The Wauwatosa Theology, Part 1: Should The Laity Know or Care?
Ideological structures are characterized by loyalty to the system over fidelity to truth, and their morphology is identical whether the system is educational, political, economic, or theological.
The Wauwatosa Theology is the eponymous name given to the theological program developed under three professors at the Wisconsin Synod’s (WELS) seminary in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, between roughly 1900 and 1929:
J.P. Koehler (church history and New Testament, 1900),
August Pieper (Old Testament, 1902), and
John Schaller (dogmatics and pastoral theology, 1908).
All three had trained at Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, under Walther, Franz Pieper, and Stoeckhardt. They inherited a curriculum from Adolf Hoenecke in which dogmatics was sovereign and exegesis secondary, with Hoenecke himself having lectured by dictating dogmatic notes and reading aloud from German commentaries. They set out to invert (or correct, depending on your view) that system of instruction.
Exegesis vs. Dogmatics
The two academic disciplines are the twin pillars of systematic theology, but they do not carry equal weight. Which one governs the other is the central methodological question of the Wauwatosa controversy.
Exegesis From the Greek ἐξήγησις (leading out). The work of drawing the meaning out of a text by studying what its author intended, in the language and context in which it was written.
Dogmatics From the Greek δόγμα (decree, established teaching). The systematic organization of doctrinal conclusions into a coherent body of received teaching, arranged by topic rather than by text.
Koehler arrived at the seminary in 1900 already shaped by a strongly historical and self-critical approach. He was appalled by the antipathy to historical study, exegesis, and dogmatics among the students1, and saw this as the institutional symptom of a deeper problem in midwestern “Old Lutheranism2.” Schaller, Pieper, and Koehler trained 43 graduating classes of pastors and created the curriculum for a three-year seminary education that, for the most part, remains in use today.
Does it Matter for the Laity?
Most laymen will never encounter the term “Wauwatosa Theology,” and the issues it fought over sound like pedantic disputes between seminary professors, which is largely what they were. Does anything underlying those contests of will and mind touch the ordinary Christian in the pew?
Every Sunday’s sermon: When a pastor opens a text and asks, “What is God saying here, in this passage, to these people, at this moment in salvation history?” that is Wauwatosan. When a pastor instead uses a text as a device for delivering a doctrinal lecture he had already prepared, or treats the Sunday Gospel as a coat hook for a soapbox topic rather than as a text with its own purpose, movement, and argument, that is the dogmatic method the Wauwatosa men opposed. Few laity may be able to articulate the difference, but they surely know the difference when they hear it. A sermon that emerges from the actual words and situation of Scripture has a different texture and evokes a different response than one that uses words as proof of a conclusion arrived at beforehand (or borrowed from elsewhere, or imposed on a congregation as the pastor’s agenda for it). If there is a diagnostic method for the laity, it is that good exegesis will surprise you, whereas dogmatic preaching confirms what you already knew or suspected (or, makes you comfortable); it’s an extension of your catechism classes.
One-size-fits-all ministry: The Wauwatosa men, especially Schaller in Pastorale Praxis argued that pastoral theology done from a dogmatics-first perspective produces what Prange (see transcript below) calls “one-size-fits-all ministry.” The pastor who is relying on his seminary training alone will apply the same doctrinal formula to grief, moral failure, doubt, and spiritual aridity, because the formulaic construction is all he is and has3. The pastor who has been trained to wrestle patiently with the original-language texts is better equipped to resist premature conclusions and impulsive resolutions of scriptural tensions. Thereby, the superficial paradox of law and gospel can be held in genuine and fruitful tension instead of defaulting to a “gospel must predominate” formula that spits out the same sermon on any given day.
Whose word settles a doctrinal dispute or confusion? The Wauwatosa men were reacting against a culture in which “C.F.W Walther said” functioned as final law. That culture did not stay in the seminary and associated ivory towers, but soaked into the pews. Consequently, when a layperson asks a hard question, and the answer comes back as an appeal to synodical position, confessional tradition, or pastoral authority rather than to the actual biblical text, that person has just encountered the problem the Wauwatosa men identified and wanted to rectify. The dogmatic answer may, in fact, be correct, but if the pastor cannot show the layperson where in Scripture the answer comes from and why, then the layperson is being asked to believe on a borrowed appeal to authority rather than on the Word itself. The Wauwatosa men would say that is not Lutheran Christianity; it is something closer to Roman Catholic Christianity with a Saxon popish flavor.
The Verstockung (hardening, which becomes obduracy, which becomes impenitence, Romans 9-11) diagnosis applies to believers and congregations, not just institutions. Koehler’s argument was that any organization, a synod, a seminary, a congregation, tends over time toward hardening: the vitality of the founding gives way to a system, the system becomes a set of habits, the habits become an identity that may not be questioned without threatening the whole.
This dynamic is not merely historical. A lot of the negative reaction to Ad Crucem News reflects the terminus of this hardening progression. Likewise, a congregation that has been doing things a certain way for forty years, that has a settled vocabulary for its faith, that knows what the pastor is going to say before he says it, and that regards theological surprise as a danger rather than as a sign that the Word is actually doing something; that is a congregation experiencing Verstockung. Koehler's prescribed medicine was not a program or a revitalization initiative, which is the default instinct of the modern confessional synods. Instead, he demanded a return to the actual text of Scripture, read freshly, in its own terms, without the accumulated dross of “because Walther” standing between the reader and the Holy Spirit’s authorship.4
The layman’s stake in the Wauwatosa Theology is reasonable and simple: you are entitled to a faith and instruction in the faith that is yours, rather than borrowed, or straitjacketed in a tradition for tradition’s sake. You are meant to be molded by the purpose and intent of Scripture, not by the rigid textbooks and towering personalities of a synod.
Men for a people of faith: The Wauwatosa men wanted pastors who had done their own work with the text, so that what they delivered to the congregation was not a received tradition passed along intact but a living encounter with the Word of Christ that the pastor could show you in the actual Hebrew and Greek, in the actual flow of the passage, and in the actual history of the situation St. Paul or or St. James was addressing. That kind of faith becomes deeply rooted and resistant to the worst hurricanes of life, doubt, and tragedy; the sort that allowed Job to declare that he would one day see God with his own eyes long after his flesh had decayed (Job 19:25-27). That is because the faith is planted, takes root, and flourishes in the source itself rather than in a hand-me-down formulation of it.
