The Missouri Synod in 1916: Powerfully Anti War

Selling the means of killing into Europe's war, Pieper warned in 1916, makes a neutral land guilty of blood. The Missouri Synod's old verdict, Englished.

Editorial note

The faculty of Concordia Seminary in St. Louis edited Der Lutheraner in 1916, the volume falling in the interval between Ludwig Fürbringer’s two long tenures at the editor’s desk, when the working editorship had passed to Professor Eduard Pardieck, who signed the bulk of that year’s shorter notes with his initials, ‘E. P.’ The essay below carries the initials F. P., those of Franz Pieper, the seminary’s president and the Synod’s dogmatician, for whom this two-kingdoms question of bloodguilt and the state was native ground. It appeared in the early months of the year, while the United States still styled itself neutral and the munitions leaving American harbors for the Triple Entente (the alliance of France, Russia, and the UK) were defended in the unbothered language of lawful commerce, and it records action already taken, because several of the Synod’s district conventions had petitioned the national government to halt the trade, on the ground that selling the instruments of killing into a war to which the nation had no calling brought bloodguilt upon the land and transgressed the Fifth Commandment, which binds the man who supplies the cartridge no less than the man who fires it.

What recommends the essay to an English readership now is the discipline of its argument. Pieper does not denounce the trade and leave it there but states the three objections his own position had to survive:

1. that the protest took sides among the belligerents,

2. that international law permitted the sales, and

3. that a church meddling in a question of state had confused the two kingdoms.

Against the first he insists the petitions took the part only of their own country; against the second he observes that the same international law that fails to forbid munitions also fails to forbid lying, from which no one infers that lying has become a duty; against the third, the longest and most careful section, he marshals Luther on the precise boundary of the church’s office, that it reaches wherever a thing is sin before God and no further, and then shows Luther crossing into “secular” matters whenever sin began, against the grain-hoarders of a Saxon dearth and against the princes whose armies stood ready over the city of Wurzen.

The essay ends where the Synod’s own founder had ended a half-century earlier, with Walther’s penitential sermon against the men of St. Louis who wanted the Civil War prolonged for the “business” they were making in it, a passage Pieper quotes at length so that the charge of profiteering from slaughter would be heard in Walther’s voice rather than his own.

The purpose of putting this before readers in 2026 is obvious. The United States has again been the arsenal of another European war ( Ukraine and Russia), shipping arms into a conflict in which it has claimed not to be a belligerent, merely a defender.

When the Synod convenes its 69th Regular Convention in Phoenix from July 18 to 23 this year, under the theme “Christ Is Risen Indeed,” it will confess on the floor the resurrection of the body, and it will do so as a Synod that once unambiguously confronted its own government with accusations of bloodguilt and murder.

The volume’s wider war coverage

Across the volume of 1916, Der Lutheraner maintains a single anti-war voice. Pardieck, who ran the paper through these interim years, returns to the conflict every few issues in the shorter notes, and Pieper weighs in from the doctrinal side, and the two come back with the same objections: they will not let the slaughter in Europe be dressed in religious clothing, and they will not let the Church be recruited into the enthusiasm of the hour.

The arguments fall hardest on the war-piety of the age. When preachers and newspapermen glorified death for the fatherland as a sealing of the Christian faith and promised the crown of eternal life to every man who fell in the line, the journal answered (p. 205) that the national idea had been strained past breaking on religious ground, and it said so as a matter of doctrine. When English-language papers floated a ‘second probation’ for the soldiers who had died in unbelief, the editors drove the proposal to its purgatorial and universalist terminus and left it there (p. 286). When the fashionable claim went round that the war was reviving the state church and refilling the pews, they printed the free-thinkers’ own boast that the nation would come out of the trenches no more devout than it went in. The “bankruptcy of Christianity” exchange (p. 387) belongs to the same category, conceding that the governments of the world had never adopted the ethics of Christ, answering that a medicine the patient refuses cannot be pronounced worthless.

The second strand is pastoral and runs counter to the patriotic sermon. The journal’s standing complaint about field chaplaincy was not that it was scarce but that it preached the wrong thing based on a soldier’s letter describing men kept standing in the cold rain through a divisional sermon that flayed Sir Edward Grey by name while saying nothing of Christ, until one of them walked out of the ranks. The same charge surfaces in the uncomfortable item praising Catholic hospital care (p. 167), printed not out of any warmth toward Rome but to shame the Protestant chaplains who handed a dying man a patriotic appeal where the priest brought him the sacrament.

