hostile world. The passage calls Christians to be something (a people set apart for sacrificial living), not to possess something in competition with or as a check upon the pastoral office.

This distinction is critical because the LCMS has appropriated Peter’s language for purposes the Sainted Apostle never had in mind. When the text is read as Peter wrote it, the royal priesthood is a call to live as sincere Christians. However, when the text is read as Walther deployed it, the royal priesthood becomes a thinly constructed argument about the what, where, why, and how of ecclesiastical authority. Both versions contain truth, but they are not the same reading.

The Stephan Crisis

Every LCMS seminary student knows the outline of the Martin Stephan affair (excuse the pun). However, the implications of that scandal for the Synod’s theology of ministry are less well known or considered.

In 1838, Martin Stephan led roughly 700 Saxon Lutherans from Dresden to Missouri. Stephan had cultivated an almost episcopal authority over the group during years of leadership of the conventicle in Saxony, and he was formally invested as bishop aboard the ship Olbers on January 14, 1839, and a “Pledge of Subjection” was signed on the riverboat Selma on February 16. However, within months, he was removed for sexual misconduct and financial impropriety (there is reason to be cautious about all the tawdry details).¹ He was deposed on May 30, 1839, and involuntarily shipped across the Mississippi the following day to live in exile in Illinois, dropped at a rock formation known as Devil’s Bake Oven in Grand Tower.² Stephan spent his final four months of life as pastor of Trinity Lutheran Church in Red Bud, Illinois, where he was greatly beloved by his congregation.³

Running Stephan out of Perry County created an ecclesiological emergency for the Saxon immigrants. Whether intentionally or not, Stephan’s charisma had concentrated the colony’s churchly identity in his person and office. So, if the legitimacy of their church depended on their bishop, and the bishop was a fraud, were they even or ever a church at all? Were their sacraments valid? Was their confession and absolution worth anything? Had their pastors been legitimately called? The transplanted Lutherans had to confront the reality that their pied piper was apparently a wolf who led them (their womenfolk, especially) into the wilderness to be devoured. Indeed, some go so far as to say Stephan was a cult leader.

A Lawyer’s Brief

It was not C.F.W. Walther who first proposed the ecclesiological solution that would become Missouri’s signature doctrine. It was a lawyer.

Dr. Carl Eduard Vehse was the former curator of the Saxon State Archive in Dresden. As such, he was a highly influential layman among the immigrants because of his legal training and expertise in archival research. On August 5, 1839, barely two months after Stephan’s deposition, Vehse submitted a set of six propositions to Pastor O.H. Walther (C.F.W.’s older brother). The propositions asserted the Lutheran doctrine of the universal priesthood of all believers and argued that the office of the ministry was merely a public service, valid only when committed to an individual by a congregation.⁴

The clergy resisted. They warned the St. Louis congregation against those “who would unfairly abuse this declaration in order to discredit our office, maliciously sow the seeds of distrust against us, and bring about dissension and offense in the congregation.”⁵ C.F.W. Walther himself was among those who resisted Vehse “most vigorously.”⁶

Vehse was undeterred. On September 19, 1839, he and two other laymen, Fischer and Jaeckel, submitted a formal, detailed protest comprising three chapters.⁷ It maintained a firm juxtaposition between the laity and the clergy, asserted the congregation's rights over those of the clergy, and declared the congregation's supremacy. Their claims were based, as John C. Wohlrabe, Jr. documented in Concordia Theological Quarterly, “primarily upon the earlier statements of Luther concerning the priesthood of all believers.”⁸ At Stephan’s own suggestion, these laymen had studied Luther’s writings for years while still in Germany, and “their knowledge of Luther’s writings was astonishing.”⁹

Vehse returned to Germany, departing on December 16, 1839. However, his brother-in-law, Franz Adolph Marbach, continued pressing the lay delegation’s case, eventually issuing a manifesto in March 1841 declaring the colony’s entire church polity sinful! The situation was deteriorating rapidly. Carl S. Mundinger’s analysis: “At the end of March 1841 the whole colony was fast approaching a state of complete disintegration.”¹⁰

C.F.W. Walther resolved the crisis via the Altenburg Debate of April 1841. He grounded the Church’s existence not in the office-holder but in the collection of believers who possess the Word and Sacraments. The Keys belong to the Church (Gemeinde), and the Church essentially runs a lending library for the Keys, handing them over to their rightly called and ordained pastors upon arrival, and taking them back into stock when they leave. That allowed the Saxon immigrants to remain a “true church” in spite of Stephan’s womanizing and fraud.