The Wauwatosa men were arguing that the method of pastoral training is critical to watering a faith that is resolute and sincere rather than cultural, formulaic, and, most of all, ideological. Indeed, if you have spent time around doctrinaire Marxists or Libertarians, you will recognize identical ideological pathologies plaguing “Old Lutheranism”. Conformity and adherence to symbols, systems, methods, and theory become the overriding factor, with a high level of devotion to latter-day prophets. Ideological structures are characterized by loyalty to the system over fidelity to truth, and their morphology is identical whether the system is primarily educational, political, economic, or theological.
Disturbingly, there is anecdotal evidence of ersatz ideological adherence through rote recitation of wholesome Lutheran maxims, rendered trite, or of camouflaging themselves behind veneration of the liturgy, rites, and old musical traditions. Form overtakes substance, but the purpose of an ideology is to demand loyalty in quantity, not quality.
When ideological formation displaces faith formation, all disagreements reach a high emotional pitch within minutes. Therefore, correctives can only proceed along two axes: conformity or coventry. If an individual resists a return to conformity through ideological reeducation, then the errant or dissenting person must be banished, and all direct or indirect relationships with that person must be threatened and severed.
Consequently, what you teach seminarians will manifest in the congregations they pastor. Generations of pastors trained to cite and recite authorities rather than to wrestle with texts will produce congregations that hold their faith hydroponically, well off the rich soil in which it was meant to grow to maturity, that we stand in our own flesh and see Christ Jesus in all his glory (Isaiah 26:19).
Transcript (Smoothed for improved reading, but without altering the substance)
Word Fitly Spoken, Episode 29
Hosts: Rev. Willie Grills & Rev. Zelwyn Heide
Guest: Rev. Peter M. Prange, Associate Pastor, Bethany Lutheran Church, Kenosha, WI
Source: Apple Podcasts
Introduction
Grills: I’m Willie Grills, here with Zelwyn Heide. We have a very special guest today: the Reverend Peter Prange of Bethany Lutheran Church, Wisconsin Synod, in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Welcome to the podcast.
Prange: Thank you.
Grills: And did I get the name right?
Prange: You got it right.
Grills: There’s a first time for everything. So, we have a Wisconsin Synod historian with us to talk about the Wauwatosa theology. Before we dig into that, why don’t you introduce yourself to the audience?
Prange: Well, I’m Pete Prange. I’m currently serving at Bethany Lutheran Church in Kenosha, Wisconsin. I graduated from Wisconsin Lutheran Seminary back in 1998 and was originally assigned to a congregation in Jacksonville, Florida. That’s where my dear wife was a member, though she wasn’t my wife at the time. One of those coincidences where the Lord moved me to a special place to find a special person. It was not love at first sight, by any stretch of the imagination, but after about four years of service there we started to date. We got married, had our first child, and I took my first call all within one year, and we actually stayed married through those three big life changes. I received a call to Morton Grove, Illinois, which is a near-north-side suburb of Chicago, and that’s where I’ve spent the majority of my ministry. I spent a little time in East Tennessee, in Johnson City, and have been at Bethany for the last couple of years.
Heide: Two parishes in the South. You’ve won me over.
Prange: Jacksonville is actually not really Florida. It’s more like south Georgia. When I first got assigned there, I had this idea of Florida beaches, but I found out pretty quickly that Jacksonville is southern Georgia.
Grills: If you watch too much Miami Vice, you’ll get the wrong impression of Florida.
Grills: I also noticed in biographies I’ve read of you, Pete, that you’ve been fairly involved at official levels within the Wisconsin Synod. The hymnal, is that right?
Prange: Yes. Our Commission on Worship developed the hymnal supplement, which I think was published in 2008 — fifteen years after our current hymnal had been published, and anticipating another hymnal coming out within about another fifteen years. In fact, our church body was working on that new hymnal at the time of this recording and scheduled to publish it in 2021. The supplement was kind of an in-between marker where you could see what was working and what wasn’t to provide some supplementary material. I served on that. I also served for thirteen years on our church body’s Commission on Inter-Church Relations, which is a bit different from the CTCR of the Missouri Synod. Our doctrinal committee is really our Conference of Presidents; the CICR is in some respects a study or working committee for our Conference of Presidents, where we interact with other church bodies — both those we’re currently in fellowship with and other Lutheran church bodies around the world. In that capacity I had the privilege of attending the 2013 LCMS convention as the official WELS observer. Not that anyone remembers me, but I was there. I mean, there are a lot of things to be impressed with — just the way the business of the convention was handled compared to our little church body still doing paper ballots. It was really impressive to see all the technology that went into pulling it off.
Grills: Technology is great when it works, but when the electronic ballot goes down it’s just a knuckle-dragging experience. Everybody forgets how to count.
Grills: Anyway, it’s our privilege to have you here. If there is one expert on the Wauwatosa theology in the United States — probably in the world — it’s you, Pete. We thank you so much for giving up some of your time to come and talk with us.
Prange: I’m sorry to disappoint you if I’m the expert on the Wauwatosa theology, but I’ll do my best.
Defining the Wauwatosa Theology
Grills: We’ve been throwing out this term the last few minutes. What would be a good concise definition of the Wauwatosa theology — or sometimes the Wauwatosa Gospel?
Prange: I would say most people who are familiar with those terms, within our circles in the Wisconsin Synod, would normally say, “Well, that’s the fact that we do biblical exegesis — that’s what the Wauwatosa theology is all about.” As in, going back to the Scriptures, digging into the original languages of Hebrew and Greek, and really understanding what Isaiah is saying, what Matthew is writing, what Paul is writing to these different congregations — understanding not only the grammar but also the history behind those words. That’s certainly a very workable definition of the Wauwatosa theology.
I would say, though, it’s certainly more than that — not that that’s at all unimportant, because that’s really the most important aspect of what those Wauwatosa guys were getting at. But when it’s all said and done, what they were really trying to do, Koehler in particular, was to take the church back again to the Reformation principles of Luther. Not just that Scripture is our sole source of doctrine, but also that we be very careful about not falling into systems of thinking where we’re just locked into “Hallelujah, we’ve always done it this way.” That we actually take a step back and ask ourselves how we got here — our doctrine, our practices — and why we do it this way. What’s the history behind all of this? Because it’s much easier for us as human beings to simply fall into the pattern of what’s familiar, what’s comfortable, what’s easy. The Wauwatosa guys were really saying, along with Luther, that repentance is a daily thing where we go back again and again and try to view things from the proper perspective. After all, that’s what repentance is: metanoia, the changing of our minds. That’s not an easy thing, because we’re just happier having a neat system where everything fits in its proper place, and when someone comes with a question you just pull the easy answer off the shelf. The Wauwatosa guys would say, well, it’s not quite that simple — the Scriptures don’t treat those questions of life in a rule-based way. So they were really attacking legalistic thought, Phariseeism, where we just have our list of rules and “this is how we do church.”
