Religion: Springtime Heresy

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U.S. Protestants can still be agitated about heresy. Three Wisconsin pastors have been tried for heretical views by the Northwest Synod of the United Lutheran Church in America (TIME, Aug. 8). Two of them, George Crist Jr. and Victor K. Wrigley, were convicted and suspended from their pastorates; the other, John H. Gerberding, was acquitted, but resigned. Pastor Wrigley's congregation has refused to obey the suspension order. Gist of the charges against them: refusal to accept Biblical authority on essentials of Lutheran dogma, notably the virgin birth and doubting Christ's physical resurrection and ascension. In the current Christianity and Crisis (edited by U.S. Protestantism's most renowned theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr), Congregational Minister Clarence Kilde, of Oconomowoc, Wis., fiercely defends the accused heretics.

"American Protestantism is never very profound in its heresy charges," he writes. "[The charges] fix on the virgin birth. Freudians may have their own explanation of this. But obviously, what is more popular than the Christmas story? Nontheological Americans in a secular age can be counted on to know at least the Christmas story . . .

"Now that the virgin birth is neither a great historical doctrine nor by itself profound theology ought to be quite evident in reviewing a few basic observations. Chronologically the oldest gospel, that of Mark, does not mention the idea. The oldest manuscript of the Gospel according to St. Matthew, the Syriac, concludes the genealogical table thus, 'And Joseph begat Jesus.'* The two greatest interpreters of Jesus in the New Testament are the author of the Fourth Gospel, and he who wrote more than one-half of the New Testament, Paul the Apostle. To both we owe the profound, classic doctrine of the Incarnation, 'And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us' (John became 1:14); and again, 'But when the time had fully come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman' (Galatians 4:4). The Incarnation, yes, but for these two writers, responsible for giving us most of the New Testament, the virgin birth was not dignified enough to mention. For virgin birth was a contemporary, popular thought pattern explaining the unusual greatness of such men as Pythagoras, Plato, Augustus Caesar." Pastor Kilde sarcastically suspects that the real crime of the three ministers was that "they were not tending to their knitting." They might not have got into trouble, he suggests, if they had been "more concerned with building financial and membership statistics. After all, a sister synod of the Midwest, the Evangelical Lutheran Church, has reported establishing a new parish every 18 days . . . Go ahead and repeat the Apostles' Creed, but be sure to be oblivious to people's inarticulate disturbance over the meaning of the creed. At denominational headquarters it is statistics that are important, not spiritual sincerity or theological integrity." Lutheranism in the Midwest, says Kilde, is "a diaspora culture. This is to say theology stopped developing with the immigrant fathers of the church in the Mississippi Valley," whereas Lutheranism in Europe kept theologically up to date.