The third strand is closest to home, and it is anxious. “Wende ab Krieg!” (”Turn away war!”) reads the threat of American entry to the war through the Sunday prayer against war, and it frets less over the foreign battlefield than over what a war would do to a church gathered from every nation of Europe and living on fading forebearance as America became hostile to Germans. The reports from Australia and Canada, where statutes were stripping German out of the schools, are the same fear documented from Europe. The volume’s flat refusal to herald the war as the dawn of a thousand-year peace sets the whole of it under judgment rather than progress. The constant, in the end, is that the Church’s proper weapon in all of it is prayer, and its proper word to the state is the one the district synods had already spoken: not in this, and not for gain.

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THE ESSAY

Our District Synods and the Supplying of Munitions to the Belligerents

At several of the district conventions held last year, memorials were addressed to our national government condemning the American shipments of munitions for the terrible world war, on the ground that such traffic is wrong before God and men and brings the guilt of blood upon our country. Of late the following objections have been raised against this action of our districts: first, that it appears to take sides with one of the belligerents, which is unbecoming in neutral Americans; second, that it ignores international law; and third, that it may be regarded as a confusion of Church and State.

As to the first objection, it must be said that the protests, so far as they have come to our knowledge, express nothing more than concern for our own country. Their aim is to keep our land from incurring the guilt of blood. That guilt arises because, by supplying munitions, we take part in a war to which we have no divine call. The case is simply this: whoever kills, or helps to kill, without such a call lays hands on the majesty of God’s commandment, “You shall not kill.” That commandment, as everyone knows, binds all men alike: Christians and non-Christians, Americans, Germans, Englishmen, every people, and every single member of the family of nations. As to the second objection, it must be granted that the international law framed by men does not, in fact, forbid the supplying of munitions. But the same international law leaves many other things unforbidden as well. It does not forbid lying, for example; yet no one concludes from this that lying is therefore permitted, much less a duty. It is one of the strangest aberrations of human reason and conscience when otherwise sensible and honorable people argue, “Because international law does not forbid the munitions traffic, it is therefore right, indeed required by neutrality.” Such confusions of mind and conscience can be explained only by the passions that the war of the nations has stirred up in America as well as elsewhere. All the other neutral nations, which have likewise accepted international law, prohibited the export of munitions at once upon the outbreak of war, as was testified even in our own Congress. In its understanding of neutrality our country stands alone.

The third objection, whether the condemnation of the munitions traffic does not amount to a confusion of Church and State, or at least an improper mingling of business with religion, deserves somewhat fuller treatment, and with it I will close. Experience teaches us two things here. On the one hand, the necessary distinction between Church and State is easily violated, even by well-meaning men, so that a word of caution is in place. On the other hand, the charge of confusing Church and State, or business and religion, is itself not seldom raised unjustly. When a man will not give up some wrong that he allows himself in his business, we commonly hear him say, “Business is business; pastor and congregation have no call to interfere.”

Where, then, does the true boundary lie? This much may be said: the office of the Church bears upon everything that involves morality, that is, right and wrong before God. Where right and wrong are not at stake, there the Church should keep silence and lay down no rules. Luther puts it thus: the office of the Church “shall not and cannot extend further than over that which before God is called sin; so that where sin begins or ends, there its rule shall likewise begin and end, and to this rule shall be subject everything that lives and is called man on earth, be it emperor or king, great or small, none excepted” (St. Louis ed. XI, 757). This holds true even of things that the civil government in part does not, and in part cannot, restrain. The prevention of the blessing of children and the murder of children, for example, are offenses against morality that the civil government can scarcely check; yet the Church rightly names such offenses a sin that brings the wrath of God upon a land, so that the land spews out its inhabitants. The oppression of the poor and lowly is something against which the civil government is in many cases powerless; yet the Church rightly lifts up its voice against this sin and numbers it among those that “cry to heaven.” In short, the Christian Church has both the right and the duty to raise its rebuking voice wherever “sin begins,” as Luther says, and to that rebuke everything that bears the name of man is subject.

