Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings St. Louis, Missouri — 1958, Page 22

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22 Proceedings of the Forty-fifth Convention

I leave it to you to judge whether either of these statements
has ever applied to us. But let us remember that the criticism
of an outsider, though it may seem unfair, is often more valu-
able than praise from one of our own.

There are other pitfalls for those who love the contempla-
tive life. Think of the achievements of German theology in the
19th and 20th centuries. Students came from all over the world
to sit at the feet of German professors. Even during the terrible
war years more excellent works on theology appeared in Ger-
many than in all of America. In some respects the Germans
were fifty or a hundred years ahead of us. Some of their major
works of years ago, now being translated into English and brought
out by publishers, in Michigan especially, are still the very best
of their kind. Yet in their proud human wisdom German theo-
logians often left the moorings of traditional faith. Even worse,
they lost contact with their people. Congregational life declined;
church and Communion attendance dropped alarmingly. Statis-
tics placed the last as low as 25 a year on the average for every
hundred Christians. The Catholic average at the same time was
1,300. German theology, brilliant as it was, had become an exer-
cise for intellectuals.

Now there is an opposite pitfall—-much more in evidence
in this country — in which theology becomes an exercise for non-
intellectuals. In this category you will find tinhorn religious
oracles from the lunatic fringe who set up shop as gospelers or
healers and somehow attract a following, sometimes by giving
a good show, sometimes by scaring their hearers with dire pre-
dictions of the end of the world. Their creeds, insofar as they
have any, are a mishmash of odds and ends often based on non-
relevant Bible passages. Here you have the contemplative mode
grown cancerous.

The instances mentioned do not exhaust the list of pitfalls.
Many of us have tendencies toward individualism or a kind of
bizarre originality. We become enamored with peripheral ques-
tions in theology or ceremonial features in other churches and
feel an irresistible urge to make them prominent in our own
synods. Presently there is a movement under way with clique
meetings, memorials, and even manifestoes, and a segment of the
church, as one observer noted, is off on the road toward revivalism,
Romanism, or pietism. At any rate the trend is away from
Lutheranism.

Pitfalls like these are the risks involved for all those whose
major interest is pure theology and purity of doctrine. But they
detract nothing from the nobility and the necessity of the con-
templative mode of life. Writing about its necessity in the July 16th
(1958) issue of the Christian Century, Anders Nygren, the great
Swedish Luther scholar, also revealed how much he loved it. For
ten years, he said, the press of other duties left him only a limited
amount of time to devote to theological and philosophical problems.
Soon he hoped to occupy himself wholly with them again because
they were so essential.

Last year a campaign of “Preaching, Teaching, Reaching” was
organized by various synods to win new converts. It was almost
wholly dedicated to the active phase of Christian life, which we
will consider next. But the word reaching could also be interpreted