The AALC Fellowship Drama Compared With Lessons From a Century Ago

The AALC now says its fellowship with the Missouri Synod binds doctrine and not practice. The record of how Missouri once treated Ohio, Iowa, and Buffalo says otherwise, and it had reason to.

When the American Association of Lutheran Churches now maintains that its altar and pulpit fellowship with the Missouri Synod (LCMS) is binding for doctrine alone and not for practice, it advances a claim that is at war not only with the plain language of the 2007 declarations but with the entire tradition of fellowship discipline out of which the Missouri Synod once acted. For the question of whether church fellowship governs life as well as faith is not a new question, and it is not a small one, and the body now being asked to treat practice as severable from doctrine is the very body that, within living institutional memory, refused union with three sister synods for nearly half a century precisely because it would not purchase concord at the price of leaving the controverted matter unsettled.

The documentary record from 2007 is unambiguous. When the Synod declared fellowship with the AALC at its 63rd convention in July of that year, the action was reported in the Synod’s own Reporter and Lutheran Witness as recognizing agreement in doctrine and practice between the two bodies; and the AALC’s own presiding pastor, Thomas Aadland, characterized the moment as a “mutually recognized concord in faith and life.” Now, faith and life is not a throwaway pairing but the historic shorthand for the Lutheran insistence that confession and conduct are not two compartments but one obedience, and that a body which agrees on the article of justification while diverging in the practice of the altar has not, in the confessional sense, really agreed at all. That the AALC affirmed this pairing precisely in 2007, and now proposes to retain the half that speaks of faith while setting aside the half that speaks of life, is the difficulty that no reading of the 2007 record has yet to resolve.

That a fellowship declaration reaches practice and not doctrine only is, moreover, the settled teaching of the Synod’s own Commission on Theology and Church Relations, which has repeatedly located the rupture of the older fellowship with the American Lutheran Church not in any formal denial of an article but in practice: in the ordination of women, in so-called selective fellowship, in the toleration of positions that the printed agreements had been drafted to exclude. A fellowship that does not bind practice is a fellowship that cannot be broken by practice, and a fellowship that cannot be broken by practice is no confession of the una sancta, but simply a gentleman’s agreement about vocabulary.

Set against that standard, the contrast with the older negotiation is both severe and instructive. After the Predestinarian Controversy of the early 1880s drove the Ohio Synod out of the Synodical Conference over the doctrine of election intuitu fidei, the so-called “two forms” of the doctrine that Franz Pieper would later insist were irreconcilable, the bodies did not reconcile quickly, and they did not reconcile cheaply. The free intersynodical conferences of 1903 through 1906 failed. The standing Intersynodical Committee that took up the work around 1916 labored the better part of a decade before it could even circulate a draft. When that draft, the first recension of what would become the Chicago Theses, was printed and sent out and laid before the conventions in 1925 and 1926, the Missouri Synod’s examining committee did not ratify it; it found, in language preserved in Der Lutheraner for August of 1926, that the doctrine of conversion and election had not yet been brought to clear, definite, complete, and error-excluding expression, and it sent the theses back for further labor.

The article deferred with Ohio in 1926, because it had not been brought to error-excluding expression, was in substance the same kind of deficiency ratified with the AALC in 2007, save that what once met with refusal now met with declaration.

Three more years passed; a final text was settled in 1928; and in 1929, the Missouri Synod rejected it outright, on the judgment of its examining committee that the chapters were inadequate, that they at times failed to touch the very point in controversy, and that they at times inclined more to the position of the opponents than to Missouri’s own. The Synod then did the harder thing. Rather than ratify a formula that straddled, it commissioned a confession of its own, and in 1932, it adopted the Brief Statement, which confesses election as the cause of faith rather than a divine response to faith foreseen, and which therefore says without ambiguity what the Chicago Theses had labored for thirteen years not quite to say. The discipline cost Missouri a union it had said it wanted, and it paid that cost rather than soften the article. And when fellowship with the merged American Lutheran Church was at last declared in 1969, the suspension of that fellowship in 1981 only proved that the older caution had been measuring something real.

Now place the AALC beside that record. The two bodies opened informal talks in 1989; they held their formal doctrinal discussions across 2005 and 2006, six sessions in which church and ministry, lay ministry, the role of women, and the practice of closed communion were indeed taken up; and in 2007 they declared fellowship. From the first formal session to the declaration was roughly two years. One need not impugn the good faith of the men in that room, nor doubt that real agreement was reached on the authority of Scripture and on the chief articles, to observe that the pace was simply the inverse of the older discipline, and that the practical questions, the questions of life and not only of faith, were canvassed in conversation rather than settled in a published, error-excluding text to which both bodies then bound themselves.

