Confess comes from a Latin word about speaking: confiteri, to acknowledge openly. In June 1948, three days after Germany changed its money, 311 German churchmen came to a Swabian spa to read the Augsburg Confession with Missouri. The question of Scripture came early and was never argued through.
Ebenezer is Hebrew for "stone of help." It is also the name of a Welsh tune that two Bad Boll men turned into one of the Missouri Synod’s best-loved hymns. Did the conferences have anything to do with "Thy Strong Word"? The documents say more than a coincidence and less than a cause.
Decide is a Latin word about cutting: decidere, to cut off. In February 1948 a cable from Stuttgart demanded a cut — Bad Boll, or Hermann Sasse in Saint Louis. No document records the decision ever being made. The file simply goes cold, and that is the story.
Conference is a Latin word about carrying: conferre, to bring things together. The documents that planned Bad Boll kept reaching for a different word — one with "against" hidden inside it — and the difference tells much about what the enterprise thought it was for.
Relief is a Latin word about weight: relevare, to lift again. Before the Missouri Synod sent Germany a single theologian, it sent $1.9 million worth of milk, clothing, and books — and a telegram its editors printed exactly as the wire delivered it.
Emergency is a Latin word about water: what is emergent is what rises up out of it. The machine that carried the Missouri Synod to Germany first broke the surface in 1932, on a letterhead, formed to save the Synod from its own debts.
Three hundred theologians came to a spa town to reconsider the Augsburg Confession. The name of the place is a bath; the academy that received them was three years old; and the house, it turns out, was Blumhardt's own.
He was born in Minnesota, raised in China, trained at a St. Louis seminary, and spent his life writing the history of Württembergers who left. Then he came back with an American army.
The last post said the next would come in September. A reader in Württemberg had other ideas, and sent three pages that changed the book.
A hometown paper in Moline recorded a young man's summer in 1953. Nineteen years later he wrote the sentence this book takes as its warrant.