Heide: This has kind of been a theme of our last two or three podcasts. And this is one of the things we’ve been trying to highlight — we’re not just studying this for the bare history. Do these men have something to say to us today?
Prange: Absolutely. Some of the issues they’re dealing with are perennial issues for the Lutheran Church. And they were also always very careful to say that when you go back and study these things yourself, it’s likely that you will come to the exact same conclusions that our Lutheran forefathers did. You should even expect that in most cases you will draw the same conclusions — but now you’ll actually understand why they drew those conclusions. And so when people ask you why we do it this way, you’re able to say, “Well, let me tell you” — and it’s not just “I’m quoting this church father or that church father or my district president.” This is what the Scriptures have to say; this is what we believe on the basis of the Scriptures; this is what we confess as Lutherans according to our Lutheran Confessions. That’s a valuable study, even if at the end of the day you come to the same conclusion that somebody four hundred years ago came to. So you don’t end up with the rather ironic statement, “We believe in sola scriptura because Luther did.”
Heide: There is that temptation. When faced with a difficult question, or sometimes even an easy one, not to fall back on the Scriptures but to say, “Have you looked at hymn 473?” or “Have you read this guy?” Living post-Reformation is a blessing, not least of which is the Bible in a common language that people can share and read. And of course the wisdom of all the great men who have come before us.
Prange: I think sometimes the Wauwatosa guys get a bad rap, in that some suggest they want to throw dogmatics out the window — that conclusions drawn in the past are of no value to us whatsoever. They would say nothing could be further from the truth. Those conclusions are very, very valuable. The key is to understand why those theological conclusions were drawn, and then in large part you’re going to find that you are in agreement with them. But you shouldn’t just accept their conclusions without digging into the primary source material yourself. Because while they may have understood all the nuance of the conclusions they drew, if you’re just taking their conclusion without understanding that nuance, you’re likely going to use it as a hammer in dealing with precious souls — whereas if you understood the nuance, you would use it with a feather. And it would have the evangelical intent that those original men had in their study.
The Three Men: Koehler, Pieper, and Schaller
Grills: So with that great summary: who are the key figures in the Wauwatosa theology?
Prange: Normally we think of three men: John Philip Koehler, August Pieper, and John Schaller. There are some who would include Adolf Hoenecke, who is usually considered the greatest dogmatician of the Wisconsin Synod — he and his sons compiled a four-volume dogmatics over time. So some would include Hoenecke in what becomes a quartet rather than a trio. But I’d say most would just name Koehler, August Pieper, and John Schaller.
Grills: It’s worth pointing out, for Missouri Synod folks, that this is August Pieper, not Franz Pieper. Was he his older brother?
Prange: There’s actually a somewhat famous story about the Pieper brothers. There were four of them, all of whom went to Concordia St. Louis. Three of the Wauwatosa men — Koehler, Pieper, and Schaller — were all graduates of St. Louis and had Walther as their professor. There’s a famous story about Walther’s comment regarding the four Pieper boys, three of whom served as seminary presidents. There was Franz Pieper, who was at St. Louis. Reinhold, I believe, was the next oldest, and he was president of the Springfield Seminary. August was eventually president of our seminary. And then the youngest was Anton. Apparently Walther once said: “Franz is both hardworking and intelligent. Reinhold is hardworking, but not intelligent. August is intelligent, but not hardworking. And Anton is neither hardworking nor intelligent.” So Anton apparently got the short end of the stick. You can read as many history books as you want and you won’t find much about Anton Pieper anywhere.
Heide: He’s the most handsome brother you’ve never heard of.
Grills: So then let’s briefly run through them. We’ve got Pieper — who would Koehler be in this situation?
Prange: Koehler was very much a son of the Wisconsin Synod. His father, Philip, was one of the earliest pastors in the Wisconsin Synod. While a lot of people give John Bading — who was the second president of the WELS — and Adolf Hoenecke the lion’s share of the credit for moving Wisconsin from a kind of wishy-washy, unionistic Lutheranism early on to a more confessional Lutheranism, if you study the primary material you’ll find that Philip Koehler was really the man behind the scenes agitating for Wisconsin becoming more confessional. So that was the household J.P. grew up in. From very early in life he showed amazing gifts: besides his great theological mind, he was an artist, a painter, a musician — just a genuine renaissance man. He went to the St. Louis Seminary, served one parish up in Two Rivers, Wisconsin, near Manitowoc, and then after about seven years in the parish was called to Northwestern College as a dean and professor of, I think, Latin and history. Then in 1900 he was called to our Wauwatosa Seminary, where he served the rest of his ministry.
Grills: And then Schaller.
Prange: John Schaller was the son of Gottfried — or Gottlieb, I can’t remember his father’s name — who was the young man that Walther won over from a Lay view of ministry. Schaller grew up largely on the St. Louis campus, or at least in St. Louis, where his father served as pastor alongside Walther. After graduating from Concordia he served a couple of different parishes, and then was eventually the president of our Dr. Martin Luther College in New Ulm, Minnesota, before being called to Wauwatosa in 1908 to be the president of the Wauwatosa Seminary. He was kind of the mediator in a lot of ways, a buffer between Koehler and Pieper, who were very strong personalities. As long as Schaller was around, those two seemed to get along. Unfortunately, Schaller passed away very suddenly in 1920. There was an influenza epidemic on the campus — in the Milwaukee area generally — and he fell sick and within a matter of days he died. The seminary was left without its great leader. From 1920 on, for that next decade, there were a lot of rocky relationships in Wauwatosa. We’ll get into that a little later.
Heide: Very interesting. That really sets the stage for us to talk about the controversies and the doctrines. And it’s interesting to note we aren’t dealing with some rogue men who came in out of nowhere — these are real theological heavyweights who are entering the fray.