The contrast is sharpest precisely on practice, where the older discipline was most exacting. When the examining committee reported in 1926, it did not confine its objection to the doctrinal article, for it recorded as an unremoved obstacle that the synods diverged in their very understanding of church fellowship, which is a question of practice and not of bare confession, and the standing complaint of the Synodical Conference against the Iowa Synod had for decades been lodged as much against its unionistic practice and its doctrine of “open questions” as against the article of election itself. The men of 1926 declined to declare concord while the practice of fellowship was still understood differently across the table. Set that beside the AALC discussions of 2005 and 2006, in which the practice of close communion was expressly on the agenda, and beside the AALC’s own profession of what it calls “responsible communion,” a practice it describes as neither open nor closed but which admits to the altar any baptized Christian who professes the real presence, without regard to the altar and pulpit fellowship that the Missouri Synod has always held closed communion to confess. By the Synod’s own standard that is not a lesser divergence than Iowa’s but the same kind of divergence, and it stands in the most visible act of the Church’s common life; it was observed and it was discussed, and yet in 2007 it was, by every appearance, set to one side rather than settled, in just the way the committee of 1926 had refused to set aside the divergence then before it.

It will be answered that the AALC is a small body of congregational polity, that it understands itself as “separate but interdependent,” and that it never meant to surrender the governance of its own practice to a synod many times its size. That self-understanding is real, and it is precisely the difficulty. If the AALC entered fellowship in 2007, already reserving the practical sphere, then the concord in faith and life that it proclaimed was, on its own present account, a concord in faith and in the appearance of life; and if it did not so reserve it then, but reserves it only now, then the reservation is a unilateral revision of a bilateral act. On either reading, it is the haste of 2007 that stands indicted, and on neither reading is the present claim rescued, for a reservation of practice that was concealed at the declaration and a reservation introduced only after it are alike fatal to the contention that the fellowship never reached practice in the first place.

See also

The two roads are set side by side in the companion timeline, Two Roads to Fellowship, where the half-century of withheld concord and the two years of granted concord can be read against each other in a single view.

The lesson of the first road is not that fellowship is impossible or that delay is a virtue in itself, but that Missouri once understood that an agreement which does not bind practice is an agreement that practice can quietly empty, and that the only protection against that emptying is to say, before the declaration and not after, exactly what is being agreed, in life as well as in faith, in language framed to exclude the error rather than to accommodate it. The men who refused the Chicago Theses were not the enemies of union, but its most serious friends, for they alone insisted that a union declared be a union that means, in life as in doctrine, what its words declare.

It’s not a bizarre antiquarian concern, but rather the need for consistency and a transparent confession. The same convention that will weigh fresh declarations of fellowship with the Evangelical Lutheran Christian Church of Bolivia and with Lutheran Mission-Australia (5-01, 5-02) is also asked to address concerns with current partner churches (5-03 through 5-09) before Floor Committee 5, and it does so with the Commission on Theology and Church Relations having laid before it a study, Unity in Doctrine, Uniformity and Variety in Practice, that takes up the very distinction the AALC now seeks to maneuver with. The question that Missouri once refused to leave for a later convention to answer is, in 2026, a later convention’s question after all.

The Synod now finds itself potentially relitigating the scope of an agreement it declared finished in 2007, a predictable outcome of haste over deliberation, which seems to be the hallmark of fellowship agreements in this century.

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Sources and notes

The 2007 declarations and the “doctrine and practice” and “faith and life” language are drawn from the LCMS Reporter and Lutheran Witness coverage of the July 2007 convention and the June 2007 AALC convention. The intersynodical sequence (free conferences of 1903 to 1906; the Intersynodical Committee from c. 1916; the 1925 draft; the 1926 deferral; the 1928 final Chicago Theses; the 1929 rejection; the 1932 Brief Statement) follows the standard accounts of the movement and the convention record in Der Lutheraner 82 (1926); the divergence in the understanding of church fellowship is recorded in that 1926 examining-committee report. That the practice of closed communion was on the agenda of the 2005-06 AALC-LCMS discussions is reported in the LCMS Reporter; the AALC describes its own eucharistic practice as “responsible communion,” neither open nor closed, on its published materials. The characterization of the AALC’s present position reflects the dispute now before the parties and should be cited to the specific AALC action or statement in the published version. The verbatim 1928 theses survive in the synodical proceedings and in C. F. Bunzel, The Missouri Synod and the Chicago (Intersynodical) Theses (Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, 1964).

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