This is Ben, and this is Keith.

And this is Main Street Lutherans. Today, we're asking a question of ourselves. Why do we keep going back to talk about Reformation and Martin Luther?

Yeah, we're kind of obsessed, aren't we?

We are.

We are, in fact, not just as individuals.

Yeah. This is the beginning of three episodes of short series that we're going to be looking at the history of the Lutheran Church in America. And we are starting with the Reformation of Martin Luther because it's important, you know, we. We do, as Lutherans, feel like Lutheran Melanchthon and their cronies got some things right. And some of those things are essential to, you know, all Lutheran churches and even most Protestant churches and even some Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christian churches and the ways they look at the world.

Yeah, he made real, real reform in all different ways. But there are dangers, and we don't get into this so much in the episode itself, but we talk about. We do talk a little bit about what I would call a Gilded Age syndrome, where we look back at times and think that they were perfect. And so we'll talk about that a little bit with Dr. Grandquist about how people are constantly looking back at when they think times were better. And the other part is that Luther isn't perfect. And a lot of times will get criticism from folks who aren't Lutheran, often Jewish people in particular, because Luther had problems. Luther was, you know, if we name his problems, certainly at the top of the list is anti Semitism. Some of the things he wrote become part of the basis for why Germany, leading up to World War II, commits evil against the Jewish people. But he's also sexist. And those become these excuses that people use out of that theology to do bigger, well, do bad things later on. As Lutherans, we believe sin is sin, but certainly the impact on the world was much more dramatic than what Luther caused directly.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Luther's not perfect and nobody is. And none of our. None of our heroes are perfect, except maybe Jesus.

That's right.

So, yeah, it is a reality that we all struggle with.

Yeah.

And it's.

It's tough to separate what a person's thoughts are, what they've written, what they've declared from what they've done. And people do good and they do bad. And the people that we remember generally do really big good things and often really big bad things. And so we tend to get myopic when we look at either the good or the bad. And historians try to separate that out and make sure that we have an adequate focus on both pieces and help us do that. It takes a long time for that to happen, though. And so historians have done that well for us. For Luther, we really abandon his vitriol and things that he was coming off the cuff. But the things that are important to us are those theological ideas that set the world in motion around grace and how it is delivered to us from God. And we'll talk a bit about that here in this episode a little bit. We'll get into that further in some future episodes. We'll talk about that after the interview here. So here is Dr. Mark Rehnquist from Luther Seminary.

So one of the things we've been wanting to do with the podcast is touch on Lutheran history for the elca. How did we get to be who we are as a denomination, as churches with our faith? And we wanted to look back, starting with the Reformation and come up to the modern day and see how all that develops. And so we reached out to Mark Grandquist from Luther Seminary, professor of church history and history of Christianity there at Luther Seminary. And so it's really great to have you on here with us today, Dr. Green.

Very pleased to be with you.

We're really interested in what makes us into who we are. We can talk about early church history, but what makes the ELCA into who we are really comes from the Lutheran tradition. And we often talk about the Reformation. When we Talked about the 95 theses back in 2024, we talked about the Flannograph or the, you know, with the pictures of the tree and Luther and all the things, the 95 theses, of course, and all that. But often that's where we stop talking about the Reformation. We don't really get into the details after that. And so we want to talk a little bit about that. So as far as the Reformation goes, what was the situation that Luther, what did he find himself in?

Yeah, when I talk about the Reformation, sometimes I think about that line from the opening line from the Tale of Two Cities by Dickens. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. The Western church that Luther grew up in was vibrant, rich, growing, faithful in many, many ways. I mean, sometimes we Lutherans try to paint that pre Reformation past as being something dire. But that success that the church found itself in was the, also the, the root of its deep, deep seated problems. And the problems were that it was in many ways attracting lots of people into it, especially into leadership who were there because of the money they were there for. They were, it was corrupt. Now there were Many, many faithful people in the church. Okay. And Luther himself. You know, one of the. One of the knocks on Luther was sometimes that he was a failed monk. Well, he wasn't a failed monk. In fact, he took his. His monastic vows so seriously that it really destroyed his health. I mean, he was doing everything that he was supposed to do. He. He joined the strictest monastery he could find. But the trouble is, it didn't. Didn't get him any peace, didn't get him anywhere that he wanted to be. And so he. His superiors despaired of getting him turned around correctly. And they said, you know, what do you do with a. What do you do with a young person who is deeply troubled and asking all sorts of questions? Well, you send them to graduate school, and that's what they did. They said, luther, look, you're gonna have to figure these things out for themselves. So Luther went to the university at Wittenberg and started reading and thinking deeply about the nature of faith and the church and everything else like that.

And how old is Luther at this point? If I can just understand?

In his early 20s.

Okay.

