St Louis Theological Monthly

In the 1880's a Theological war broke out among the conservative Midwest Lutherans.  Walther had been investigating what the Bible and Confessions say instead of just what the 17th Century claimed it said and was quite publicly teaching that God's choice of us is the stable ground for our Faith and not that God foreknew who would have faith and picked them...  For saying this, Walther was attacked for heresy by some Schmidt, who formed a German language journal "Altes und Neues" for the purpose, and Loy who founded the Columbus Theological Journal and whose Lutheran Standard was the, uh, standard magazine for English-speaking Lay people in the Synodical Conference.

Missouri had the tools for the conflict in German between "Lutheraner" and "Lehre und Wehre".  But they didn't have anything in English, and English was obviously the future.  They had to get their side out to English speakers, even if the main debate was in German.

And so they created an English Journal.  It ran for almost 2 years.  Evidently they then published the complete run in a single volume...  In these two years, they present their side (eg. the 13 theses in August 1881 issue), ask tough questions of what Ohio was saying about them (eg. The New Confession of the Ohio Synod in Dec 1881 and the many issue explanation about why we left the Ohio Synod) and some out and out polemics against anti-missouri polemical tracts (See the "Cheap Tract" in the Oct/Nov 1882 issue for a taste of the polemics of each side)

Once they had presented their views, they seemed happy on letting a new magazine take over - namely the Lutheran Witness.

Source for this edition is Google Books. http://books.google.com/books?id=AbknAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false

Most of it was straightforward, but I wanted to tear my hair out at the review of the Jacobs Book of Concord (V 2 p 92ff).  I've had a year of German, but it was all in latin letters.  This journal, when it used a german term used latin letters.  BUT NOT HERE.  It was a big mix of German, English and Latin, using a black-face font for the German.  OCR didn't handle it that well, and so I had to type quite a bit of it by hand.  But then it was a bit confusing having all three languages in the same font, so I re-blackfaced the German.  I did not re-insert long s's, but used the freely available font Unifractur Cook, available from http://unifraktur.sourceforge.net/cook.html

The result is admittedly not the same as the original, but the font variety helps clear up which language at a time while being easy to transfer into the current standard characters if you want it that way.

If you want to see a bit of what I had to deal with, check out http://books.google.com/books?id=AbknAAAAYAAJ&pg=RA1-PA92&img=1&zoom=3&hl=en&sig=ACfU3U1bH7-XOkRU0ydo8qQc9cEpxTTBpg&ci=109%2C797%2C781%2C645&edge=0

This resource is evidence of when the battle was white-hot between Missouri and Ohio, and so is useful context for the Brief Statement for when they were officially talking with each other 50 years later.

SDG

Ken McGuire