Word: synods
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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...
...clash has been building ever since 1969, when the Rev. Jacob A.O. ("Jack") Preus was elected to a four-year term as president of the Synod. Preus, now 54, came in as a champion of conservative Synod members who believe staunchly in the "inerrancy" of the Bible, including its factual accuracy. Thus Preus and his followers hold that Adam and Eve were historical individuals - a position, they contend, that is vital to such doctrines as original...
...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...
...Bible has been shaping up ever since 1969, when a grass-roots alliance of conservatives succeeded in electing the Rev. Jacob A.O. ("Jack") Preus as president of the denomination. Preus, a former professor of Greek and Latin as well as Scripture, is no simple fundamentalist; like other orthodox Missouri Synod theologians, he believes that some parts of the Bible are poetic or symbolic-such as the Book of Revelation. But he also believes that what the Bible presents as factual is factual, and he holds what could be called a theological domino theory: if a man denies...
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...