Shockwaves Continue After Extramarital Affair Detonates
Heav’n has no rage like love to hatred turn’d, / Nor Hell a fury like a woman scorn’d.
Erik Herrmann, a former professor of historical theology at Concordia Seminary in St. Louis for eighteen years, published a public statement on his personal site addressing what he called false accusations and defamation. The statement catalogued a six-month extramarital affair with Jill Szoo Wilson that ended in early 2023, his private resignation from the seminary and from the roster of The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod (LCMS) later that year, an internet campaign conducted by Wilson beginning in 2025 under the pseudonyms Helena Sloane, Helena Nightingale, u/LegOld6895, and Iris Lennox, and a defamation action he filed in the Circuit Court of St. Louis County, Case No. 25SL-CC09509. The legal portion of the matter appears to be resolved after Wilson submitted an affidavit to the court on March 3, 2026, admitting that Herrmann was not guilty of clergy abuse, rape, and molestation accusations as she had previously alleged.
The whole matter is as gross and distasteful as such things are, but it warrants attention because it is a case study in three things at once: how a moral catastrophe metastasizes in a church, the lengths that a scorned party will go to in search of meaning when an affair ends, and how a subculture keeps such matters circulating through the plumbing of a Synod.
Wages Earned, But Deferred
The old warning in Numbers 32:23, reinforced in Hebrews 4:13, that a man may be sure his sin will find him out, is not a very popular topic of LCMS sermons, but it never goes out of fashion, as demonstrated by the Herrmann drama. It came to light when his spurned paramour disclosed the affair to the Missouri District President. Herrmann tendered his resignation from CSL and the roster, which notice the Reporter published in August of 2023 in language (“for personal and private reasons”) that is commonly a euphemism for unpleasant things.
Things did not end there, as they seldom do. Two years later, Wilson began a written campaign that placed the most intimate and sordid details of the affair into public view. She set herself as a victim of clergy sexual misconduct, spiritual abuse, and almost criminal grooming and predation. When the wages came due, they arrived in the form of a subreddit persona, a Substack account with a paywall behind which Concordia Publishing House employees and members of Herrmann’s own congregation reportedly subscribed1, a network of pastors and seminarians who forwarded the posts, and the eventual willingness of Ministry Watch, Wartburg Watch, and Christian News to run the abuse allegations under Herrmann’s real name.
Wilson's affidavit establishes that the allegations were false, but it does not address the collateral damage. Herrmann’s teaching contracts at the Institute of Lutheran Theology (ILT) were canceled, his applications for secular employment have gone unanswered, at least one publisher has closed its list to him, and academic conference committees have entertained motions to revoke his membership. That is what the wages of one adulterous half-year now look like on his books, three years on.
The lesson of Numbers 32 is not a threat of retribution but an observation that private moral infractions tend to become public. The affidavit vindicates Herrmann against the criminal accusations; it does not, and cannot, restore what the private (yet public because of his vocation) failing had already begun to dissolve, and which he is clearly bitter about:
No one contacted me to find out if it was true. No one checked to see if I was okay. No one even contacted me to tell me it was happening. My former faculty colleagues at the seminary went radio silent. Family members quietly shared posts among themselves and my wife’s family without telling us. Pastors — so many pastors— read and shared and reposted without once stopping to consider what this might be doing to me or my family. By the end of the year the total number of people who finally did reach out to me remained countable on a single hand.
LCMS public confessions have a different quality from those you come across in other denominations. Nietzsche’s description of “German dyspepsia” may be insightful regarding the Synod’s apparent difficulty in privately digesting its own experiences. He meant a compulsion to bring every ache and burden to public attention and to work at it there, ruminatively, in the sight of others, until the private matter had been thoroughly published, commented upon, and regurgitated.
The Herrmann matter is a case study of it. The affair, having been ended privately and confessed, could have remained the pastoral problem of two marriages and one bylaws-compliant resignation notice. It did not, and Herrmann’s public statement is itself a further, hopefully final, contribution to the public rumination.
The root of much of this is the Synod’s uptake of the culture’s casual view of divorce. We have developed very intricate casuistry to deal with pastors who have more than one wife, so it is no wonder it poisons the fruit of other trees. The Office of Holy Ministry is greater than any single man, circuit, district, or Synod, and we need to repair our willingness to make the Office derivative of our politics and feelings.
Conclusion
The world now knows that a consensual affair occurred between a married woman and a married LCMS pastor and professor. It also knows the clergy-abuse accusation was false, was made under four pseudonyms across multiple platforms, and was retracted under oath on March 3, 2026. Herrmann’s career within the Synod and its adjacent confessional academic ecosystem was destroyed and will probably never revert to a previously recognizable state.
Herrmann was grievously wronged, but he brought it upon himself and his family because, as a pastor, he had a higher duty and responsibility and was under stricter judgment. He complains that his colleagues, friends, and family didn’t behave or respond the way he wanted, but this ignores human nature. When a drain backs up and floods a house with a meter of sewage because you blocked a drain, nobody wants to wade in to clean it up for you.
We don’t need to rush into coddling adulterous pastors because it is an incentive to premeditated repentance. In our therapeutic culture, shame is viewed negatively. However, it yields constructive outcomes when exercised scripturally for remorse, restitution, rehabilitation, and reform. That process should be managed in silence and out of sight over a long period. The last thing the church needs is performative communal processing of shame and the rapid reintegration that results from misguided and misapplied ‘gospelly’ empathy. Indeed, we should be highly suspicious of pastors who do not process their shame in remote, prolonged solitude. Not exiled, just managed with extreme judiciousness, with equal doses of law and gospel.