Luther understood the separation of Church and State quite well. He had no wish to see worldly and spiritual matters “mingled together.” Yet wherever sin entered, even in worldly affairs, he raised his voice. When, during a time of scarcity in Saxony, certain noblemen bought up the grain and “laid it by” in order to resell it at high prices, Luther did not say, “Business is business; this is no concern of the Church,” but rather, “It is sheer human wickedness. What will become of us if God’s punishment should come? Ah, dear Lord God, if the world is so evil, then I would gladly die, even of hunger, if only I might be gone!” In a letter to his prince, moreover, Luther urged that he “so govern that the nobility may not buy up the grain for themselves alone any longer and carry it off, and so profiteer without shame” (St. Louis ed. XXIb, 2324).

Luther likewise regarded it as his duty, precisely as a churchman, to warn against war and bloodshed. When war threatened to break out over the city of Wurzen between the Elector John Frederick and Duke Maurice, and the two armies already stood armed against each other, Luther sent both princes an urgent letter of admonition. In it he readily granted that the quarrel concerned “mere worldly matters”; but, he added, “there still stands the Word of God, which commands us preachers and the whole Church to care for the civil authorities and to pray for peace and a quiet life on earth.” He reminded the princes that what Scripture says of peacemakers and peace-breakers binds all men without exception. He counseled arbitration, and by this means Luther actually prevented war and bloodshed at that time. Nor would he be deprived of the right to set before the whole people, and before the princes, the truth that by self-glory and reliance on their own power they call down the wrath of God upon the land and so bring it to ruin. That this was any improper meddling of the Church in worldly affairs he expressly denied.

In just the same way, those of our synodical districts have been guilty of no confusion of Church and State who, in a memorial to our national government, have pointed to something that is wrong “before God and men,” namely, our participation in the war and the prolonging of the war through our shipments of munitions. Here the maxim “business is business” does not apply. Here this applies: You shall not kill, and you shall not help to kill! When, during our own Civil War, a large party, and certain men in St. Louis as well, desired the war prolonged for the sake of the lucrative “business” they were doing in it, Dr. Walther said in a penitential sermon: “They want the war continued for the sake of filthy gain. They would bring hundreds of thousands to beggary in order to enrich themselves; they would make hundreds of thousands homeless in order to build themselves proud palaces; they would see ever new hundreds of thousands breathe out their lives in agony on the battlefields, so that they themselves might live in splendor and pleasure every day. To such monsters in human shape, such wild beasts in the form of men, any counsel of peace is treason, and the cry of anguish that rises to heaven from those weltering in their blood, from the countless widows and orphans, is sweet music to their greedy, covetous heart, kindled from hell” (Epistle Postil, p. 494).

— F. P. [Franz Pieper]

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Translation and source notes

Translated from Der Lutheraner, vol. 72 (Zweiundsiebzigster Jahrgang), 1916, pp. 63–64 (Concordia Publishing House, St. Louis), from the searchable scan of the bound volume. The piece appears among the year’s “Krieg in Europa” material and is indexed in the volume register under that heading.

On the signatures: the 1916 volume falls between Ludwig Fürbringer’s two terms as editor of Der Lutheraner (1896–1912 and 1917–1947), and in that interim the working editorship was held by Professor Eduard Pardieck, whose initials, E. P., sign the great majority of the year’s notes, including the shorter war items discussed above (the “bankruptcy of Christianity” note, “Wende ab Krieg!,” and the warnings against war-piety on pp. 205 and 286). The leading article translated here is signed F. P., the initials of Franz Pieper, the seminary’s president and dogmatician; the volume itself names him repeatedly as “Prof. D. F. Pieper.” The penitential sermon quoted at the close is from C. F. W. Walther, the Synod’s founding theologian, cited from his Epistle Postil. The attribution of E. P. to Pardieck rests on the documented fact of his interim editorship together with the signature pattern, and is worth a confirming check against Concordia Historical Institute records before print.

On the English: the machine translation (Anthropic, Claude Opus 4.8 ‘high’) follows a W.H.T Dau-inspired register that preserves Pieper’s doctrinal content and forensic argument exactly while opening his Germanic compression into cultivated, lightly modernized American ecclesiastical prose. The two Luther references retain the St. Louis (St. Louiser) edition citations printed in the original. The Fifth Commandment is given as “You shall not kill,” following contemporary catechetical usage rather than the older “Thou shalt.” Reverential capitalization (”the Church,” “the Word of God”) is applied selectively.

The editor’s headnote and the survey of the volume’s war coverage are not part of the 1916 text.