All right. And he comes up with more questions about the. The church than he can figure out. All right? And he. But by the way. And here's another thing that we Protestants sometimes do. We probably say, you know, Luther was the first one to figure out that the church was in trouble. All right? One day, Martin Luther wrote, wakes up, and he says, oh, I finally realized that the church is corrupt. And he's the first person to ever say this. I mean, hundreds of years. People have been saying this for hundreds of years. They've been. You know, they've been saying that the church needed to be reformed. All right? There are plenty of reformers before Luther.

Well, probably every pope or. Or most of the popes probably thought of them.

Well, some of them and not others, but. Well, that's right. Yeah, but. But the system. The system was sort of like Mayor Daley, Chicago. It didn't want to be reformed.

Can you name a couple of those earlier reformers? Earlier reformers and.

Sure.

Their time frames and where they were at.

Well, I mean, 100 years before Luther was Janos in Bohemia. But you go back to the. To the reformers, even somebody like Francis of assisi in the 13th century or even before that, they were reforming popes and everything else like that. So, I mean, this is not. But the. The cis. The. The. All these reformers tended to think in terms of reforming the system, purifying the system. Luther was the first one to really say that the problem was the system itself, that the system needed to change because it was built on the fact that the church was the delivery system for grace, and the church decided who got grace and who didn't. And the church also confused the grace of God with the works that you did to be a good person. So Luther goes back to Paul, he goes back to Augustine, people like that, and he becomes radicalized in a very conservative way. He was a conservative radical or a radical conservative. I don't know. You know, what you want to. What you want to figure out.

And, and by conservative, you mean going back to Scripture? Going back to the roots.

Yes, to. To go back to this. To the roots. Radix. Remember? Radical radix means to go back to the root.

Sure.

And so in this case, the root being the, The Christian tradition based in scripture that exists, you know, kind of ahead of the structure, the system that you're describing of the church at that.

Time, that the church that it grew into. Yes.

Yeah. Okay.

It's kind of funny in a way, because I think the church constantly has people who say, you know, we want to go back to house churches or we want to go back to the early church model. We want, you know, Stephen Ministries and, and all these things. We constantly say we want to go back there. And, you know, it seems to be a tendency among us. Right.

Well, there's. There's what I talk to my students about called the, called the myth of the Golden Age. If we could only go back to the, to the Golden Age somewhere along the line.

Yeah.

That everything would be okay. Well, there's plenty of models from the past that were good. But. But would you want to go back and live in the past?

Well. And, you know, just like Luther, every, every age has somebody that, that finds the corruption. There's always something that's. That's got a problem.

Sure.

That has to be fixed. That takes us to a new age, which seems perfect at some point.

Mark, I'm really curious about this concept of. Of Luther as a conservative radical in that, you know, I think in our, our common conversations with folks, we would. People would say that Luther was this liberal reformer. And I hear you saying something different. I'd love to hear you expound on that a little bit more.

I don't, I don't, you know, use the. You use the word liberal in the modern sense. Wouldn't. Would have made no sense in the 16th century.

Sure.

Okay, so let's just start with that one.

That's fair.

The, the idea is, for example, Luther Felt that there was in the, in the traditions of the church, especially through Paul and Augustine, there was that the gospel had been proclaimed in its power and its vitality, but that eventually, like the weeds growing up with the wheat, a whole superstructure of religiosity gets developed, which piety is good, but you know, it's not. You know, how sometimes we, we sometimes think about. We'd end up playing religion. All right, so he was, he was a conservative. He didn't want to throw those things out. He didn't throw out the Latin mass. He wanted to purify it. He didn't. He didn't throw out the medieval traditions of worship. He wanted to purify them. But he had this sort of laser like focus on the idea that the core of the gospel is God's free justification of the sinner through the grace of God, apart from any works. Right. And that was that, that, that laser like precision. He used that, that, that, that central idea, that central motif to criticize everything in the church. Does it measure up? You know, does it preach the gospel? If it doesn't preach the gospel, then it's just a human invention and we can do away with it, and we should do away with it.

Now, is that something that came to him all at once or was it something that started, you know, the 95 theses, really focus on particular points and then it seems to grow. Is that something that happened or was that just because of the documents?

Oceans of ink have been shed trying to figure out when did Luther have his gospel experience? And it's above my pay grade to figure that out. Just all we can say is sometime between the time he started teaching, about 1512 and the 95 theses in 1517, or some people even say later, this started becoming clear to him. Now, his test case, his first case, were the 95 theses. And if, you know, if you've read them, 95 theses, they're very narrowly tailored. But the implications of what he's saying are, are pretty frightening to the church of his day.

Absolutely.

