SmithL, I’m not trying to start a fight with you. However, you must realize that the former LCA was already a severely compromised group in 1962 when it was formed from four other “Lutheran” groups. Your experience would very much have depended on which of these four your home congregation would have sprung from, because some were more theologically conservative than others.
To be noted, however, is that the largest of the four bodies was called the United Lutheran Church in America, which was itself a merger group formed from the General Synod, the General Council, and the General Synod of the South. The name you want to look for in history here is Samuel Simon Schmucker (1799-1873), who drank deeply from the theological well that sprang from the so-called Enlightenment (when it comes to theology, Endarkenment would be a better term). He is, in many ways, the spiritual godfather of the LCA and today’s ELCA. He was not Lutheran in his theology, and the ULCA, then LCA, and now ELCA has been paying an ever and ever higher price since then on account of the theological tares he sowed among the wheat of sound confessional Lutheran theology.
The other Lutheran groups, the LC-MS, the WELS, and the ELS have a completely different history and theological foundations.
We’re in no danger of fighting about any of this. I came from the ULCA, way back when, and agree with your conclusions about that branch. My only point is that the quota system used in creating the “New” Lutheran Church gave the AELC more voice than it should have had.
The heritage of the ULCA/LCA (of which I was once a member) not only includes Samuel Simon Schmucker (1799-1873) but also Charles Porterfield Krauth (1823–1883).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Porterfield_Krauth
Pretty different, isn’t he? And I’m speaking as one who was mentored by pastors who graduated from the OLD Philadelphia Seminary (before it too became radical/liberal), of which Krauth was an early leader. Krauth’s influence eclipsed that of Schmucker in the ULCA/LCA, which after all held to the Augsburg Confession and the doctrine of the Real Presence, and other Lutheran touchstones that Schmucker denied, and ended up with an Orthodox-inflenced liturgy.
The plain fact is that faithful, conservative Lutherans from every church body that formed the ELCA blame the others for the eventual sorry fall of American Lutheranism. ALC people blame the LCA “Eastern establishment”, LCA people blame those “soft Minnesota liberal pietists” of the ALC, and nearly everybody blames Seminex!!!!
With much more justification, many people blame that organizing committee for the ELCA back in the late 1980s, infiltrated by stealth gaysbian activists like Barbara Lundblad, as well as by the quota and “inclusive language” crowds.
Hopefully, those of us who have gone on to become Orthodox or Roman Catholic have moved beyond the blame game. (That’s part of spiritual growth, after all.) We see that nearly ALL American and European Protestantism has experienced the same cultural, theological, and spiritual rot as the ELCA. Therefore, there is something much deeper going on, which the Lutheran “blame game” cannot address.