The Election Controversy: Historical Background
Grills: Let’s take a look at the theological background. The first place to start would be the election controversy. Pete, can you give us a rundown?
Prange: The Gnadenwahl-Streit — that’s the German for it, a fun one to say. I’ve been doing some study in early Missouri Synod history, and there was a man who was with the Saxons in St. Louis, by the name of Glegle, whom the Missourians didn’t really like too much apparently. Eventually he and Walther had some time together and began to see eye to eye on some things. He went from St. Louis up to Milwaukee, and then he caused trouble up there. The Buffalo Synod guys would always say Glegle had a Calvinistic view of election, and it’s interesting because Glegle said to Walther, “This doctrine of election is something we really need to talk about.” Glegle, I think, leaned pretty heavily on Luther’s Bondage of the Will, which sometimes sounded a bit Calvinistic because people read Luther that way. And if you read some of those early issues of the Lutheraner, there are essays by Missouri guys that even use the terminology intuitu fidei — “in view of faith.” The idea, used by some Lutheran theologians, was that the way God chose people from all eternity was to look into the future and choose this person to be saved because He saw that they would believe in Him and be preserved in the faith until the very end. So even some Missouri men used that language early on. Walther eventually started to clean it up, and in doing so probably said some things that went a little bit too far — at least for people who were paying close attention. And then they started accusing Walther of being a crypto-Calvinist, because Calvin’s doctrine of election is that God chooses some to be saved and others to be damned, and they heard Walther talking that way.
So there was a big controversy within the Synodical Conference in the late 1870s, with Walther on one side and a former colleague of his, Friedrich Schmidt, on the other. From my reading, what got Walther most riled up was that Schmidt called Walther a heretic. And those are fighting words. Walther was very, very careful to distinguish between a weak brother, a schismatic, and a heretic. A weak brother is someone who just doesn’t maybe know what he’s talking about or doesn’t really understand the issues, and you have to be very patient with him. A schismatic is someone who has latched on to a false idea but doesn’t really understand why it’s false, and just has difficulty letting it go. A heretic is someone who knows they’re teaching false doctrine and, for whatever reason, wants to hold on to it. For Walther to be called a heretic — someone who is purposefully trying to mislead the church — Walther said, if you want more, we’ll have more. That was a bridge too far. And Walther is actually a beautiful example of an ecumenically generous man. He sometimes gets a bum rap for being this kind of stick-in-the-mud old Lutheran who doesn’t have time for anybody who doesn’t say it exactly his way — but that was not true of him. When he got into a theological battle with someone who was accusing him of heresy, though, that was not simply going to be dismissed. He was going to fight that one out.
The election controversy ultimately blew up the Synodical Conference, because the Ohio Synod, which had been a charter member, ended up leaving as a result. The Norwegian Synod withdrew as well, having some internal issues on election that they wanted to get sorted out. It was a devastating controversy to American Lutheranism that we are still truly feeling the ramifications of today. Lutheranism kind of washed itself out in a lot of ways through the election controversy.
Grills: How does the effect of this controversy, and all the fallout that comes after it, contribute to the rise of the Wauwatosa theology?
Prange: Koehler picked up the election controversy in the early twentieth century and said, “You guys are battling one another, but you’re all using the wrong weapons. You’re all going back to the dogmaticians and trying to pit Gerhard against Gerhard, or Luther against Luther. You can dig around in the dogmaticians and find people who seem to be saying what you’re saying and use them as proof that you’re right.” And Koehler said, “How about if we actually go back to the Scriptures and see what the Scriptures have to say?” Because no one had really thought of that.
Heide: And if I’m not mistaken, isn’t the whole concept of intuitu fidei itself drawn from the dogmatic tradition? It has a very strong following in Lutheran orthodoxy.
Prange: Right. There were any number of Lutheran dogmaticians who used that type of phraseology. And when people start using phrases you don’t find in Scripture, you have to ask the question: why? What were they guarding against? What was the controversy in their time that led them to say it the way they said it? If you actually go back and study the history, you’d say, “Oh, I get what they were concerned about.” But we’re dealing with a different issue now, and we have to be careful that we don’t simply adopt their language and apply it to a completely different set of circumstances. Because you end up going from one extreme to the other, rather than going back to the Scriptures where you’re always going to find that narrow scriptural — we would say Lutheran — road where you avoid crashing off one side or the other.
The Analogy of Faith
Prange: One of the phrases that was used in those discussions was the “analogy of faith” — the idea that we can’t say anything doctrinally that goes against the analogy of faith. That was something that Koehler really felt it was necessary to deal with.
Heide: From the way I understand it — and I have to admit I’m pretty heavily influenced by the Wauwatosa theologians on this because of their reaction against it — the analogy of faith is the idea that we have to base our interpretation of any given passage on lots of other passages, so that you’re always looking away from where you are right now in order to determine what the Scripture is saying. I realize that’s a little polemical; can you help me be a little less polemical?
Prange: You don’t sound polemical at all, actually. The challenge with this idea of an analogy of faith is that what it suggests, from our human perspective, is that the Bible ought never to contradict itself. And of course, from God’s perspective, His Word is never contradictory — He always means what He means and He never talks out of both sides of His mouth. But from our sinful human perspective, we have to admit that we run up against contradictions all the time as we read the Scriptures. In fact, you might even say they’re almost purposefully put in there. Luther called it the theology of the cross — there are contradictions that require us to have faith, where we simply believe the Word rather than trying to take the Scriptures and twist them so that they fit into our nice, neat, logical system. And that’s what these people were trying to do with the doctrine of election: it all has to make sense. To them, what Luther was arguing — that on the one hand God has not elected anyone to be damned, but on the other He has elected individuals to be saved from all eternity, and not in an intuitu fidei way — just didn’t make sense. It seemed to them like God’s grace was then not universal, that He didn’t love everyone. And what they were having difficulty understanding was the great question of election: why some and not others? They wanted to be able to answer that question, and they tried to answer it with this notion of the analogy of faith. It can’t contradict.
Heide: What leads to this kind of perspective, this wanting to box everything in and not embrace paradox? Is there a scholastic tendency there?
