“Remember your leaders who spoke the word of God to you. Consider the outcome of their way of life and imitate their faith. (Hebrews 13:7)
2011 is the two-hundredth anniversary of the birth of Carl Ferdinand Wilhelm Walther (October 25, 1811 – May 7, 1887) He was the first president of the Lutheran Church - Missouri Synod and is still the most influential pastor and theologian of our church body. This year I will be dedicating each of my newsletter articles to some aspect of his life and/or teaching. There is still much that Walther has to say to us today, even 200 years after his birth.
CFW Walther was born in the village of Langenchursdorf in a part of Germany known as Saxony. His father and grandfather were pastors in Langenchursdorf, and his great grandfather was also a pastor. His childhood built a foundation of faith in God’s grace and mercy in Jesus Christ. At the age of three his father gave him a three-penny piece for learning this hymn verse:
Jesus, thy blood and righteousness My beauty are, my glorious dress;
Wherin before my God I’ll stand When I shall reach the heavenly land.
Ferdinand went off to boarding school as a young boy. During that time Rationalism was broadly accepted in the German lands. He was taught that the Bible could not be trusted and that Christianity was nothing more than simple moralistic teachings. He would later recall, “I was eighteen years old when I left the Gymnasium (high school), and I had never heard a sentence taken from the Word of God out of a believing mouth. I never had a Bible or a Catechism, but a miserable Leitfaden [guide] which only contained morality.
He wanted to study music, but his father offered him a Thaler (about $40) a week if he would study theology. The Rationalism taught at the university only intensified. It troubled him so much, that he joined a pietistic student group called the Holy Club. They emphasized that we must go through great personal struggles to be saved. This only led him into more despair, as he wondered if he were truly saved. Regardless of what he tried, he was unable to find a forgiving, loving God.
But then three things happened through which God worked to point Walther to His grace and mercy in Jesus Christ. He often visited the Barthel home in which he was always comforted and directed to the Gospel. Second, he wrote to Pastor Martin Stephan in Dresden who had attracted a large following as a preacher of the Gospel. When the reply from Pastor Stephan came, Walther prayed fervently before opening it that God would not permit him to be further misled. When he finally opened the letter, he later recalled, “When I read his reply, I felt as though I have been translated from hell to heaven. Tears of distress and sorrow were transformed into tears of heavenly joy.” The third experience was that he became sick and had to take a leave of absence from his studies. He returned home and began to read Luther’s Works from his father’s library.
The false teaching of his day left Walther confused, frustrated, and doubting his own salvation, but God was at work through different situations in his life to point him to the Gospel of God’s love through Jesus Christ. He would learn that the Gospel must always predominate in both preaching and teaching as he would later write in the final thesis of his work Law and Gospel. Our Lord used these experiences in his early life to enable him to shape the LC-MS into a church body that is grounded in the Scriptures and centered on the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
Yours in Christ,
Pastor Don Hougard