Cover Photo by Pawan Sharma on Unsplash
Several of Herrmann's statements hint at lingering animosity, such as these footnotes: “Every subscriber to the Casual Impact Substack was handed over in the legal discovery–every email and every instance of access has been recorded”, and “Several LCMS pastors actively (and illegally [tortious interference]) pushed for my termination at ILT, threatening to pull funding from supporting institutions. As a result all of my teaching contracts were canceled.”
Many years ago, I heard an LCMS pastor say something alone the lines of: "while God does forgive our sins because of the work of Jesus Christ, and when it comes to our relatoinship with Him, our sins are as far from us as the east is from the west, that does not mean that He always takes away the consequences of our sins in this life. We are also told in the 8th Commandment that when we speak of others, we are to do so "in the kindest way."
The "statement" Erik Herrmann pulbished and emailed to many late last week brings a lot of issues to the surface, some of which are addressed in this article. One issue, and one person, that isn't is the other party in this situation: Jill Wilson.
Jill has freely confessed to her sin in this situation. Dr. Herrmann has successfully taken her voice away with the defamation suit, and the legal remedy that was settled upon. She has the right for people to allow her to move on with her marriage and her life as a forgiven, redeemed child of God without having her name continually be brought up in articles such as these.
The focus of the issue this article addresses should be on Dr. Herrmann. In particular, the reality his statement expresses: he does not seem to understand the concept that there are consequences to our sin that we don't always get to escape in this life. In this case, he should not expect with this pubic knowledge (and his own confession in his statement of a sinful, adulterous affair) to ever again be put into a position of public ministry. I would everyone reading this would agree this would and should permanently bar him from ever serving in ordained ministry again. But it is more than reasonable to also expect that this would also preclude him from service in another institution of the wider church (LCMS or beyond) that is tasked with the formation of clergy or other professional church workers.
Instead, it appears Dr. Herrmann wants to, indirectly, lay the blame on Jill Wilson and not accept the reality of the consequences of his own sin, which brings into question the sincereity of his "repentance" and amendment of life.
At this point, if we're even going to give this topic any further attention, the focus needs to be on Dr. Herrmann, not Jill Wilson. To speak of this situation in the kindest way, we simply need to let her, her husband, and their family live their lives, and let this issue die.
I suppose my contrarian nature will once again command a response that may not be well received.
You were exactly spot on to remind readers of the true nature of repentance: "The last thing the church needs is performative communal processing of shame and the rapid reintegration that results from misguided and misapplied ‘gospelly’ empathy. Indeed, we should be highly suspicious of pastors who do not process their shame in remote, prolonged solitude. Not exiled, just managed with extreme judiciousness, with equal doses of law and gospel." Well said.
I don't desire to continue to stir this pot, but there are valuable lessons in properly applying the third use of the law for all of us, men AND women alike. Jill Wilson's post on her substack this week (https://jillszoowilson.com/2026/07/04/the-cost-of-silence-the-courage-to-speak/) is hardly one characterized by remorse and shame. To this reader's interpretation, it is intensely "gospelly" and intentionally deflective of any true remorse for even the untruths she has admitted on the record. It reeks of the feminist gospel ravaging the church that women are always ultimately victims and, to the extent any wrong was done on her part, it was due to some form of overpowering manipulation. She proudly talks about speaking out and telling her truth, even though the implication is that she was forced into silence.
So isn't there shame to process in her part of the sin? Is the man the only one to be (rightly) held to this standard of prolonged solitude? There's no hint of such remorse that stands out as a central theme in her statement. It's over. She's done. She's been forgiven. Let's don't dwell on the personal damage she has wrought.
I'm reminded of an old friend of mine who was ordained in the Catholic Church years ago. He recalls, perhaps tongue in cheek, that his spiritual father cautioned him to only confess children in his first year as a new priest. In the second year he was advised to add men to his regular confessional duties, but to wait until at least the third year before hearing women's sins. When asked by my friend the reason for this advice he was told "because women never do anything wrong."
We've got a real problem in the Western Church around the whole issue of women and their roles. I'm not being flippant here, but ask yourself "when was the last time I heard a sermon addressing the specific sins of women?" (We hear lots of them about men and their well-earned opprobrium). It just doesn't happen with women. Preachers of all stripes instinctively know that there would be a huge price to pay in their congregations for opening Pandora's special container. Feminist dogma only reinforces this angst.
You're spot on about the special status of a pastor and the high standard we should hold them to. But that can't mean women are held to no standard at all or that they get a free pass on shame and guilt. Our culture proclaims that the "fairer sex" has for eons been accused and trampled under patriarchal dominance/interpretation. The scripture plainly says that "ALL have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God." Our reluctance to solemnly apply the law's third use to women is simply making cultural impacts in Christian life worse rather than better. We're all called to a high standard of holiness and it's time we started acting like we know what that looks like.
You're tag line that hell has no fury like a woman scorned is not just poetry. Any man older than 20 years of age knows this to be true. But is that response in keeping with Christ's teachings? When wronged (even by a man), what is a woman's best Christ-like response? Well, we don't really talk about it, do we?