Prange: I think it’s good old-fashioned human nature. We don’t like contradictions. We don’t like faith; we like reason. You think of what Paul has to say in 1 Corinthians chapter 2 — God sends this kind of miserable-looking preacher without eloquent speech, and gives him for a message nothing but Christ crucified. It just doesn’t make any sense. If you want to bring people to faith, you’d think you’d send somebody who’s good looking and has the kind of message people will latch onto. But the irony Paul points out is that we do speak a wisdom among the mature — those whom the Spirit lifts the veil for, who see the wisdom of God and the power of God in Christ. And that doesn’t just apply to the central themes of the Gospel; ultimately it applies to the entire Scriptures. So to try and impose this analogy of faith where everything is reasonable — within Lutheranism, I would say the best analogy of faith is the theology of the cross, where it requires faith, it’s contradictory, and therefore it is true.
Grills: So Koehler challenges this analogy of faith, and how was he received?
Prange: Not well. This was kind of standard dogmatic practice going back many centuries. The phrase “analogy of faith” or “rule of faith” was something people could pull out of the writings of very early Church Fathers. But in his very long essay on the analogy of faith — not at all easy to read — Koehler goes not only through an exegesis of Romans 12:6 where Paul uses that phrase, but also through the history of the use of that term and how the different Church Fathers and theologians had used it. His conclusion is essentially: you are all making this more complicated than it needs to be.
The Church and Ministry Debate
Grills: What might be a simple way to explain the church and ministry debate — that bone of contention?
Prange: You need to realize that the Wauwatosa men — these three who were on the forefront of that debate — were all trained at St. Louis. They had Walther for dogmatics and pastoral theology. And so at least in our circles, as we in Wisconsin read Walther through the lens of the Wauwatosa theologians, we find Walther saying really most of the same things the Wauwatosa guys did, though they were dealing with somewhat different circumstances. In my recent study of Walther, coming out of the whole Stephanite cult situation — it was crazy what was going on there — their great fear of episcopal church government, and the swing that takes place within that setting: where Walther landed on those questions, we read him very much through the lens of the Wauwatosa theologians and see them saying mostly similar things.
Grills: For the sake of the average layman, how would you summarize the position and why it was a question at all?
Prange: Walther was dealing with a day and age where most congregations had one full-time minister of the gospel — the pastor — who was not only preaching and administering the sacraments and visiting the sick, but also teaching school. The thought of there being this one minister called to do gospel ministry in your midst, being the pastor, was just very natural. But the question started coming up more often: what about the teachers who are serving in our schools? Are they ministers of the gospel? Are they called to administer the gospel, especially in word, to the people in the congregation — to the children, obviously? And where Koehler and the other Wauwatosa guys ended up on that was: absolutely, they have divine calls — not with the same scope as a call to serve as pastor, but a congregation is asking them to proclaim the gospel on behalf of that congregation. School teachers also have a divine call to proclaim the gospel publicly within the confines of the church.
Grills: Do you think this is interpreted a little differently today? Our schools don’t necessarily look the same or operate the same.
Prange: Within our small parochial church body, we’ve managed for the most part to have teachers that we have trained ourselves and who are certified by us, so they receive a divine call. There are a lot of different paths you could follow in this whole discussion. One of the things that sometimes comes up is that teachers — that the work of the teacher — is not essential to the work of the church, and therefore for a teacher no longer to be there, the church is still there. We wouldn’t see the school teacher’s position as being essential to the work of the gospel in the same way, but it is part of the well-being of the church that we have people who serve in those capacities. So you make a distinction between the pastoral office and this other office. The office of pastor has been the most comprehensive office in terms of use of Word and sacrament — there’s no question about it. Teachers in our circles are not called to administer sacraments; they are called to proclaim the Word. So the scope of ministry is really very important.
What’s particularly interesting to me is not even so much the whole church and ministry discussion itself, as interesting as that is, but rather the development that began to take place in thinking through the distinction between things that are commanded legally by God as opposed to evangelical institutions. Schaller especially — there are just some golden essays by Schaller that really help you think through how it is that God brings things into being. He cautioned against always thinking of God’s commands as being legalistic commands, arguing that there are things that are brought into being by God’s Word, the gospel, and that even though God often uses the imperative to talk about these things, we dare not think of them as legal commands. One of the examples Schaller uses is when Jesus called to Lazarus in the grave and said, “Lazarus, come out.” That’s an imperative — it sounds like a command He’s giving to Lazarus — but the dead man had no power to obey it. It was the Word itself that brought it into being. And that’s the way these guys talked about the ministry of the gospel as well.
They felt like the St. Louis faculty, Franz Pieper in particular, were very caught up in this notion that only the office of pastor has a divine mandate, and only the local congregation has a divine mandate — and that they were thinking of it, from the Wauwatosa view, in a very legalistic way. The Wauwatosa guys were really trying to get the St. Louis faculty to think about it differently. It was a little bit like talking to a brick wall. Pieper had family connections there — August on one side, Franz on the other, and many of these men had gone to school together. There was always a little bit of a big-brother-little-sister relationship between Missouri and Wisconsin. The attitude was essentially: “I know you feel like maybe we’re not saying things the right way, but of course we are, because we’re Missouri.”
The Trinity Cincinnati Incident and Synodical Authority
Grills: What is the Trinity Cincinnati incident and what does it have to do with Wauwatosa?
Prange: Already before the controversy that transpired at Missouri Synod’s Trinity Cincinnati, there was a lot of discussion about church and ministry. But as I understand the story, what happened at Trinity Cincinnati is that a gentleman pulled his son out of the school there — it was still a German-language school and he wanted his son to learn English in the public schools. The pastors were not happy with that decision and ended up excommunicating him. There was a big brouhaha about this man being excommunicated for that reason. Whether we know the whole story, I’m not entirely sure. I suspect there may have been a bit more than simply pulling your kid out of school. Funny how there’s always a little more to the story.
Anyway, eventually Missouri Synod district and synodical officials — I think Franz Pieper was the synod president at that time — conducted an investigation and concluded that the excommunication was not valid. The congregation and pastors refused to overturn it. So the pastor and congregation ended up being suspended from Missouri Synod membership until they got their house in order. Rather than wanting to do that, this congregation and its pastors made an appeal to the Wisconsin Synod to see if they might be able to get into membership there if Missouri didn’t want them anymore. The Wisconsin Synod formed a committee and studied it all. Apparently that committee came to a slightly different conclusion than their Missouri brethren, and there were even some who were somewhat advocating that Wisconsin should take this Cincinnati congregation into membership. Of course, that wasn’t going to happen because Missouri and Wisconsin were in fellowship with one another. But basically it was one of those situations where people were sticking their noses into other people’s business, and the question really began to be: what business does a synod have in a congregation’s business to begin with? Is synod church, or is it only the local congregation that is church?
