Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings St. Louis, Missouri — 1958, Page 20

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20 Proceedings of the Forty-fifth Convention

identity as Lutherans altogether but for the strict insistence on
purity of doctrine. The Lutheran Church — Missouri Synod led
in this respect and wielded a powerful influence on other synods
of the Middle West, especially those that later formed the Syn-
odical Conference. But these other synods, after an early period
devoted chiefly to ingathering of members, quickly absorbed the
interest in confessionalism and made their own contributions
to it, besides fostering those disciplines that make for enlargement
of the mind. With such backgrounds it would seem that the
contemplative mode of life—to hark back to Augustine — would
be in no danger of deteriorating among us. Yet even a church
that rightly prides itself on upholding the purity of doctrine will
fall short in its high calling if it makes that purity an end in
itself. To cherish doctrine for its own sake is one thing; to make
it an end in itself is quite another.

To illustrate, let us briefly consider the history of Israel,
that great nation to which were committed the oracles of God
and which for 2,000 years and more preserved them intact. The
careless multitudes in Israel, as everywhere, often betrayed their
high calling. Their defections and disloyalty often obscure the
fact that the faithful did a magnificent job in guarding their pe-
culiar treasure. It was holy men of Israel who spake as they
were moved by the Holy Ghost and thereby created both the
Old and the New Testaments of Scripture. Israel’s gigantic strug-
gle to keep her race and her religion uncontaminated took up
all her energies, so that none were left to missionize the ancient
world.

One thinks of such an episode as that recorded in the last
chapter of the Book of Nehemiah. Nehemiah was a layman who
had attained high honors in the Persian court of Susa. But on
his second visit to Jerusalem, the city of his father’s sepulcher,
finding many things amiss, he drove the Ammonite usurper To-
biah out of the temple chambers; ordered adequate salaries for
the Levites; demanded that the Sabbath be observed strictly, even
locking the gates of Jersulem so that no burden could be brought
into the city during the Sabbath; and attacked the proforeign
element among the Jews, slapping their faces, pulling their hair,
and making them take an oath against permitting mixed marriages.
Then he read the riot act to all foreigners and cleansed the city
of their presence. That does not sound much like the contem-
plative mode of life. But it was all done in the interests of
preserving purity of doctrine.

The prophets — Malachi and Isaiah, for instance — speak out
against intermarriages with foreigners, against laxness in observ-
ing Sabbaths or paying tithes. Yet their glory is that they rose
above the exclusiveness of their race and envisioned Israel’s heri-
tage as a gospel for all nations. As such it is presented in the
second part of Isaiah, in Micah 4, Amos 9, Psalm 72, and the book
of Jonah. The priests, on the other hand, and those learned teach-
ers called scribes worked toward greater exclusiveness. They
certainly never practiced unionism! They steeped themselves in
the study of the Mosaic Law and wrote commentaries that even-
tually became the Talmud but lost sight of the vision of the
prophets. As a result their efforts did not bring illumination
or enlargement of the mind but clannishness, rigidity, Pharisee-