So he doesn't, he doesn't. So the, the 95 theses that I say, they're the 16th century of going viral, right. They go around Europe in weeks. They're translated into different languages. I mean, we have a different time frame here.

Right, right. Well, he certainly benefited by the printing press. You know, that's, that's probably one of the things we learn. I don't know how contemporaneous Gutenberg's printing Press and the 95 theses are but.

It'S about 50, 60 years before the press is movable type is, you know, but the printers, you know, they, they, they recognized they were the Internet providers of the day, and they recognized how they could make a buck and also contribute to society, I guess. I don't know. Something like that.

Yeah.

Anyways, when Luther, when Luther's 95 theses start moving around the Church, all sorts of people get very, very worried. And they reacted to Luther like they always reacted, which was they, they tried to pressure him. Sit down, shut up, and if you don't watch your P's and Q's, you're gonna get it. And Luther was actually, after the 95 theses, was actually radicalized by them because they kept pushing him in directions that he wasn't sure he wanted to go. But eventually the whole system that tried to. Tried to silence him became the very issue. That's. No, he writes some terrible. He writes some very nasty things about the Pope.

Right.

He's. He's. They're also writing very nasty things about him. But, but he understands that it's the system. It's not necessarily the Pope, the individual person, but it's the system. The papacy is a system as a part of a whole system. That. That is the problem. And so in after 1517, after the 95 theses, he's. He's getting himself into more and more trouble and fully expected to be executed or arrested or anything else like that. He was very fortunate to have a political protector. He lucked into that. And lots of people in, especially in central and northern Germany started to gather around his preaching and his teaching and his ideas.

Mark, could you say a little bit about. I'm not sure how to ask this question, but about the structure of the church compared with the structure of the civil government in Germany and in Wuther's day?

Well, the church was. The medieval church was very, very jealous of its own. I mean, of its own prerogatives, and tried to keep the, you know, tried to keep the power of the. Of the state at bay. On the other hand, there was this idea that the church and state would work together to protect the gospel. The church had its role, the state had its role. And the, the, you know, they're all. They're all fighting with each other about it. But. So, you know, for example, when a. If a heretic was erect, arrested, and executed, it would be by the state, not by the church. The church didn't do those sorts of things. They. They approved of it, but they didn't.

Okay, so what kind of risk then was Frederick taking in being Luther's protector?

Well, Frederick, who was the. The ruler of Saxony, his, His. Luther's sovereign, played a very canny game. He knew what power he had. He knew how he could. He knew how he could game the system, if you want to put it that way. And he was taking a risk. No, I know it was. It wasn't just a. It wasn't just a cynical move. I think he ultimately came to believe in Luther and Luther's reformation, but there were some risks.

So then Luther goes through all these things. There's a lot of defenses of his arguments. They write a lot of stuff, and then eventually Luther only passes on. And that leaves what he's written, but it leaves a bunch of his followers, the leaders in that area, to go on and try to formalize this thing. Right. And so what we get out of this is the Book of Concord, the collection of a lot of those writings, and some stuff that they produce to handle what I take as squabbles between them. At that point, do they see themselves as still part of the Roman Church, as part of the Catholic Church, or do they see themselves as separate?

At that point, they see themselves as not definitely a part of the Roman Church. They see themselves as a part of the Catholic Church in the theological sense of the creed.

Yeah.

Holy and catholic and apostolic. But they did not identify that Catholic Church with any one particular institution. For them, the Church Catholic was the church that proclaimed the gospel in its power and its. And its purity. Okay. So they would very much claim to be a part of the one true church, although they were not politically structurally a part of the. They didn't think they needed to be. Okay. Now the crisis that you're talking about, of course, is luther dies in 1547. And the problem is that when a, When a leader like that dies, then what do you do for. What do you do then? Right. And what had happened along the way is that the movement that had gathered around Luther had developed a number of writings. The augsburg confession in 1530, for example, one of them, Luther's own small called articles, his catechisms, some treatises that he wrote and Philip Melanchthon wrote, and those. Those were considered to be authoritative. But then Luther was a hard act to follow. Right, okay.

Yeah.

His theology was very creative. And I sometimes say that Luther had more problems with his friends than he had with his enemies, because his friends were always trying to take his theological ideas to. In directions or to ends that Luther probably never would have done. And so, and so the legacy of Luther is being fought over in the 1550s, 60s and 70s.

Can you give us an example or two of how that might have worked?

