LCMS Convention Workbook St. Louis, Missouri — 2023, Page 217

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THEOLOGICAL DOCUMENTS­­—COMMISSION ON THEOLOGY AND CHURCH RELATIONS
Here we have the establishment of the church before there was any government of the home and of the state; for
Eve was not yet created. Moreover, the church is established without walls and without any pomp, in a very spacious and very delightful place. After the church has been established, the household government is also set up,
when Eve is added to Adam as his companion. Thus the temple is earlier than the home, and it is also better this
way. Moreover, there was no government of the state before sin, for there was no need of it. Civil government is
a remedy required by our corrupted nature. It is necessary that lust be held in check by the bonds of the laws and
by penalties. For this reason you may correctly call civil government the rule of sin.22

most followed Luther’s view that male authority in both home and church was rooted in creation, while the misuse of
that authority by men in the home and the church, as well as the state’s coercive authority to punish sin, came about
as a result of the fall.27 The 17th-century Lutheran theologian Johann Gerhard, however, implied that women may not
have been subject to submission apart from the fall:
A woman should not teach nor dominate the man because the beginning of sin came from the woman. But the
manner of teaching in which the woman taught the man turns out badly here, for she did not so much teach or
lead him as she deceived him. In punishment for this deception she was subjected to the man, and the genuine
domination of woman over man is incompatible with this divine judgment.28

The order of civil government comes into existence only after the fall as a means to restrain sin. God instituted
government for that purpose, and it thus continues to be inscribed onto the creation as we know and experience it.23
Consequently, one cannot encounter the created order without encountering all three of these orders in some form or
fashion, no matter how unintelligible they may be to sinful humanity apart from God’s revelation.
Turning to the relationship between men and women before sin, the distinctiveness of man and woman was a
feature of creation and included male headship and female submission. The relationship of male headship to female
submission, however, was adversely impacted by the fall, not by abolishing it, but by distorting it. Now, fallen man is
predisposed to assert his headship coercively over woman, and fallen woman is inclined to chafe at her submission to
man. Luther, using imagery customary for his day, described the curse pronounced upon Eve in Genesis 3:16:
This punishment, too, springs from original sin; and the woman bears it just as unwillingly as she bears those
pains and inconveniences that have been placed upon her flesh. The rule remains (regnum manet) with the husband, and the wife is compelled to obey him by God’s command. He rules the home and the state, wages wars,
defends his possessions, tills the soil, builds, plants, etc. … If Eve had persisted in the truth, she would not only
not have been subjected to the rule of her husband, but she herself would also have been a partner in the rule
which is now entirely the concern of males. Women are generally disinclined to put up with this burden, and
they naturally seek to gain what they have lost through sin. If they are unable to do more, they at least indicate
their impatience by grumbling. However, they cannot perform the functions of men, teach, rule, etc. In procreation and in feeding and nurturing their offspring they are masters. In this way Eve is punished; but, as I said in
the beginning, it is a gladsome punishment if you consider the hope of eternal life and the honor of motherhood
which have been left her.24

LW 1:104.

23
Luther and Melanchthon both argue that the state’s use of force to preserve obedience is an outgrowth of Adam’s use of coercive authority after the fall to exercise his
headship over woman. See Mickey L. Mattox, “Order in the House? The Reception of Luther’s Orders Teaching in Early Lutheran Genesis Commentaries,” Renaissance
& Reformation Review 14, no. 2 (2012): 110–26.

Mattox, “Order in the House,” 115–23. This would also account for the male’s sinful abuse of his authority through verbal or physical violence.

28

Loci XII.II.36, in Johann Gerhard, On Original Sin, On Actual Sin, and On Free Choice, trans. Richard J. Dinda (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 2014), 21.

Speaking in reference to 1 Cor. 11:7, Loci XI.VI.107, in Johann Gerhard, On Creation and Angels, On Providence, On Election and Reprobation, and On the Image of
God in Man before the fall, trans. Richard J. Dinda (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 2013), 301.

LW 1:202–3.

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Nathan Howard Yoder, Ordnung in Gemeinschaft: A Critical Appraisal of the Erlangen Contribution to the Orders of Creation (New York: Peter Lang, 2016), 2–8, 52–54.

