Miscellany

On March 28, 1933, a correspondent in Germany wrote to St. Louis that no one there was thinking of persecuting the Jews, and Der Lutheraner printed it, adding that the church reports from Germany bore "the stamp of untruth on their forehead." What the Missouri Synod's German paper told its readers in 1933 and 1934: the book burning, the German Christians, the Antichrist question, "the alleged persecution," the secret police at a Free Church synod, and Hermann Sasse as one of two witnesses.

Read the essay: https://news.collver.biz/the-stamp-of-untruth/

The pages are in the CHI Digital Archive, German and English side by side: https://chi-archive.collver.biz/page/44455

In July 1968 Hermann Sasse wrote to Norman Nagel, newly called to Valparaiso, and set down a conversation with Missouri Synod president John W. Behnken about a professor at Concordia Seminary, St. Louis. "But he teaches the inerrancy of Scripture," Behnken replied. Sasse's answer: "Yes, I said, because the pope teaches that."

The usual account of Missouri in those years has one danger, a new way of reading the Bible. Sasse saw a second beside it: a high-church movement cut loose from doctrine, which passed the tests Missouri usually applied. This essay follows both dangers through Sasse's letters and Nagel's own writings, to the collision between the two men in October 1974, and ends with an epilogue on worship, preaching, and the article by which the church stands or falls.

Written and read by Albert B. Collver III.

Read the essay: https://news.collver.biz/as-long-as-the-pope-believes-it/

Typeset article (PDF): https://misc.collver.biz/as-long-as-the-pope-believes-it.pdf

In August 1731, more than a hundred men knelt around a salt cask in a mountain valley near Salzburg and swore to hold the Lutheran faith in life and in death. That autumn their archbishop ordered them out. In 1854 Der Lutheraner told their story in six numbers: the dragoons who taught the children the catechism, the last May festival on the high pasture, the miners going down the river, "A mighty fortress" sung at the shut gate of Kaufbeuren, and the ninety who set out for Georgia on Reformation Day, 1733, and named their settlement Ebenezer.

Read the essay: https://news.collver.biz/the-covenant-of-salt/

The six installments are in the CHI Digital Archive, German and English side by side: https://chi-archive.collver.biz/page/1712

On Sunday, October 21, 1849, a pastor eleven months ordained drove his wife through the woods and prairie of St. Clair County, Illinois, to see a church dedicated at Centreville, now Millstadt, and wrote it up for Der Lutheraner. Three pastors, a wreathed pulpit, a village choir singing in parts, and "Wachet auf" sung according to Layriz. The man who preached the dedication sermon was leaving for Altenburg, and eight years later the Synod would put him out over the millennium. A hundred and seventy-seven years ago today.

Read the essay: https://news.collver.biz/through-woods-and-prairies/

The two pages are in the CHI Digital Archive, German and English side by side: https://chi-archive.collver.biz/page/862

A St. Louis theological journal printed a New York church's budget in May 1856: $22,505 a year, $432.78 a Sunday, with the bellows-treader's wage on the same list as the pastor's four thousand. Add the column and it comes to $8,505. What the missing fourteen thousand dollars tells us about how the journal clipped.

Read the essay: news.collver.biz/the-most-expensive-pew-in-new-york

The two pages are in the CHI Digital Archive, German and English side by side: chi-archive.collver.biz/page/2384

In the autumn of 1864 a Confederate army marched to within forty miles of St. Louis, and the theological monthly printed there did not write the word Price once. What Lehre und Wehre's news column recorded instead, and why the silence was not an accident.

Read the essay: news.collver.biz/the-army-at-the-gates

The pages discussed are in the CHI Digital Archive, German and English side by side: chi-archive.collver.biz

A companion to “The Public Reading of Scripture”: the Greek witnesses on 1 Timothy 4:13, from Chrysostom to Theophylact, printed whole with English translation, and what they show about a word that never told anyone where it was read.

Read the essay: news.collver.biz/the-sentence-always-did

The edition (PDF, 31 pp.): misc.collver.biz/greek-witnesses-1tim413.pdf

The paper it accompanies: The Public Reading of Scripture

In May 1911 a speaker at the Walther centennial told twenty thousand Lutherans that St. Louis had joined “the few cities of the world from which a complete edition of Luther’s works has been published.” This essay is about that edition: twenty-five books of Luther in German, printed by the Missouri Synod’s own press between 1880 and 1910.

It began at a district pastoral conference in 1879, with Walther behind it. It cost eight thousand dollars in printing plates before the sixth volume was out, stopped selling almost at once, and was finished anyway, thirty years later, down to the index. Its second editor, A. F. Hoppe, came up the Mississippi from New Orleans in 1886, worked on it for the rest of his life on $840 a year, and dated foreword after foreword on the Festival of the Reformation.

Drawn from the edition’s own forewords, the Synod’s convention minutes, and Robert Kolb’s 1983 history of the edition in the Concordia Historical Institute Quarterly.

Read the essay, with the page images: news.collver.biz

Written and read by Albert Collver.

The fourteen-page index to Lehre und Wehre, the Missouri Synod's theological monthly, was not made by its editors. A footnote in six-point type says who made it — a parish pastor in Baltimore named Ernst Keyl — and why the editors called his work loving. An essay on indexes as wagers placed on future readers, the compiler's ear for foreign names, and two ghost page references repaired a hundred and sixty years later.

Read the essay, with crops from the original Fraktur pages: news.collver.biz/compiled-with-loving-diligence

From the CHI digital archive project: chi-archive.collver.biz

Lector is Latin for reader: the one who reads aloud so that others can attend to their work — in church, in the monastery refectory, and on the platform above the cigar rollers of Havana and Tampa. This essay marks the launch of Lector, an iPhone app that puts the old office in your pocket: PDFs, EPUBs, Word documents, and Safari articles, read aloud entirely on the device. No account, no analytics, no subscription — free with a three-document library, one $9.99 purchase to remove the cap.

The app: apps.apple.com/app/lector-read-aloud
The essay in print: news.collver.biz/the-lector-returns
Screenshots and voice samples: lector.collver.biz