Okay, well, what is a good work? All right, if, if you're saved by grace, apart from works of the law, then of what value is a good work? And there was all sorts of, you know, in other words, we still want people to be moral. Right? We still want people to, you know, God wouldn't have given us the law if, if God didn't want us to follow it. And so there were a number of different theories that would go on about, about how works happened and, and what they, you know, what benefits they gave or any other sorts of things like that. Sometimes they went in semi ridiculous directions. And eventually it became a political crisis as well as a theological crisis for the German, German states that had adopted Lutheranism as their, their religion in their, in their territories. And a bunch of theologians had to get, sit down and knock out some compromises on some of these issues. And what were their relationships with the Roman Church and what were their relationships with the other Protestants? These all come together in a thing called the Formula of Concord or the Formula of Peace, Concord meaning peace. And all of those documents are pulled together in 1580 into a thing called the Book of Concord. And this is the Constitution. This Book of Concord is the constitution of the Lutheran Church. And we have had no theological statements, no, no normative theological statements since 1580. We just, we just fight about what the, what the confessional documents mean.

And I think I read that Scandinavian churches don't really put much into that, that they only go by the Augsburg Confession. So there's the phrase the unaltered Augsburg Confession as far as in our statements of faith.

Yeah, well, since it was a German theological document in 1580, it was slower to be adopted, but it was adopted by the Swedes eventually and the Norwegians adopted as a, as helpful, but not as helpful as the, the one document that all groups which you would call Lutheran really focus in on is that augsburg confession of 1530. And there are some churches that don't call themselves Lutheran, but they do, you know, they do hold to the Augsburg Confession and so they're considered to be, to be Lutheran in that sense. The Formula of Concord varies in its acceptance, but most Lutheran churches at least believe that it may not be as important as the Augsburg Confession, but it is important.

I haven't read through that. Is it apparent from reading that what the arguments are that people are having that make that document necessary Formula of Concord.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I mean, for example, what is the nature of communion? What about predestination? What about sin? What about grace and works? So there, there are, these are constants. These are things that we fight about forever.

Oh, sure.

It's interesting. The, the Formula of Concord really is. It's very interesting because it is. It'll say, on the one hand it says this, on the other hand we says, then they're trying to take a sort of mediating position or trying to take a position that, that, that makes everybody okay. Well, that provides a sort of a middle ground for people.

I think I see where the ELCA gets it. When we talk about the social statements and the social messages and talk about how they provide more or less a framework of how to talk about the topic and less what specifically to think about the topic. And that's sort of the middle ground on those things, right?

Well, especially in the modern Western sense, you sometimes have a hard time telling people what to think.

That's true. That's true. So as far as expansion, it's a German thing. So Luther's in Saxony. He's influencing that. Of course, the documents get around. How does Lutheranism make it up into Norway and Sweden and those areas? What do they find interesting about it?

Well, usually it's, it's, usually it's church leaders and, or theologians or students, theological students who are coming down to Wittenberg to study with Luther.

Okay.

And so. And they're, and they're bringing this new understanding of the gospel or renewed understanding of the gospel back to their home countries. They will work with church leaders, they'll work with the governments, the kings to make this happen. And so what happens is that these, that the pre Reformation churches in Scandinavia literally go lock, stock and barrel over into the new Lutheran tradition, usually oftentimes through the encouragement of the kings.

Is that because they're further away? Because Lutheranism doesn't really take hold in France or certainly not Italy. Is that because of distance? Yeah.

I mean, if you think about the. Scandinavia was at the end of the world when it came to the medieval church, Western church.

Sure.

And the Scandinavians hadn't been, they hadn't been Roman Catholic all that long.

They're still a little Viking.

Yeah. I mean, the Reformation really didn't come to Finland until, you know, the 13th, 14th century. So. Or the. Christianity didn't come to the Finland.

Okay.

So. And, and, you know, you have to understand at this time. Right. The, the whole idea in Germany and in Scandinavia and elsewhere is that the the monarch determines the religion of the state. The political leader just, you know, they both, they, they thought that pluralism was a terrible thing. Better to all be one thing or another. Right?

Yeah.

Now, Lutheranism will seep into areas. It'll go into Holland, it'll go into, into eastern France, it'll go into Slovakia and Slovenia and Poland and Transylvania and places like that. Well, that was more seepage by Lutherans moving there or ideas being taken over by places. There's still a number of minority Lutheran.

Churches in Europe, and the Reformed tradition sort of makes that more of a westerly migration from, I don't know, would you say Switzerland and then Dutch reform coming out of Holland? Certainly.

Right, yeah.

So, so they sort of take that middle step.

What impact does this have on the Catholic Church as these countries or regions are, are severing ties? You know, does this have a, a detrimental effect on the, on the Catholic Church initially? You know, we can certainly talk about the Counter Reformation a little bit, but I'm just curious, you know, was there an economic impact?