To be sure, this was a piece of brilliant pastoral theology and ecclesiological maneuver. But here is the critical fact that standard LCMS accounts routinely understate: Walther’s Altenburg position was substantially Vehse’s position. Walther himself acknowledged this with startling candor:

“With deep gratitude I must here recall that document which, now almost a year and a half ago, Doctor Vehse, Mr. Fischer, and Mr. Jaeckel addressed to us. It was this document, in particular, which gave us a powerful impulse to recognize the remaining corruption more and more, and to endeavor to remove it. Without this document—I now confess it with a living conviction—we might have for a long time pursued our way of error, from which we now have made our escape.”

— C.F.W. Walther, as recorded by J.F. Koestering; translation by P.E. Kretzmann in Concordia Theological Monthly XI, 169ff. See also A. Baepler, A Century of Grace (CPH, 1947), 47–48.¹¹

It is a rather incredible statement. Walther says that without the Vehse protest, the clergy “might have for a long time pursued our way of error.” So, it’s not a minor intellectual debt. The Church-possession thesis that became the foundation of LCMS ecclesiology was not the product of intense research, study, and wrestling by a theologian, but rather the protest brief of a lawyer who felt the clergy had failed the laity and argued his case on a narrow recasting of the priesthood of all believers.

Philosopher’s Shadow

Where did Vehse get his ideas? Standard LCMS lore treats his propositions as though they sprang fully formed from Luther’s writings. They did not. As Rev. Dr. David Scaer of Concordia Theological Seminary, Fort Wayne, has noted, Vehse’s position has its intellectual origins in Friedrich Schleiermacher.¹²

Schleiermacher (1768–1834), the “Father of Modern Liberal Theology,” grounded theology not in divine revelation or institution but in the religious consciousness of the community. Applied to the ministry, this meant that the Church does not receive a divinely instituted Office from above. Rather, the community generates its own leadership structures from below, out of ‘practical necessity’. Schleiermacher explicitly advocated a form of “transference theory”: offices derive “solely from the whole body,” and the formation of clergy into a self-propagating corporation “has no Scriptural basis of any kind.”¹³ He gave “to every Christian the right of leadership” and insisted that only when “the religious consciousness of the people is left unfettered can the ministry of the church flourish.”¹⁴

This framework was taken up by J.W.F. Höfling at the University of Erlangen and applied specifically to Lutheran ecclesiology. Höfling argued that the pastoral office was not divinely instituted but was merely a human, churchly arrangement for maintaining good order. The community creates the office; the office serves at the community’s pleasure. William Weinrich explicitly links Vehse and Höfling as holding the same functional position: both “claimed that the pastoral office was of a human churchly institution in order to maintain good order in the church.”¹⁵

Vehse’s August 1839 propositions make precisely Höfling’s argument: the ministry is “only a public service” valid only when committed to an individual by a congregation. In other words, the intellectual pipeline is transparent from Schleiermacher to Erlangen to Höfling to Vehse to Walther to the LCMS, with each stage translating the same basic idea: ministry as a community function, not a divine institution, and laundered through confessional proof-texts.

The irony for the LCMS is significant. Walther’s second thesis on the Ministry in Church and Office, “the preaching office or pastoral office is not a human ordinance, but an office established by God himself”¹⁶, was written against Höfling and Vehse. But the Church-possession side of Walther’s synthesis, the side that Walther adopted from Vehse, has in practice swallowed the divine-institution side that Walther wrote against Vehse. The denomination ended up operationally where Schleiermacher’s theology of community consciousness would predict, while officially confessing the opposite. That has manifested negatively in dozens of ways, and we will cover some of them in part II.

The Office of Instability

Walther knew he could not leave the argument in Altenburg. In Church and Office of the Ministry,¹⁷ the theses on the Church’s possession of the Keys are systematically paired with theses on the divine institution of the pastoral office to produce an attempted synthesis. That structure is intentional, matching the belief that believers hold the Keys with the Ministry theses that establish that Christ instituted a distinct office for their public administration. It was a clever design because neither was subordinate nor superior to the other. If you remove or over-emphasize just one of the pairings, you risk clericalism or congregationalism.

Walther found a way to keep the Saxon peasants upright on their horses and to note the ditches they might fall into on either side, echoing Luther.¹⁸

The problem is that the two sets of theses have different origin stories: the Church-possession side from Vehse’s protest (which traces back to Schleiermacher via the Erlangen school) and the Office of the Holy Ministry from eternal Scripture and the Lutheran Confessions.¹⁹ Consequently, Walther’s professional career was overwhelmingly concerned with the question of who possessed the Keys. To be fair, without his formulation, there would be no Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod.