31
This approach misused the order of creation by claiming that German ethnicity and land — Blut und Boden (“blood and soil”) — were established by God and could
take preeminence over the shared religious identity Christians had across many nations and many races. For more on this, see Robert P. Erickson, Theologians under
Hitler (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), and Yoder, Ordnung in Gemeinschaft, 90–105.

Joel F. Harrington, Reordering Marriage and Society in Reformation Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 48–100.

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25
We note this again elsewhere in Luther’s Genesis lectures: “Hence it follows that if woman had not been deceived by the serpent and had not sinned, she would have
been the equal of Adam in all respects. For the punishment, that she is now subjected to the man, was imposed on her after sin and because of sin,” LW 1:115.
26

Nonetheless, Luther and the Lutheran tradition affirmed a divine order built into creation that remains in effect
for all structures of society — the home, the church and the civil sphere — even where those structures are impacted
by sin and we as sinners fail to act in accordance with God’s design for us.

The order of creation debates continued into the 20th century, where the idea was most controversially abused by
the “German Christian” movement to support its racial politics, identifying nationality and race as intrinsic parts of
that human community created by God.31 Certain German theologians responded directly to this misapplication of
the order of creation and offered a different perspective. In particular, Lutheran theologians such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Walter Künneth responded with their own interpretation of the order of creation that took into consideration the consequences of the fall. Bonhoeffer used the terminology “order of preservation” in arguing that due to sin
the order of creation is no longer intelligible to all peoples, so God has provided an order of preservation that sustains

Lutheran theologians in the two centuries after the Reformation followed Luther’s lead. They continued to affirm
the authority of the husband and father in the domestic sphere, the pastor in the ecclesiastical sphere, and the prince
or magistrate in the civil sphere, though such responsibilities tended to overlap because of the state churches of the
day and their rigorous application of Scripture to civil law.26 Where Luther’s successors commented on Genesis 1–3,

24

Yet Gerhard can in other places describe submission as part of creation itself:
Therefore, when the apostle says that woman is the glory of man, but man is the image and glory of God, he is
not denying that woman also was created after the image and likeness of God in the principal sense. Instead,
he is speaking of the sense in which the dignity of the image had been placed secondarily and principally, that
is, the position of domination whose high status properly befitted man, for the woman was made subject to the
authority of man.”29

When did the order of creation as a specific term enter the discussion? Though Luther and his successors understood divinely instituted authority in a way conceptually similar to the order of creation, specific use of that language
only began to emerge among German Lutheran theologians in the 19th century. The terminology and its applications
were diverse. It could be referred to as “orders of creation” (Schöpfungsordnungen) or “orders of the creator” (Schöpferordnungen). Theologians described the concept as “fundamental forms of human community” — chiefly, though not
exclusively, those of the family — and the relationships that govern them.30 It could refer with varying degrees to the
state as a political entity, the land or territory in which one lives, one’s network of family relationships, or even one’s
ethnicity. These forms are accessible to all people by reason and experience, not strictly revelation. Much of this was
articulated against the breakup of traditional European institutions like the Holy Roman Empire or the state churches
of Germany due to the spread of constitutional democracies in the mid-19th century.

In this case, Luther somewhat equivocates between woman’s submission to man as a dictate of creation — “the
rule remains with the husband” — and as a consequence of the fall — “if Eve had persisted in the truth, she would …
not have been subjected to the rule of her husband.”25 Whether he roots this alone in the creation account of Genesis
1–2 or, in certain respects, in the fall account of Genesis 3, the creation as we know and experience it in the present,
according to Luther, is no different: innate to this creation are realities designed by God — before or after the fall —
which entail relationships of authority and submission, including between husband and wife in the home and man
and woman in the church.