Well, I'm sure there was. You know, I mean, it's, you know, the, the whole, the ideal was of a Christendom, of a single united Christian civilization under the, under the, under the, the church, under the control of the Pope. Outside of the Pope, there is no church. Okay. And so all of a sudden you lose 40, 45% of your, @ least of your territory, not necessarily your population. And of course, that shocked them. They were slow in, in, in figuring out the threat that Luther posed. They, if they had, if they had really stomped on Luther and the Lutherans in the first five, 10 years, it might have been different, but they're not really getting their feet going until, you know, 15, 20 years after Lutheran. At that point, it was too late for a good portion of the, of the Lutheran territories.

Why do you think that is?

Because this, the, the, the old way of dealing with this no longer worked. All right, the, the, the, the idea of, in the Middle Ages was power politics. You stomped out heresy by driving it underground or, you know, kind of thing like this. They didn't feel that you had to argue with them. You know, why, why argue with, with heretics, you know, kind of thing like this. And so, and so the old, the old mentality sort of said, well, we'll just deal with these pesky people somewhere along the line and, and, or a series of rather indolent popes that didn't, didn't take it quite seriously. It wasn't until about 1535 that a pope arose in Rome who really understood the magnitude of the problem, and also that the church had to fight it in very different ways, which they eventually did that. We talked about the Counter Reformation or the Catholic Reformation, probably one of the best things that ever happened to the Roman Church because it gave the people who were the real reformers in the Roman Church ammunition for finally getting rid of a lot of the abuses.

Now, economically, for the Roman Church, is Germany, is it a major contributor to their funds? I think about the same period, you've got folks going over to the New World and bringing back gold and, and things.

Yeah.

Is that, is that, does that play into that? Why they would maybe ignore Germany a little bit?

No. Germany was very economically important to the papacy because there was not a centralized government. I mean, there was an emperor, but it was very kind of loose. And so the, the, the church could pull a lot of money out of Germany in ways that they couldn't pull money out of France or England or Spain because there were kings there who said, look, you're, you're not going to take our money, for example, the, the whole business of the indulgences. Right, the whole business of the indulgences lot. Many countries said, you're not going to pull all that money out of our country. But the Holy Roman Empire, which was Germany at the time, they could get away with it.

Okay, so Lutheranism, Luther's ideas spread through the, through Europe, and then we get migration to the Americas, and the people from northern Europe, when they come to the Americas, bring Lutheranism with them. Does that happen in. In phases? I know my family went from Poland to Scotland and Ireland and then crossed the Atlantic to come to western Ohio and. But I'm not really sure when that happened. I think it's the early 1800s that they do.

Yeah. I mean, most of the Lutheran territories in Europe were not major colonial powers. Germany was a wreck after the thirty Years War, and it was very divided up into lots of little territories. The Scandinavian kingdoms played around with colonies in the New World. There was a colony in the 17th century along the Delaware in New Sweden. The Danes had, you know, the Virgin Islands. But, but, but most of the immigration that happened started in the late 17th and early 18th century. And it was basically individuals, family groups leading, leaving Lutheran territories and coming to. And especially coming to the middle colonies, to New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and, and Virginia. And they're coming. They're coming. They're not. They're not. There is no colony there for them. It's not like the British or the French had colonies or the Spanish had colonies. They're coming to places like Pennsylvania because there's good land and they can practice their religion as they wish to.

And so are they leaving for religious reasons or are there any. Any economic causes for this?

Just most of them are leaving for economic reasons.

And it's personal. Not. Not like a. A famine or anything like that causes it.

Well, you know, there was a lot of warfare going on in Germany, and after the 30 years war, there was a lot of plague and. And poverty and other sorts of things like that. But. But remember that. That people who leave like this, economic migrants are not the poorest of the poor. There are people who have a sense that they can. They can go someplace, they can risk it all and go someplace and make themselves a better life.

Because these people, you have to have some means in order to make this journey and an investment in establishing yourself in this new land.

Now, any number of the German settlers who came over came over in the 18th century as indentured servants. And what that meant was that they came, that they basically said, you pay my way over here and I'll work for you for free for seven years, and then you will give me my walking papers and then I'll kind of thing like that. So. So, you know, there's these people who are. These are young people. These are people who are ambitious. These are people who. Who want to make something of themselves. Occasionally there will be people who will become because of what they perceive as religious persecution. But really, that wasn't most of the people.

And then do they mostly settle in the cities then? I'd imagine being indentured, they would be committed to. I don't know.

No. Remember, what they want is land.

Okay.

Land was wealthy.

So they're going to work on farms.

Work on farms.

Okay.

I mean, some of them did end up in the. In the cities, obviously, but for their. Their vision was mainly of land.

Okay.

Yeah.

That's why they end up around where Keith is.

Right. I would guess farming and mining and the. And the, you know, industries associated with theirs.

Absolutely, absolutely.

There's economies. Then the church. Then how does the Lutheran church and other churches come to be established? In the American colonies, the ideal of.

