50 years ago – February 19, 1974 to be exact – Concordia Seminary In Exile (Seminex) came into existence when the students, followed by the faculty majority, left the campus at 801 DeMun Avenue in St. Louis, to continue classes at Eden Seminary of the United Church of Christ and the St Louis University Jesuit faculty. It was a voluntary, student-initiated “exile,” even if provoked by outrageous violations of due process, not to mention moral violence against what Prof. Fred Danker later titled Christian “brotherhood.” At that time I was in my final year at Concordia Senior College in Fort Wayne, Indiana.
In this blog I venture into troubled waters – still, after all these years. Just a decade ago, Carl Braaten in his memoir asked a penetrating question about the aftermath of the LC-MS break-up – specifically the ultimate absorption of many Seminex faculty into the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago (LSTC): What is the sense of costly confession for the sake of the gospel, he asked pointedly, when the confessors abandoned the witness stand to resume business as usual elsewhere? Even though Braaten, and later Bob Benne in a similar 2011 First Things article, mixed up this penetrating theological question with inside baseball grievances of their own, from the beginning I often reflected that the student-initiated walkout handed the institution over on a silver platter to the forces of reaction. Staying put would have forced the sorry spectacle of heresy trials and exposed the reactionaries to public scrutiny. It’s all water under the bridge now. I wish in this post to recount my existential experience of Seminex and to offer my own reflection on the aftermath.
I was the editor of the Senior College student newspaper, The Spire, and I wrote a sharp editorial in support of Seminex in the spring of 1974, urging my graduating classmates to attend there. When word of my planned editorial, however, got to the ears of the college's president, my editorial colleagues and I were summoned to his office. He pleaded with us not to go forward publishing my editorial because it would damage the college’s prospects of survival in the denominational civil war underway. At length I agreed to a compromise. My editorial would appear alongside two others supporting different options for graduates, including enrollment at the remnant of Concordia Seminary that remained at “801” (as we called it). I regret succumbing to this compromise. Predictably, it did no good in saving the college, which was shuttered within several years by the same forces which had accused the seminary faculty in St. Louis of false teaching "not to be tolerated in the church of God." Concordia Senior College was, in their eyes, the notorious "seedbed of liberalism" feeding the heretical seminary.
I did not then and I do not now dispute that there is such a thing as false teaching. In fact I think the real existing Christian churches are quite full of it. But the standard and the modality by which this judgment was made – through demagoguery and skullduggery (as historian James Burkee has shown) via a church convention vote prevailing by a 60/40% margin, without due process for the accused (according to a newly formulated document which stipulated such things as the historicity of Adam and Eve and Jonah and his whale as touchstones of orthodoxy, as you can read here) – missed the mark by a mile.
On the other side, however, the underlying concern of the accusers was rarely if ever acknowledged honestly or taken up in good faith on the Seminex side, as it seems to me. Their concern was rather met with scornful mockery of Missouri’s inheritance from 17th century Lutheran Orthodoxy. That legacy is this: in the polemical antithesis between Roman Catholicism and the magisterial Reformation, the Bible had to be treated as the Protestant “paper pope” over against the living one in Rome. Undermining its authority as the divinely revealed and inerrant word of God would collapse Protestantism into rudderless chaos and interminable fragmentation. Over against this danger, moreover, how could one deny to a Protestant church the ecclesiastical authority to judge doctrine, especially about its fundament, the Bible?
To be sure, the fundament was fundamentalism. The doctrine of the Bible’s miraculous inerrancy was an implausible reach for sheer authority in 1974 as also it was in the 17th century. What was really needed was a “back to the drawing boards” ecumenical turn (which, to his great credit, Seminex’s Robert Bertram undertook by his significant participation in the Lutheran-Catholic dialogue). But deeply settled into the “ecumenical winter,” as we are today 50 years later, the eminently predictable Protestant decline into chaos is there for those with eyes to see. The Missouri Synod’s civil war signaled this multisided decline aforetime.
In any event, Concordia Senior College was both “seedbed” and in a highly qualified sense "liberal," that is, in the context of the 1970s Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod. It was liberal as in the liberal arts: academic excellence on the one hand, especially in the humanities, and openness on the other hand to the big world of God's creating and redeeming. I knew academic excellence as a freshman at Bard College in 1970. After an intellectually wasted sophomore year at Concordia Junior College in Bronxville, New York, I tasted that excellence again in Fort Wayne. But the know-nothing faction of the Missourians (“The Bible says it! I believe it! That settles it! End of discussion!”) feared open, curious, inquiring minds willing to see the huge trouble our human world is in and thus to challenge the status quo in the church as well as the world. In their eyes we were "rebels." In their eyes, we were “freethinkers’” but in our own, we were “freedthinkers” – freed in Christ, the church’s one foundation.