Nevertheless, the result is that LCMS clergy and laity have struggled not to fall into Walther’s ditches. So, we witness the Synod’s persistent frictions over lay ministry, licensed deacons, alternate track pastors, and the hard boundaries of the preaching office. Cameron A. MacKenzie is careful to note that “we cannot press Walther’s congregationalism into a New England mold. His concern was to insist upon the means of grace as the marks of the church and not to restrict the church to some outward form.”²⁰ But whether Missouri heard that nuance or heard only the Vehse-derived emphasis on lay authority is another matter entirely.

Walther wasn’t necessarily wrong, but something has gone awry in treating his splitting of the baby as birthing a divine and eternal constitution for congregations. As with all constitutions, they are subject to very selective quotation and gerrymandering.

In Part II, we will examine what the “royal priesthood” doctrine actually seems to produce when it is detached from St. Peter’s meaning and deployed as an ecclesiological argument in ordinary congregational life, including the Synod’s persistent confusion about the distinction between the mutual consolation of the brethren and the authoritative absolution of a called and ordained pastor

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• Idea for article: Senior Teacher of the Lutheran Church “A”

• Historical lineage clarification: Senior Teacher of the Lutheran Church “B”

• Source development and research: Anthropic Opus 4.6

• Cover illustration: ChatGPT

1. On the charges against Stephan, see Walter O. Forster, Zion on the Mississippi (CPH, 1953), chs. 5–6. For a more sympathetic treatment, see CTQ 72 (2008): 363ff. [CTQ PDF]

2. W.G. Polack, The Story of C.F.W. Walther (CPH, 1935). The “Sentence of Deposition” bears Vehse’s name. See Forster, 416–418.

3. Stephan served at Trinity Red Bud for approximately four months before his death on January 26, 1846. Forster, 390–398.

4. John C. Wohlrabe, Jr., “The Americanization of Walther’s Doctrine of the Church,” CTQ 52:1 (January 1988): 5. [CTQ PDF]

5. Wohlrabe, “Americanization,” 5. [CTQ PDF]

6. Carl S. Mundinger, Government in the Missouri Synod (CPH, 1947), 212.

7. The original German document is held in the Saxon Immigration Collection, 1811–1962, at Concordia Historical Institute (CHI) in St. Louis.

8. Wohlrabe, “Americanization,” 5. [CTQ PDF]

9. Mundinger, Government, 212.

10. Mundinger, as quoted in Wohlrabe, “Americanization,” 5–6. [CTQ PDF]

11. A. Baepler, A Century of Grace (CPH, 1947), 47–48, translating Koestering via P.E. Kretzmann in Concordia Theological Monthly XI, 169ff.

12. David P. Scaer, Professor Emeritus, Concordia Theological Seminary, Fort Wayne; longtime editor of CTQ. On Schleiermacher’s ongoing influence, see Scaer, “Gospel Reductionism,” CTQ 88:4 (October 2024). [CTQ PDF]

13. Schleiermacher, as discussed in “Walther on the Office of the Holy Ministry,” Concordia Society.

14. Ibid. On the Erlangen school's roots in Schleiermacher, see 'Erlangen School,' New Catholic Encyclopedia, via Encyclopedia.com. On Höfling specifically, see Weinrich, CTQ 70:3–4.

15. William Weinrich, “Should a Layman Discharge the Duties of the Holy Ministry?” CTQ 70:3–4 (2006). [CTQ PDF]

16. Roland F. Ziegler, “Walther and Augsburg Confession V,” CTQ 76:3–4 (July/October 2012). [CTQ PDF]

17. C.F.W. Walther, The Church and the Office of the Ministry (CPH, 2012). [CPH]

The world is like a drunken peasant. If you lift him into the saddle on one side, he will fall off again on the other side. One can’t help him, no matter how one tries.”

18. The Lutheran Witness cited this reference in a 2016 column by President Matt Harrison titled “Keep Us Sober and on the Horse.” His source was Luther’s Works, American Edition, vol. 54 (Table Talk), p. 111.

19. See “Missouri’s Twin Traumas: I. The Stephan Crisis,” Project MUSE. [MUSE] Also: Lutheran Heritage Museum, “The Altenburg Debate: Who Won?” [lutheranmuseum.com]

20. Cameron A. MacKenzie, “C.F.W. Walther and the Missouri Synod Today,” CTQ. [CTQ PDF] Also: “C.F.W. Walther’s Use of Luther,” CTQ 75:3–4 (2011). [CTQ PDF]