Europe was what we would call a state church or an establishment of religion. Right. The government. You would collect taxes and provide religion. Actually, in the colonial America, most of the. Most of the American colonies, the British colonies in North America had some form of state church one way or another. In New England, it was the Congregationalists. In New Netherlands, it was the Dutch Reformed in the South. It was the Anglican churches and everything else like that. But it was only in those middle colonies that. That there was anything approximating religious freedom, and this is why the Lutherans had it there. But remember, the people in Europe thought that. That if you didn't have a state church, you would just have no religion whatsoever. They. They believed that these people were going off into the wilderness and would. Would never be seen as Christians again. And, you know, they couldn't imagine how you could have a. A voluntary church like we have in the United States today. That. That was such a. A foreign concept to them, that when you. This is what these Lutheran immigrants run into, that you could be religious if you wanted to. You didn't have to be religious. You could be a different religion than you were when you were. This whole idea of choice and freedom. They. They couldn't believe it. And that we have as many Lutherans as we do. I won't say it's a miracle, but it's because people thought that that heritage was important enough that they would voluntarily pay money to make it happen.

I think I heard somebody say that. Paul Tillich. One of Tillich's things was that culture and religion are tied together and that. That without that, culture is religion, and that. So they. They go together. Whether you. Whether you know it or not, culture is always your religion or one of your religions.

Well, it wasn't. But remember, it wasn't until Tillich almost seems to think it's automatic.

Right.

Remember that. That, you know, we have this again, this romantic vision of the past.

Yeah.

Like back in the day, everybody went to church, and like, now nobody goes to church.

Yeah.

That's completely false. Back in the colonial period of time, organized religion was particularly weak. Less than 20% of Americans had a membership in a church at the. In the. In 1776. And so it took a lot of work, a lot of shoe leather, a lot of knocking on doors to develop. And these people, these Lutherans, these lay Lutherans, when they developed their church, they were very much invested in them. We sometimes wonder, why do people get so possessive about their churches? Right. You've run into this.

Oh, yeah, right.

Well, because it's their church.

Sure.

Now. Now, one of the big ways, one of the big reasons. And you'll see this with almost all the immigrant groups. I mean, you see it with the immigrants coming today. All right. Is that the churches, the religious organizations are the bearers of the ethnic tradition.

Sure. I mean, we think of the Greek festivals and all the ethnic festivals that come out of the churches. Right, exactly.

They maintained the language longer than anywhere else. They maintained the traditions. And so sometimes you're never quite sure whether these people are more German or Lutheran.

And we've talked about that as being sort of a problem of the elca is that the, I'm not going to say it's necessarily the Scandinavian or the German heritage, but it's more the upper Midwestern heritage at this point. You know, the, you know, in some cases lutefisk and aquavit or hot dish, but sometimes it gets in our way of being Lutheran in, say, Atlanta, as we talked with Imran Siddiqui. Right. They can't relate to that.

Right. Jokes don't make any sense.

Well, I mean, the traditions in the south don't make any sense to us in the North. So, I mean, it's not, it's not a question. I mean, we don't understand the, the bratwurst suppers and the, and the beer taps in the, in the fellowship halls. You know, we, you know, or the, or whatever. I mean, just, just remember that you, you don't divorce.

Right.

It's a question of you. If you of, of a balance.

So when.

What, what, what made it possible to develop Lutheranism in America oftentimes was that cultural identification?

So we're going to talk in another episode about how American Lutherans sort of came together or, or, you know, did that. But, but in this period, say the 1700s, 1800s, if a Lutheran person is traveling, say, from central Pennsylvania and they go out to Ohio or they find themselves in the UP and they're, they're in with the Finns up there and Suomi College area. Right. Houghton and all that, are they going to identify as being the same? Are they Lutheran the same way? Would they be welcomed into a Lutheran church in another area?

Well, it depends on the language.

Right. I was going to say that would be a language barrier facility.

Right. Yeah. I mean, as long as there's immigrants coming, these, many of these groups are maintaining the immigrant language because they feel that they need to have a, a ministry for the people who are coming after them. Right. When the immigration, when immigration stops, there's a great crisis of language transition and they all start speaking English eventually. But that was a very difficult transition. Gotta remember that. That was very difficult.

And does that happen in pockets or is there sort of a time when that just, I mean, immigration's a big topic for us, certainly in contemporary America. But, but, you know, there were issues of trying to prevent immigration in the past, too.

Two major periods of language transition. One was in the very end of the 18th into the early 19th century, when that colonial immigration stopped.

Okay.

And immigration picks up again in the 1840s and goes to about 1920. And then after. Right after this first world war is another major time of language transition. And you'd be surprised how quickly it happens. It happens in less than 15 years.

Wow.

Yeah. From 1918 up to the start of the Depression. I mean, it happens like that.