In many ways, as mentioned, that church conflict 50 years ago foreshadowed our contemporary culture wars. I definitely sided, to speak anachronistically, with the "progressives" of the day, especially on the burning issue of the time about the ordination of women. I mention this background to my memories of our years at Seminex, 1975-77, of which I shall write shortly. Yet the background is for me of central importance, because what happened to the faculty majority that precipitated the student walkout in St. Louis was continuous with the threatened destruction of Concordia Senior College in Fort Wayne, the place where I personally experienced the trauma of cruel demagoguery destroying something precious.
This continuity with Fort Wayne became a bone of some contention during our difficult and exhilarating years at Seminex. I have already reminisced about my many debts to the Seminex faculty in the previous post, and further back to the training in Paulinism I received at Seminex from Edgar Krentz, in my blog on J. Louis Martyn. I have also paid tribute to my Seminex mentor in theology, Robert Bertram, in a blog about the soteriological Christology of Luther I learned from him. But there were tensions. This is how the late Prof. Edward H. Schroeder described them, looking back in 1998:
Bob [Bertram] and I sometimes were labeled as "Elertians" [disciples of German theologian Werner Elert] with our LGH [Law/Gospel Hermeneutic] and thus seen as not ecumenical enough within the world of Lutheranism. "There are other equally valid Lutheran theologies that we are not getting from Bob and Ed" was the complaint. One year our LGH "narrowness" provoked a student initiative "to get different Lutheran voices into the systematics department." The students pressing for this had already chosen their candidate from the good teacher they'd had at the Senior College. [The editor rightly identifies James Childs here]. Our department – all three of us – officially went on record approving the idea, even the preselected candidate, but finances had the last word, and it never happened. One of the students leading that movement, now a respected international theologian himself, still wonders if systematic theology at Seminex didn't really support the American religious establishment, and that what Bob and I have been doing since then, e. g. in Crossings, is but more of the same. Who knows?" (Edward H. Schroeder, Seminex Remembered, ed. Michael Hoy with an afterword by Kurt K. Hendel (St. Louis, MO: The Crossings Community, 2024): 32-3.)
In an endnote the editor correctly identifies yours truly as that student protagonist in Ed’s account.
The rhetorical question, Who knows?, indicates some level of humility regarding the failure of Seminex described in Schroeder’s remembrance. I appreciate that. It is telling to note here that Ed and his wife Marie had, about the same time as writing this remembrance of our conflict, visited us in Bratislava, staying in an adjacent small apartment we arranged for them. We talked a lot then, and had always corresponded. Ours was a hot-and-cold relationship through many years as this thick-skinned Jersey boy clashed culturally with the Missourian farm boy whose skin was made ever thinner by his battle with diabetes (as he admitted to me once).
In fact we had a substantive disagreement about the tacit anti-Judaism embedded in his version of the LGH. He once complained to me that the Old Testament professors could not, on account of their subject matter, understand LGH. I tried to raise with him the logical problem of distinguishing between what substantively the law is as divine instruction, the Torah, and the uses of the law, whether to constrain injustice or to reveal sinfulness. My problem with his theology was not the conservative accusation of "gospel reductionism" but rather "law reductionism," i.e. reducing the law of God to its several functions, thus obscuring its substantive reality as divine instruction in the twofold law of love: of God above all and of all God's creatures in and under God our creator, as explicated (by Luther! in his Catechisms!) in the two tables of the Decalogue.
This was a debate between Ed and me that began in Seminex days and lasted till the end of his life. I find it gratifying, however, that in the above-cited 1998 reminiscence he acknowledged the danger I sensed in his theology, namely, of co-optation by the (decaying!) American liberal Protestant establishment with its antinomian and neo-Gnostic tendencies. I say this is a danger, not an intention, because he and Bertram were capable of the Pauline-apocalyptic move in theology of which I am partisan. Indeed Schroeder’s lament over failure is that Seminex did not persevere in the apocalyptic travail but grew weary of suffering witness and longed after the fleshpots of Egypt. To my ears, this rings similar to Braaten’s query mentioned at the beginning: what is a confessing movement that abandons battle stations to take safe harbor?
But my Seminex experience extended well beyond that particular bone of contention, both exhilarating and depressing. It was exhilarating to be dispersed into the city of St. Louis, to find our own housing solutions and experience urban life in that profoundly racialized city. We experienced existentially the criminal dangers afflicting the north side and the Bud-and-brats ethos of the white working class on the south side. Once I stupidly volunteered to referee a church league basketball game (for which I was in no way competent!) between an all-black Northside team and an all-white Southside team. I was lucky to get out of that clash with my life, and never refereed again. Depressing.