Coming out of what they had experienced under Stephan, those early Missourians were really, really fearful of any type of episcopal governmental thinking. After what happened with Stephan they were going to maintain their congregational autonomy at all costs. But as my study this summer has led me to conclude, that whole thing with Stephan really colored their thinking in a way that maybe didn’t allow them to go back and think it all through. How yes, within a local congregation you have a ministry of the gospel where a pastor is concerned for the souls of his people — but is it not wise, is it not for the well-being of the church, that that pastor also have some oversight exercised over him as well? And isn’t that type of oversight also a ministry of the gospel, where a district president or synodical official in love uses law and gospel in the case of a pastor who needs some direction, some encouragement, some rebuke even at times? Isn’t that also church?
Within Missouri, that was the kind of thinking they were not willing to entertain. But the Wauwatosa guys thought it through and said, “Why should we say that ministry only happens within a particular local congregation? Isn’t law and gospel also taking place at a larger level?” When you read Walther’s “Duties of an Evangelical Lutheran Synod” — I think that’s the title of that essay — that’s Wauwatosa thinking on the relationship between a synod, its congregations, and its workers. Those guys were basically parroting Walther in that essay.
Koehler’s Church History and the Break with Missouri
Grills: How would you tie Trinity Cincinnati together with the later Wauwatosa theology? How do you make the connection between the church and ministry debates and what affects Koehler and Pieper and Schaller?
Prange: It was still very early in their thinking, as far as the progress they were making. Koehler had really gotten the ball rolling, asking the important questions and drawing some conclusions on church and ministry, but both Pieper and Schaller were kind of lagging behind a little bit. Koehler really encouraged those two men to start digging into the church and ministry question. A lot of the essays in the Wauwatosa theology volumes are actually written by both Pieper and Schaller. Pieper in particular took up that effort, even to the point where Pieper called it “meine Amtslehre“ — “my ministry teaching” — which Koehler didn’t argue with, though Pieper certainly liked taking the credit for it.
It seems like one of the things that was a real deal-breaker for the Missourians was when J.P. Koehler came out with his church history in 1917 — a church history dealing with the entire span from the early church up until that present moment. In it, Koehler mentions the debate going on between the Wisconsin and Missouri Synods on church and ministry. Koehler’s comment is really quite ironic. He says essentially: “We haven’t drawn the same conclusions, but we’re in fellowship with one another, and we both cling to the truth of God’s Word. We’re just having some difficulty working out our terminology” — and he even expresses hope that that will come as long as we keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace. Apparently Franz Pieper saw him within that year and said, “We can’t recommend your history for reading,” because apparently that comment was just too much for Franz to stomach. And it went downhill from there. Wisconsin and Missouri certainly made attempts to come to some understanding on terminology, but I think part of the difficulty was coming to those discussions with one’s own theological baggage — too often not willing to maybe let go of some presuppositions and ask ourselves, how did we end up here in the first place?
Koehler said in his analogy of faith essay that when you’re dealing in doctrinal controversy, not only do you have to make an effort to understand a person — your opponent — and how they want to be understood, you almost have to put words in your opponent’s mouth to understand them the way that you think they want to be understood. To put the absolute best construction on another person’s words. Koehler really tried to bend over backwards to do that. And that’s how you make progress when, especially, you’re both coming at a doctrinal or theological question from ultimately the same perspective, which is: we find our answers in the Scriptures. Let’s go back to the Scriptures.
The Wauwatosa Theology Forged in Controversy
Grills: Would you say the Wauwatosa theology was forged through these controversies?
Prange: Absolutely. It was the election controversy and the church and ministry debates that really gave the Wauwatosa theology its birth. And again, I’m not even that crazy about calling it the Wauwatosa theology. These are Reformation principles: you go back to the Scriptures. We do what Luther did, who just asked those tough questions of the Roman Catholic system. “Wait a second — how did we end up here? Is this really right? What does the Scripture actually say about this?” Luther was surprised that other people didn’t just go along with him, because he found all these things in the Scriptures that seemed so evident, so clear, but the Roman Church wanted to hold on to the system it had created. We all like that. It’s more comfortable for us to hold on to the system we’ve created for ourselves.
Heide: Applying this kind of critique and self-examination to ourselves is something we don’t like doing. My dear wife has taught me on any number of occasions that maybe my thinking isn’t entirely in line with reality. And of course you know how valuable it is for a pastor to be able to listen to members, not come to snap judgments, try to understand situations, and then make an attempt to apply law and gospel in a surgical way that is going to be able to hit home. That’s valuable stuff, as opposed to taking a one-size-fits-all approach and applying God’s Word to each situation exactly the same way every time. You’re going to butcher pastoral ministry if you take that approach.
Prange: That’s a big thing that Koehler especially expresses: we have to teach our seminarians not only to think dogmatically — because dogmatics helps us think clearly, helps us analyze things — but also history and exegesis, which always give us pause, which always lead us to say, “Am I understanding this correctly? Have I thought this all through? What am I not thinking about? What questions do I need to ask here? Do I have the whole story?” Koehler argued that that two-sided kind of brain makes the very best pastors. It was ultimately a pastoral concern that Koehler had as he and his colleagues were training future pastors in the Wisconsin Synod.
The Protestant Conference and Its Fallout
Grills: As reasonable and as beautiful as the Wauwatosa theology often is, unfortunately there is fallout. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about W.F. Beitz?
Prange: William Beitz was actually best friends with my grandfather, Arnold Sitz. They began to be bosom buddies as sophomores in high school, went through high school and college together. Bill Beitz actually went to a General Council seminary in the Chicago area for the first two years of his seminary education, because he wanted a seminary education where the teaching was done in English. After two years at that General Council seminary, he came to the Wauwatosa Seminary for the last year of his studies. Think of that today — if one of our classmates had gone to an ELCA seminary for a couple of years but was now going to finish at one of our seminaries. I don’t think that would happen anymore. But apparently it was not a problem for the Wauwatosa faculty. He and my grandfather graduated together in 1917 from Wisconsin Lutheran Seminary in Wauwatosa. Bill Beitz was assigned to a congregation in Tucson, Arizona, and my grandfather was assigned to a congregation in Wisconsin. My grandfather actually resigned after just one year of ministry and moved to Arizona to work on the railroads — Bill Beitz had encouraged him to come down. Eventually my grandfather got back into pastoral ministry and served alongside Bill Beitz in Tucson for a little less than a year. But then Bill Beitz followed a call to Rice Lake, Wisconsin, which was in our Synod’s Western Wisconsin district.
