It is agony to be a witness to the realization of the worst fears of our Missouri Fathers. What they feared more than anything else was subjection to "an arrogant clericalism" and domination by the "hierarchical oriented" (terms used by Dallman -Dau- Engelder in Walther and the Church, p. 50).They had just recently escaped these ecclesiastical plagues and fear of their return dominated their thinking while they were organizing the Missouri Synod. They responded enthusiastically to Walther's treatise on the church and the ministry because it laid out the principles according to which they could pattern their practices to protect themselves against the Episcopalianizing and Romanizing tendencies dominant in the Lutheranism of their day. But what they took such pains to protect themselves - and us - against has now thoroughly infected Synod. Old Missouri has passed away.

It is agony to hear it claimed that the revolutionary principles and practices that have been developed over the past 24 years in Synod are in harmony with those of Old Missouri. The Commission on Theology and Church Relations, in its report, "The Ministry," delineates the practices that have been adopted since 1962 and defends them on the basis of the same principles that underlie the Wisconsin Synod's view of church and ministry.

Even the Wisconsin Synod acknowledges that these principles are antithetical to the principles inherent in Dr. Walther's theses, upon which Old Missouri's practices were based. Yet at the end of its report the CTCR appends Dr. Walther's ten theses on the ministry with the astounding announcement that it is doing so "as a testimony to the theological and practical consistency of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod's view of the ministry." Such deceit is an indication of the depths to which an episcopal mind set will drive men in their efforts to disguise an illegitimate system with the mask of legitimacy.