Word: synods
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Arlis Ehlen, a professor of Old Testament studies at Concordia Seminary in St. Louis, follows this mildly liberal interpretive trend. Many members of his denomination, the 2.9 million-member Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, do not. Because of the conflict and because the Missouri Synod controls Concordia, Ehlen, 40, finds himself at the center of Protestantism's biggest heresy fuss in a decade. "My own temperament is to stay away from such disputes," he says with some surprise. "My views are quite typical of those held by all the biblical teachers here...
Error-Free. The case came to a head last December when Ehlen went up before the seminary's board for a lifetime tenure appointment. The meeting was also attended by Church President Jacob Preus. Preus, former head of the Missouri Synod's other seminary, Concordia of Springfield, Ill., is a theological conservative who holds that the Bible is error-free and that such stories as the Exodus must be taken at face value...
Preus was not satisfied. This month he sent all Missouri Synod pastors and teachers his own five-page set of theological principles. In a covering letter Preus postulated a sort of Domino Theory: "It is only a short step from a denial of the miraculous elements surrounding the greatest redemptive act of the Old Testament (the Exodus) to a denial of ... the miracles of the incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ and His Resurrection from the dead...
...Lately, his problems have been mostly temporal, as the Greek government in Athens pressured him with humiliating ultimatums in an effort to either throttle his power or force him out of office (TIME, Feb. 28). Last week, for a change, the archbishop was experiencing ecclesiastical complications. At the annual synod of the Cypriot hierarchy, three bishops invoked a canon law-unused for at least a hundred years-forbidding bishops to hold church and state posts simultaneously. They moved that Makarios resign the presidency...
...synod can force Makarios out as archbishop, although this would be dangerously unpopular. By making a show of his popularity, Makarios adroitly underscored the point that any overt attempt to topple him would raise the possibility of civil...