There were a number of things that happened — coincidental things, I would say. Some small controversies: at our Northwestern College there was some rampant stealing that was investigated in a rather high-handed way, and some students were expelled. It was just kind of a mess. And then there were a couple of female teachers at one of the Wisconsin congregations in Fort Atkinson who charged their pastor with false doctrine. They ended up getting suspended, but there were pastors who came to these women’s defense. There were just a number of uneasy things that happened over the course of a couple of years. Before long there was a small group of pastors who found themselves to be kindred spirits, not happy with the way that district officials and synod officials were handling things.
One theme of the Wauwatosa theology that Koehler particularly emphasized — and that we haven’t talked about yet — is the whole idea of Verstockung: hardening. Koehler would talk about how it’s just natural for us to become hardened in our thinking. You just get into a rut — theologically, physically, emotionally — you fall into a system. And Koehler said it’s natural for a church and a church body to do that too, where the vitality of the early life goes away and there is a hardening of the spiritual arteries. These young pastors saw the events around them as evidence that the Wisconsin Synod was falling under the judgment of hardening. And Bill Beitz took the lead in calling the Wisconsin Synod to repentance. He wrote a paper that he delivered at a pastoral conference, and his audience that day was not prepared for the things that Bill Beitz had said. He hadn’t really prepared them for this sermon. They accused Beitz of judging hearts and using hyperbolic language that was maybe not the most pastoral.
Maybe the easiest way to describe Bill Beitz is that he was a bit of a pietist — or, when you read that paper, you might say pietist or prophet. A little bit of both. He wanted people to be excited about their Christianity, and he just saw people cashing it in. This was all happening during the Roaring Twenties, after World War I, and I think the German Lutheran Church in America was struggling with its identity — not dissimilar from how we feel today in a society becoming more and more secular: “We’ve got to get our people fired up, we’ve got to get them out there sharing their faith, and we have too many time servers just cashing it in.” Bill Beitz felt this urgent need to preach this sermon of repentance. He just wasn’t careful enough. He kind of hit people over the head with a two-by-four, and they weren’t ready for it.
What’s interesting is that later, one of his associates — a pastor by the name of Paul Hensel — wrote a paper where he actually compared Beitz’s paper to the essays of August Pieper. And he said: Bill Beitz is not saying anything different from what August Pieper was saying. The difference, though, is that August Pieper was fairly well known and had a reputation. Beitz didn’t have Pieper’s cachet. It’s one thing to take that from old August, because we’re kind of used to it. To have this young, startup pastor trying to do his best August Pieper impersonation — well, in our circles, you’re not allowed to talk at a pastoral conference until you’ve been in the ministry for five years. Unwritten rule. And here’s this new guy coming in castigating us. Who does he think he is?
The district officials got involved, and eventually the seminary was asked to offer its Gutachten — its formal opinion — on the Beitz paper. To my knowledge, it’s the only Gutachten our seminary faculty has ever issued. Koehler was the president at that time, and he did his very best to keep it from happening. He didn’t even offer his own draft of an opinion on the Beitz paper; he begged off, saying he was busy designing our new seminary building that was going to be built a couple of years later. So when the faculty got together and submitted their various opinions, it was decided that Pieper’s opinion would essentially serve as the seminary’s Gutachten. And what kind of words does August Pieper use to describe the author? He called Beitz an “ignoramus.” Not the best way to approach controversy.
Koehler accepted Pieper’s Gutachten under the condition that he wanted to go and talk to Beitz one-on-one. So he made the trip up there. His understanding was that this Gutachten was a private document until he had an opportunity to go over it with Beitz. Well, he took the train up there and another pastor picked him up in a car, and as they were driving to Beitz’ house this pastor started arguing with Koehler about the Gutachten. And Koehler said, “How did you get this paper?” Because his colleagues had published it against his expressed desire that it first be a private conversation. He knew that as soon as that Gutachten was published, Beitz was going to be in no mood to have a sensible conversation about it. And it just got worse and worse.
Koehler eventually ended up writing what he called his Erörterung — “the fruit of his investigation” — where he charged Beitz with less than careful language, but also charged those reading Beitz’s paper with not really understanding where this man was coming from. He essentially said of them: “You’re judging Beitz just as much as you feel he’s judging you.” He said you really need to understand where people are coming from, and not be so quick to judge. Keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace. Well, of course, when Koehler was now publicly disagreeing with his seminary colleagues, that was not going to fly. Eventually it came down to a high-noon showdown where Koehler refused to bend to the will of his seminary faculty colleagues and to the seminary board. The board ended up firing him, because they just saw the disagreement within the faculty as insurmountable. And so Koehler became the sacrificial lamb of that entire controversy.
Legacy and the Danger of the Wauwatosa Heritage
Grills: There certainly is a legacy. I’d say the danger of the legacy of the Wauwatosa theologians is the same danger we face with the legacy of Luther or Walther or any of those other great theologians — that we not actually do what the Wauwatosa theologians encouraged us to do, which is go back to the Scriptures, go back to the Lutheran Confessions. Dig into those first and foremost, because the Scriptures are the one source of our doctrine and our Lutheran Confessions are the norm that norms us. Rather than making the Wauwatosa theologians our primary resource material — that’s something we’re forever tempted to do, where we say, “This must be right because the Wauwatosa theologians said it.” That would have those guys spinning in their graves.
Prange: So the best legacy — the best way that we can put their legacy into practice — is certainly to read them, understand them, enjoy them. But then also do what they themselves really encouraged us to do: go dig into it yourselves. Do the exegetical study, do the historical study, think outside the box. Don’t be a legalist. Don’t allow “because we’ve always done it this way” to be the rule by which you practice pastoral theology. Koehler makes a comment in his history of the Wisconsin Synod about how guys would be in Walther’s pastoral theology class, take down notes, get into pastoral ministry, and just follow the notes Professor Walther had given them back in the day as to how to handle every situation. Koehler just really discourages that type of approach to ministry. The way we avoid it is by doing what Luther did, what the Wauwatosa theologians did, what any good Lutheran pastor will do: keep studying, keep digging into it.