Is there then a time period when. Is there a tipping point of some kind when folks are drawn to the Lutheran Church in this country in particular, who do not come from those particular ethnic backgrounds of Germany and Scandinavia and Sweden? When does that start to happen? When people from other cultural groups start becoming Lutherans?

Has it happened?

Well, now my family's got as much English as we do Germany.

Yeah. No, I'm. I'm just being facetious, but I don't know. I mean, after World War II. All right, especially as Lutheranism expands out of its traditional Lutheran areas into the south southwest, into the new suburbs, they're using English. Then there is more of a. There's intermarriage. Then there's more of a chance that people might be drawn into. Into the Lutheran Church for other than ethnic reasons. And it does. It does. It does happen. African Americans have been drawn into the Lutheran Church for hundreds of years. Not in great numbers, but. But it's happened in places, one place or another. I remember my dad who had a mission church in Grand Rapids, Michigan, of all places, where if you're not Dutch, you're not much.

Right.

But my dad gathered this mission congregation in Grand Rapids out of a very interesting group of people, not all of whom were Lutheran. You know, they were drawn to the. To the teaching, to the. To the way in which the gospel was presented. So it happens, all right.

Yeah, but. But it does take quite a while, the. That ethnic identity, if it stays all the way up till then, right into the. You know, at least till after the Civil War. But. But end of the end of World War II in particular, that's. That's a long time. That's, you know, a couple hundred years of. Of isolation. So.

Yeah. Well, think of the. I don't want to pick on any particular area, but think about the Lutherans in North and South Carolina. All right? They've been speaking English for over 200 years, but they still have a sense of their. Of their. Of identity that sometimes you. It's no longer like. It's no longer language, but there's, there's something there. I'm not sure. And we should, of course, we should talk up in the upper Midwest, but.

Right. What about, you know, in particular the clergy and their training and their resourcing? You know, in addition to, to establishing these congregations and building buildings, we've also got the, you know, the, the need for ministers. And we've, we've heard those stories about pastors riding circuit and presiding over communion in a different church every week. But how does, how does that, you know, when, when does, you know, the education of clergy stop being something that's done, you know, back in Europe and being done, you know, in a more homegrown sense in North America almost immediately.

Very few, very few Lutheran pastors from Europe who came over here were successful. This was just such a. Well, first of all, why would you leave a state church where you got a salary to go out of the wilds of Pennsylvania or New York or someplace like that?

Sure.

And gather the, get one of these little Lutheran congregations and that you got no salary and other kinds. The, the whole way of being church, this voluntary church was so foreign to these, to these European pastors that most of them couldn't adapt, adopt to it. You know, they just, you know, some did. Muhlenberg, for example, Henry Melke or Mug, who was sort of the leader and Colonial American Lutheranism, he figured it out. But, but most of the pastors didn't. And so what the Lutherans basically had to do in North America was start growing their own pastors.

Then would they send them back to Europe for training or would they be able to use seminaries in the US.

There were no seminaries.

But I mean, like at Yale, for instance, they wouldn't go.

There was no seminary at Yale, and of course they spoke German anyway, so it wouldn't work. It was done basically on a, a tutoring system. You, you had a pastor who would have students who would read theology with them and an apprentice, literally apprentice themselves to this already established pastor. And then once they felt that they were ready, once it was felt that these students were ready, then the local clergy would examine them, oftentimes two or three days in Greek and Latin and German. And then if, if they were satisfied, they would be ordained.

You know, that sounds an awful lot like what, what we talk about. I present at Greenfield Village, and I'm at no, Webster's house. Right, right. Which comes from, from New Haven. And it sounds almost exactly like what he would go through to be. To try to pass the bar. Exactly right. So he would Be he would apprentice. Abraham Lincoln did the same thing. Right.

You would read theology the way you would read law. All right. And this is, for the first 150 years, this is how Lutherans got their pastors.

Now, would they use the large catechism as sort of a whole.

The whole business. The whole book.

Okay.

The whole book of Concord.

Yeah. And. And then. And then eventually this wasn't providing enough pastors. And eventually they take that sort of model of a. Of a pastor with student apprentices, and it sort of morphs in the 15, 20 or 1820s, 1830s, into seminaries, which were literally first several pastors gathering a group of students around them.

So do they have any organization? Is there a structure to the church, or is each one Congregationalist? Essentially.

Yeah. For the first hundred years, there were no synods at all. Finally, in 1748, Muhlenberg, who I've spoken about before, there's enough pastors in Pennsylvania, there's enough congregations that he gathers them together into a ministerium called the Ministerium of Pennsylvania. That's the first Lutheran Synod. And remember, they're. We're borrowing the synodical polity from the Dutch and the German Reformed. And it's the idea that a synod is a group of pastors and congregations who have organized together to do things that they can't do on their own.