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creation after the fall.32 In a similar, but clearer way, Künneth speaks of an order of preservation as God’s ongoing creative work (creatio continua), or the means through which God preserves not simply creation in the abstract, but the
original order which God instituted at creation and which remains inaccessible to fallen humanity apart from God’s
revelation.33 In this sense, the order of creation is parallel to natural law, yet it is only perceptible and appropriated
by virtue of the order of preservation. While Künneth’s explanation was more explicitly Lutheran and emphasized
revelation to a greater degree, both used the order of preservation as a direct rejoinder to the misuse of the order of
creation by theologians sympathetic to National Socialism. The order of preservation provided them a way to view
the order of creation and its potential applications after the fall into sin from the perspective of the Christian standing
under the authority of God’s Word rather than as a strictly philosophical or political idea accessible naturally to all
human beings apart from faith in Christ or submission to Holy Scripture.
Order of creation terminology also makes its way into the Christian Dogmatics of the prominent late-19th,
early-20th century Missouri Synod theologian Francis Pieper, presumably through his arduous study of theological
currents in Germany. Pieper makes two passing references to the “order of the creator” (Schöpferordnung), by which
he had in mind the order in which man was created by God before woman, and both references pertained to the position of women relative to men in contemporary society. In the first case, he explains passages regarding subordination of women in the New Testament as having their origin in both creation and fall: “It is the plain teaching of Scripture that in relation to the man, the woman is in a position of subordination. Both the order of creation and the order
established after the fall assign her that position.” 34 Shortly thereafter, Pieper defends the conception of the home as
“the sphere of woman’s dominion and teaching activity” against those who consider this view a relic of a different
time or place. He claims that according to 1 Corinthians 14 and 1 Timothy 2, it is a “universal, permanent order, for
Paul gives as the reason for vetoing any public teaching of the women in the church (1) the order of creation, that
Adam was made first, after him Eve; and (2) the role that woman played in the Fall,” namely, the deception of Eve.35
The most direct precedent for the Missouri Synod’s official adoption of the term “order of creation,” however,
came through a 1950 dissertation by Austrian theologian Fritz Zerbst, published in English by Concordia Publishing
House in 1955.36 Zerbst had written the book in response to concerns over the legitimacy of women serving congregations in emergency situations as assistants to the pastors, including in certain exceptional cases the right to preach
or even celebrate the Sacrament of the Altar.37 Central to his argument was the distinction between the order of
creation and the order of redemption. The order of creation provides the conceptual background to St. Paul’s insistence in several New Testament letters that women should not speak or exercise authority over a man (1 COR. 11; 1 TIM. 2)
and that wives should submit to their husbands (EPH. 5; COL. 3; 1 PETER 3). He ultimately concludes that if a woman were
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Creation and Fall: A Theological Exposition of Genesis 1–3, trans. Douglas Stephen Bax (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996), 139–40. “The Creator
is now the preserver; the created world is now the fallen but preserved world” (139); “All order of our fallen world are God’s orders of preservation that uphold and
preserve us for Christ. They are not orders of creation but orders of preservation” (140). Ultimately, Bonhoeffer would augment this with his notion of four “mandates”
— work, marriage, government and church — which provide Christians an ethical principle for life in the present world yet could only be understood through faith in
Christ. See, for example, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics, trans. Richard Krauss, et al (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2005), 68f.
32

33
Walter Künneth, “The Concept of the Order of Preservation,” in Faith and Action: Basic Problems in Christian Ethics: A Selection of Contemporary Discussions, ed.
Heinz Horst Schrey (Edinburgh: Olivier and Boyd, 1970), 282–92, and Yoder, Ordnung in Gemeinschaft, 189–200. According to Künneth, “the thesis of the divine
order of preservation does not represent the result of empirical perceptions, nor does it represent an idea which is the result of metaphysical speculation. Man is denied
immanent recognition of the orders as an order of God” (“Concept of the Order,” 282); and “the fundamental recognition of world order as ‘God’s order of preservation’
is not a product of human wisdom but it is dependent on revelation, and every closer development of this judgment is bound by revelation” (“Concept of Order,” 283).

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to receive the office of pastor, she would “completely reverse the order of creation” by assuming the role of “head” of
the man.38 The biblical case against women’s ordination for Zerbst depends upon the relationship of headship and
submission instituted at creation and subsequently reiterated in the New Testament. Interestingly enough, Zerbst
never clearly defined the order of creation or order of redemption, nor did he address the implications of the order of
creation for the civil or domestic realms.39 Yet it was his thorough argument against female clergy on the basis of the
order of creation that would lead to the term’s adoption within the Missouri Synod, while also leaving some ambiguity about how it should apply to matters other than the pastoral office.
To summarize: The concept order of creation, though not found by name in Scripture, has in the Lutheran tradition been used as a way of referencing or summarizing Scripture’s own rationale for assigning specific roles of authority to men in the church and in the Christian home. First, the New Testament appeals to the account of creation
and the fall in Genesis 1–3 as the basis for male authority in the public teaching and liturgical conduct of the church.
Second, Luther and subsequent Lutheran theologians understood this authority as applicable to the realms of the
home, the church and the government as instituted and preserved by God Himself in His created order. Third, 19thand 20th-century German theologians, including Lutherans, debated how the concept related to those same spheres
of authority and how sin affected the way Christians perceive them and live in accordance with them. Finally, the
application of the order of creation to specific questions about the roles and relationships between men and women
in the church would ultimately suggest the adoption of that terminology by the Missouri Synod.

