Word: concordiae
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Outwardly, the tailored lawns and brown Gothic buildings of Concordia Seminary in St. Louis give every evidence of serenity. The very name of the school-the 135-year-old academic font of the 2.8 million-member Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod-is Latin for "harmony." Last week, however, Concordia, the largest Lutheran seminary in the world (690 students), was closed down by a student and faculty boycott. The reason: Concordia's president, the Rev. John H. Tietjen, 45, had been ousted on charges amounting to heresy...
...conservatives have long been disturbed by liberal trends at Concordia, which has allowed its professors to inter pret Scripture by the historical-critical method. Using that system, scholars consider the Scriptures in their historical and literary settings, which may suggest that some accounts are myth, others metaphor. Tietjen has forthrightly de fended his faculty against attacks, arguing that God's word was never meant to be judged so factually. Last summer Preus was re-elected overwhelmingly at the Synod convention in New Orleans...
...also given an explicit mandate to clean Concordia's house of doctrinal error, and a new seminary board with a conservative majority was elected. Last week the board "suspended" Tietjen-in effect fired him, pending a long series of hearings. The 20-page list of charges accused the president of, among other things, "holding, defending, allowing and fostering false doctrine," and "rebelling against the Synod...
Since his election, Preus has been waging a war of attrition against a number of somewhat more liberal theologians at the synod's distinguished Concordia Theological Seminary of St. Louis, and particularly against its president, the Rev. Dr. John Tietjen. The progressive majority on Tietjen's faculty hold that the Bible is the inspired word of God because it has the power to bring men to salvation, but they believe that insistence on inerrancy can actually obscure the Gospels' message...
...bitter fight apparently lies ahead for Concordia's faculty. Tenured dissenters who do not resign may find themselves facing church heresy trials. Church officials, in turn, could well face civil suits from dismissed teachers, and the seminary risks losing its accreditation from the American Association of Theological Schools. "Some professors will fight to the bitter end," Preus told TIME, "but if we don't act, the church will lose its doctrinal character...