Such as theological education.

Mission work, other sorts of things like that, helping out, disciplining if there's cases of problems with the pastors or anything else like that, or conflicts between pastors and congregations.

Okay, what was, what was the training for pastors like in Europe? Prior to coming to the, To North America?

Most of the Lutheran pastors were trained in the universities.

Okay, right. Okay. So there was already a vehicle available for the, for the training that became standardized for them.

And it was a. It was a university degree.

Gotcha. Thanks.

Eventually, in 1748, they. They developed the first Lutheran Synod, or Ministerium. It was only just a ministerium, which was just. Only the gathering of pastors. Lay people said, hey, we're going to be involved too. You know, we pay the bills, we're going to be involved in the decisions. And so what we understand now as a synod, which was a gathering of Lutheran pastors and representatives of the various congregations, starts in 1748. The next one isn't until, I think, 1796 in New York. And then after that, they just explode all over the place. I mean, we have. By 1850, 1860, there's probably 100 different synods.

Now.

That one in Pennsylvania is that all of the state of Pennsylvania or.

Well, that's what it was to be begin with. Yes. In fact, in fact, it was, it was Pennsylvania, it was Maryland, it was New Jersey, it was parts of New England or in New Jersey, New York. Yeah. But then, of course, travel and, and the explosion of the number of Lutherans just meant that in, you know, pretty much that soon there's like five or six synods in Pennsylvania and theological differences. Okay. You know, five or ten pastors get theologically put out by the, what the synod is doing and they form their own synod.

Yeah. And we haven't stopped so. Well, I think that does it for this, this phase of history of Lutherans in America at least.

Okay.

Thank you so much for this part. I'm certainly looking forward to the next installment of this. Yeah. And thanks. Thank you so much for taking time to do this with us.

Yeah. Thanks, Mark, so much for being here. We appreciate it.

Glad to do it some more. Glad to do it.

Once again, thank you to Dr. Grandquist for explaining this much. We'll have Dr. Grandquist back on for two more episodes at least not the next one, but the episode after this. And that would be episode 32. So look for that in a few weeks and then also another future episode. So the next episode will be about the time frame after this. So we'll go from the beginning of immigration to America up to about the 1930s to talk about how Lutheranism enters the modern age and expands through the United States up to that point. But in between this, we're going to have some talk more about theology. We're talking about history here. We'll talk about some of the theology that goes with that. Our next episode you're going to love. We talk with Pastor Dave Dobert from Elgin, Illinois. He's written some books that help us dig into theology from a lay perspective, gives us some easy ways to talk and think about how our Lutheran theology is really an asset to ourselves and to the world. And we'll have another conversation with Pastor David Lowes about what Lutheranism has for the world going forward and how we can make an impact on the world. And that'll be great. Dr. Or yeah, it's actually Reverend Dr. Lowes is pastor at Mount Olivet Lutheran Church in Minneapolis, Minneapolis, and was the president of Philadelphia Seminary and was faculty at Luther before that. So. So we've got some really great episodes ahead of us, but thanks, Dr. Granquist. We've had some great conversations so far and we'll keep doing that. Our last episode, we had the catechism question was about the Book of Concord. And the question was what was considered by Lutherans to be the primary document in the Book of Concord? And we talked about this a little bit in this episode, and that is the unaltered Augsburg Confession. All the things that were listed there, the catechism, the creeds and the formula of Concord are all in the Book of Concord. But the unaltered Augsburg Confession is considered to be the seed, the core of all that. And Carol Johnson emailed mainstreetlutheransmail.com with the correct answer. Thank you, Carol. If you want to be like Carol and be a big winner for the next episode, just email your answer or send it to us on our social media. What about our catechism question for this week, Keith?

All right. Well, in keeping with our discussion about the Lutheran Reformation in Germany, our question for today is where did Martin Luther go into hiding during the height of the German Reformation?

Did he put his covers over his head?

So something like that? Yeah, I think he probably was tempted to. I wouldn't blame him.

Yeah.

Your answer options are A, in the castle church in Wittenberg near the university where he taught, B, as a sideshow in the Barnum and Bailey Circus, C, in the tower of Wartburg Castle, or D, in Emperor Charles V's wine cellar. And you will be able to respond in a number of ways that you're going to hear in just a minute. Main Street Lutherans is hosted by Keith Fair and Ben Fot. You can reach us by email@main streetlutherans gmail.com. our website is main street lutherans.com we're on the socials as Main Street Lutherans on Facebook, Instagram threads and YouTube. You can call and leave us a voicemail at 734-250-9554. The show is produced by Phote Media Productions. Until next time, go in peace, serve the Lord.

Thanks be to God.