by Jon Diefenthaler

Abstract 

In view of two recent anniversaries, the 175th of its founding in 1847 and the fiftieth of the “Walk Out” of faculty and students in 1974 at its St. Louis seminary, the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod (LCMS) through its Concordia Historical Institute has published several volumes that highlight two traumatic moments in its history. One of them is a new translation of The Emigration of the Saxon Lutherans in the Year 1838 and Their Settlement in Perry County, Missouri, written in German by an LCMS pastor, Johannes  Friedrich Koestering, twenty-five years after its immigrant forebears arrived in America. The book provides an account of the  exposure and exile of Martin Stephan, a bishop to whom these Saxons had given total authority in ecclesiastical and civil matters.  The traumatic effects of this crisis were not only immediately felt but help explain the subsequent behavior of “Missouri” as a church body. Chief among them are its unequivocal allegiance to its own brand of Lutheran orthodoxy, its insistence upon complete agreement in matters of doctrine and church practice for ecclesiastical fellowship of any kind, and its tendency to isolate itself  protectively from key features of America’s culture. As a subsequent article will demonstrate, the second traumatic moment created by the “Walk Out,” named more often as “Seminex” and featured in other recent LCMS anniversary publications, only reinforced these same effects of the Stephan crisis. These incidents shed light on where “Missouri” has positioned itself in the world of the twenty-first century.

Upon the 175th anniversary in 2022 of the founding of the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod (LCMS) in 1847, Concordia Historical Institute sponsored the publication of two volumes that highlight two critical features of its history. The first was Seminex in Print: A Comprehensive Bibliography, which provides extensive documentation of the various types of literature on the “Walkout” in 1974 of most of the students and faculty of Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, that led to the creation of their own seminary in exile (Seminex). The second was a new translation, The Emigration of the Saxon Lutherans in the Year 1838 and Their Settlement in Perry County, Missouri, written in German by an LCMS pastor, Johannes Friedrich Koestering, twenty-five years after the crisis of 1839 among these immigrant forebears of the Synod over the leadership of Martin Stephan.

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