Rarely if ever in American religious history has a Christian church body been able to repulse a concerted attempt by professional theologians to lead that church into the darkness of theological liberalism.
But that was what happened fifty years ago when theologically conservative laity and pastors rescued the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod from such a fate. In 1974, 90 percent of the faculty (forty-five out of fifty professors) at the denomination’s foremost seminary, Concordia Seminary, and approximately 80 percent of the students walked off the St. Louis campus and into “exile” to start their own theologically liberal institution. Eventually, the group took about two hundred of the church body’s six thousand congregations with them, thus forming the Association of Evangelical Lutheran Churches.
This article is taken from The American Spectator’s latest print magazine. Subscribe to receive the entire magazine.
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