LUTHERAN THEOLOGICAL REVIEW - Brock University

20 LUTHERAN THEOLOGICAL REVIEW XV
that not the mercy of God and the most holy merit of Christ alone, but that
also in us there is a cause of the election of God, for the sake of which God
has elected us unto eternal life.” 6 Schmidt continued to agitate, however.
Meetings were held in Chicago, September and October 1880, and
Milwaukee, January 1881. Nothing was resolved. Finally in Fort Wayne, in
May 1881, Walther laid down a definitive set of thirteen theses on
predestination. The Synodical Conference met in Chicago, October 1882,
and refused to seat Schmidt. As a result, the Ohio Synod withdrew from the
Synodical conference. The Norwegian Synod withdrew in 1883. It has been
said that the press of events surrounding the controversy is probably the
reason why Walther never produced a systematic theology. Sadly, the
Synodical Conference “never became the unifying agent her founders had
envisioned”. 7 So painful was this controversy that Lutheran theologians have
been hesitant to take up the doctrine of Predestination ever since. 8
THE CURRENT DEBATE
While the Lutherans in America have pretty much kept silent on
Predestination, the Calvinists and Arminians have continued in controversy
with each other. Both streams are represented in Evangelicalism in this
country. Clark H. Pinnock, the Evangelical scholar who made a name for
himself by espousing biblical inerrancy and later denying it, took up the
subject of election in a 1989 collection of essays entitled Grace Unlimited. 9
As the title indicates, Pinnock and his fellow authors stake out a basically
Arminian position and specifically oppose the Calvinist:
We are implacably opposed to any attempt to limit grace and the atonement.
… We are opposing a powerful effort in Protestant orthodoxy to limit the
gospel and to cast a dark shadow over its universal availability and intention,
manifesting itself most overtly in classical Calvinism. This theology which,
in its dreadful doctrine of double predestination, calls into question God’s
desire to save all sinners and which as a logical consequence denies Christ
died to save the world at large, is simply unacceptable exegetically,
theologically, and morally, and to it we must say an emphatic “No!” 10
6 Schmelder, 22.
7 Schmelder, 27.
8 I am indebted to Dr John Wohlrabe for the following observation: “It [the debate over
election] continued to simmer through the 1920s (Free Conferences in the Midwest 1901-
1905, the Layenbewegung of 1915, the Intersynodical Conferences through the 1920s). It was
ignored after the death of Franz Pieper (1932) in subsequent talks with the American Lutheran
Church (1930 formed from the Ohio, Iowa, and Buffalo Synods).”
9 Clark H. Pinnock, ed., Grace Unlimited (Minneapolis: Bethany Fellowship, 1989).
10 Pinnock, 12.