II. Order of Creation in the Missouri Synod
The Missouri Synod officially endorsed the language of the order of creation — and, with it, the language of the order
of redemption — at its 1956 convention in St. Paul, Minnesota through the report of the Committee on Woman
Suffrage. The committee delivered a report drawing heavily on Zerbst’s dissertation. It argued that Christians live
simultaneously within two orders — the order of creation and the order of redemption — and that these orders are
governed by what God has instituted through them: either the “horizontal” relationships between all created beings, including men and women, or the vertical, redemptive relationship between God and man. The committee’s
definition of both orders provided far more clarity than Zerbst’s and reveals to some degree the narrowness of their
intended application.40 It dismisses any attempt to protest the order of creation using Galatians 3 — that there is no
distinction between male and female in Christ — by claiming that this does not override what God has established in
creation.41
The report concludes that, because the order of redemption does not abrogate the order of creation, then likewise
the order of redemption does not support the formal adoption of women’s suffrage, which it argues is prohibited by
the order of creation. The submission of woman to the headship of man in the order of creation, which according
to Zerbst undergirds St. Paul’s prohibition of women teaching or exercising authority over men in the church, then
determines the role women have in the governance of the local congregation. To that end, 1956 Resolution 03-22
argues that, while Scripture does not specifically address whether women should participate in voters’ assemblies,
surrendering male headship to women in congregational matters is “anti-Scriptural,” and thus commends the

34
Franz Pieper, Christliche Dogmatik, 4 vols. (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1917–1924), 1:627; for the English, see Francis Pieper, Christian Dogmatics, trans.
Theodore Engelder, 4 vols. (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1950–1957), 1:524.
35
Pieper, Christliche Dogmatik, 1:629; English 1:526. The term “order of creation” also appears in John T. Mueller’s Christian Dogmatics: A Handbook of Doctrinal
Theology for Pastors, Teachers, and Laymen (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1934), 179, in reference to the chronology of the six-day creation narrative, not the
relationship between men and women. Mueller does, however, refer to a “divine order” that “must not be subverted,” since it is “the will of God that the woman should
not usurp authority over the man by ruling over him” (209). Similarly, Edward Koehler does not address the order of creation or the primeval headship of man over
woman, nor the complication of that headship after the fall. By contrast, however, he speaks of the “dominion and rule” of humanity over other creatures, and how that
“dominion of humanity over nature was curtailed” due to sin. See Edward W.A. Koehler, A Summary of Christian Doctrine: A Popular Presentation of the Teachings of
the Bible, rev. ed. (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1939), 50–52.

38

36
Fritz Zerbst, Das Amt der Frau in der Kirche: eine praktisch-theologische Untersuchung (Vienna: Evangelischer Pressverband in Österreich, 1950); English translation,
The Office of Woman in the Church: A Study in Practical Theology, trans. Albert G. Merkens (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1955).
37
These measures had taken shape due to the financial and demographic devastations of Weimar Germany and World War II, though by the 1950s cases for women’s
ordination had begun to percolate throughout northern Europe, most notably Sweden. See Zerbst, Office of Woman, 7–13, for the historical background.

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Zerbst, Office of Woman, 81.

39
The translator, Concordia Seminary professor Albert Merkens, provides this brief description of terms in a footnote: “‘Order of creation’ (Schöpfungsordnung) and
‘order of redemption’ (Erlösungsordnung), as employed by the author of this book with reference to the positions assigned by God to man and woman, must be understood in the sense of an arrangement of things in order, as in ranks, rows, or classes. In some sentences of the book ‘ordination’ and ‘ordinance’ express more clearly the
intended meaning of Schöpfungsordnung and Erlösungsordnung” (Zerbst, Office of Woman, 11 n9).

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40

The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod, Proceedings of the 28th Delegate Synod (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1956), 566.

41

1956 Proceedings, 556.

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2023 Convention Workbook

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