We connected with a Slovak heritage congregation and a generation of young adults our own age, as our first born daughter Sarah arrived in the 1976 bicentennial year. Exhilarating. But to get through school with our newborn, Ellen had to work full time and I had to work 20 hours a week at a variety of low-paying jobs. We were so poor that the day before payday I would regularly turn out the couch cushions looking for change to buy a pack of cigarettes. Depressing. The individual professors were excellent in their fields. Exhilarating. But there was little coherence to the program as a whole. Depressing. Seminex quickly became a quasi-institution in search of a mission (as well as students, placements for graduates, and funding) as any lines back to Missouri hardened into roadblocks. Loss of the institution at 801 was not trivial. Many of us were simply adrift. Personally, I couldn't wait to get back East for my vicarage, which was at a viable Long Island congregation, and then on to graduate school the following year in Manhattan at a solid (at least at the time) institution, Union Theological Seminary.
Coming out of the 1960s, there was a spirit of radical democracy, if not anarchy, among us Seminex students. As in my experience with the president of Concordia Senior College, this expectation of freedom ran headlong into conflict with corporate management models of leadership, with their mission statements, branding ploys, lobbying for patronage and ostentatious strategic plans. The managers always won and the results were always the same. Seminex died by suicide after 10 years, just as the Senior College fell victim to murder. So the Age of Aquarius morphed into a new, but hip conformism in the disco-dancing Me Generation’s “culture of narcissism.”
Kurt Hendel’s Afterword to the Schroeder remembrance tells another tale about Seminex’s fulfillment, counter to Ed’s story of failure. To me it is one of triumphalism, inversely mirroring Missouri's ballyhooed triumph over liberalism. I dispute this. The exhilaration of defiance gone as constraining reality set in, the meaning of the exile came to be seen by Hendel and the many in his camp as realization of the dream of “Lutheran Union” – well, sort of, if you leave out the fulsome third of American Lutheranism left behind as dark Babylon. "It was readily apparent to most members of the Seminex community that the seminaries that welcomed us and the anticipated ELCA were the home that God had been preparing for us" (Hendel p. 53). I think this is a rationalization of a bad situation. Truth be told, the faculty redeployment was more like "any port in a storm."
Once, when I was pastor in upstate New York, rostered in the Missouri-refugee Association of Evangelical Lutheran Churches, I met Seminex president John Tietjen at a pastoral conference. Tietjen was playing a catalytic role cheerleading the claim that our exile from Missouri was God’s signal to unite the rest of American Lutheranism into a “new” Lutheran Church. In the fellowship evening talking with him, I said somewhat reluctantly, "We are going in different directions." He did not like that at all, denied that we were at loggerheads, and eventually we found ourselves faced off like gladiators in a ring with a large crowd circling around us late into the evening as we debated my proposition. How sad - though in my view regarding the “new” Lutheran Church, how predictable-- that his own initial term as Bishop of the Metro Chicago Synod ended abruptly and prematurely in the “new” denomination he had helped to engineer. What a denouement to his claim that the ELCA represents the triumphant fulfillment of Seminex.
How quickly the “new” Lutheran Church melted into the already rapidly decaying mainline of American liberal Protestantism! In this observation I agree with Braaten and Benne. I don't see Missouri's civil war as anything other than another tragedy of decaying Christendom. I don’t put the blame on Seminex, however, as they did. This is blaming the victim for the fallout from Missouri’s cowardly turn to fundamentalism. In my view, however, a disastrous role was played by the Elwyn Ewald contingent of the AELC on the Commission for a New Lutheran Church; these pushed the utopian dream of supposed radical democracy onto the “new” Lutheran Church. Seminex and this anticlerical clique (which emerged years later) were not the same thing. The clique, moreover, found plenty of allies in the old ALC and LCA, indeed enough to prevail.
We were right, in the terrible hour, to protest the authoritarian populism of the Preus putsch, and to foresee the sectarian dynamic of ever more narrow boundaries being drawn in the 50 years of the Missouri Synod since. But we were not right to imagine a church without boundaries or, for that matter, to project the viability of any separated communion, even one ostentatiously pretending to be “new,” in divided Christianity, contrary to the will of Christ that all be one. After thirty-some years, the ELCA, plain to see, is nothing new, hardly a church in any thick sense, just another troubled American denomination. The victorious reign of God in its fulfillment will be a city with open borders. But we are not yet in heaven. Nor are we ruled directly and purely by God alone. Far from it. Existentially, that is the bitter lesson I draw from my Seminex experience.