Heide: I find it helpful to be so self-critical — to examine myself even in the most hallowed of traditions. I’m pretty sure it’s Koehler or Pieper, Pete, who has a comment about even words like “Trinity,” with its long usage — that we should accept such terms after we’ve done our homework on them. To go through the same struggles, to think through these issues even in things that seem so basic to us — not because we’re just being contrarians, but really to make it our own, so that we’re able to explain it in a way that is vivid, fresh, and continues to express the same truth from age to age. That’s what I’ve really gotten out of reading these theologians.
Prange: Right. And it’s really a concept that Luther himself touches on again and again in the Large Catechism — that you’re going to have simple folks who just kind of need to be told “this is how it’s done,” basic elementary teaching. But to rejoice in the New Testament freedom that we have, to be mature Christians, to understand why we do things the way we do them, why we apply this to life the way we do, and to continue to examine that and be self-critical is just essential. It’s particularly essential for pastors to be self-critical — not in a destructive way, but always thinking through: how is it that I approach my people with law and gospel, and how do I not just take a one-size-fits-all approach to ministry?
Where to Learn More
Grills: Now, if someone wanted to learn more about this period of history and this controversy, where would they go?
Prange: In our circles, the first paper that was probably written on the Protestant Controversy in particular was written by Pastor Mark Jeske. A lot of those papers are available on the Wisconsin Lutheran Seminary website — just go there, click on Resources, and there’s an Essay File. You can do a subject search on “Protestant Controversy,” “Wauwatosa Theology,” or “gospel” and you’ll have all kinds of things available. What’s interesting about Mark Jeske’s paper is that it was written in, I think, 1977 or 1978, about fifty years after the Protestant Controversy had actually happened. There had been a kind of unwritten rule or embargo on writing about or discussing the Protestant Controversy within the Wisconsin Synod. There had been all kinds of papers flying around for about a decade, and once that thing got quote-unquote settled — it wasn’t really settled, but once it kind of shook out — there was a sense of “we’re going to stop talking about this now. We’re not going to write about it. We’ll let the Protestants do what they do; they write their journal Faith-Life and we’re not going to spend any time responding to it.” So Jeske’s paper in 1977 or 1978 kind of re-opened that whole discussion.
What makes Mark’s paper particularly interesting is that he is a great-grandson of August Pieper. I am a great-grandson of J.P. Koehler. So you can read the Pieper view and you can read the Koehler view. It’s probably not quite that simple — but it is kind of interesting how that worked itself out.
Grills: Well, good stuff. Any last words?
Prange: I just appreciate the opportunity. I’ve put in a lot of time — it’s been very much a labor of love. And I still consider my work a work in progress, because you can never really get to the bottom of it. I’m just amazed how you can turn something up that puts maybe a little bit of the story, or maybe a whole chapter of the story, in a different light. So I’m continuing to work it out in my own mind and study it myself. I’m just happy when somebody else cares.
Grills: Again, thank you so much. We’re certainly happy to have you, and maybe you’ll come back and give us some more good stuff later on down the road.
Prange: Sure, anytime.
Transcript prepared from the auto-generated captions of Word Fitly Spoken, Episode 29 (2018). Speakers: Rev. Willie Grills (host), Rev. Zelwyn Heide (host), Rev. Peter M. Prange (guest). Lightly smoothed for readability; faithful to what was said.
Cover illustration: Wauwatosa Seminary, colorized by ChatGPT. Source: https://welshistoricalinstitute.org/histories/historic-places/
Sources
Braun, Mark E. — “The Reception of Walther’s Theology in the Wisconsin Synod,” Concordia Theological Quarterly 77:1–2 (2013)
“In order to understand where the Church is today and how it got there, "the historian must follow-up the development, growth and decline that goes on in the Church on earth and in the world."10 Such analytical study of history placed emphasis not on how things came about, rather, on why things came about as they did.”
+ Werth, Charles E. “The Wauwatosa Theology: J. P. Koehler, His Exegetical Methodology and the Protestant Conference.” M.Div. thesis, Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, 1979. https://scholar.csl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1180&context=mdiv.
“According to Koehler, the historian, mid-western Lutheranism was failing to grasp its historical roots. Rather than tracing its heritage to Scripture and the theology of the Reformation, "Old Lutheranism" was content to halt at the Golden Age of Lutheran Orthodoxy during the late 16th century.”
+ Ibid.
Quoting Rev. Dr. David Scaer: “Hutchens writes that each denomination seems to be infected by its native strain of bad preaching. Anglicans by preciousness. Lutherans by formula. Catholics by laziness and biblical illiteracy. Baptists by great volume to no great end. What he says about Lutherans is this: you bring out the doctrine and build on it, so the text itself has nothing to do with the sermon.”…
+ Wood, Tim. "David Scaer: You Can't Preach Justification Without the Cross and Empty Tomb." Ad Crucem News, Substack, May 17, 2026. https://www.adcrucem.news/p/david-scaer-you-cant-preach-justification.
“One thing I love in biblical work is being swept along by the passage itself. The real awakening was learning to let the current of the text carry you. So many people have guilt feelings: “Where was the gospel in that sermon?” It doesn’t have to be there in the sermon. It’s in the sacrament. It’s in the liturgy.”
+ Ibid.
Excellent article! There is a reason why many of our stellar exegetes (eg Martin Franzmann) came from the WELS. Doctrine provides the boundary lines but exegesis is the name of the game or "sola Scriptura" means nothing.
Our tendency in Missouri is to place dogmatic formulations over the text of Scripture (or worse, to dogmatize the interpretation of Scripture thus violating Scripture's perspicuity). David Scaer's critique in the footnote is spot on.
In my formation as a preacher, we were taught to be textual preachers, that is, to engage the Scripture text directly in its original languages. Certainly doctrine and Scripture go together, as orthodox doctrine provides a faithful summary and exposition of the Scriptures (as we confess in our ordination vows) but Scripture alone remains the sole source of our teaching and preaching. Even when we preach "catechetical sermons," we preach them from texts of Scripture not the texts of the catechism.
A valuable conversation. I notice that the machine transcription rendered W Beitz surname as Bites. A correction seems prudent for the sake of those who would want to dig deeper into that history.