The Conferences

Between 1948 and 1954 the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod held seven summers of theological conferences with German and Scandinavian Lutherans. About 1,800 European clergy attended one or more of them — the vast majority from churches not in fellowship with Missouri. That fact is the whole difficulty and the whole point.

This page is a reference summary: what met, where, under whom, and what each year was about. The full rosters of essayists and co-essayists, session by session, appear in the book.

1948 · The Augsburg Confession

Printed on the mimeographed program as The Significance of the Augustana for the Ecclesiastical and Theological Development Both in the United States and in Germany. Bad Boll, Württemberg, in three nine-day series: 23 June–2 July, 6–15 July, and 16–25 July. Chairman: John W. Behnken.

Attendance, per the commissioners’ final report: 110, 80, and 121 — 311 in all. Contemporary tallies differ (304 and 307 also survive), a discrepancy that reflects the currency reform of 20 June 1948, which took effect three days before the first session opened and disrupted travel and registration.

A separate conference on Christian education, run by the VELKD under Bishop Hans Meiser, preceded the three free theological series.

1949 · The Way of Salvation

In full: The Way of Salvation According to Scripture and the Lutheran Confessions. Two tracks ran in parallel — the only year the National Lutheran Council took part in the enterprise. The NLC track, chaired by Julius Bodensieck, met under its own theme, “The Lutheran Church in the World Today”; Missouri’s two conferences were chaired by Herman Harms. Thereafter the NLC held its own separate conferences with the VELKD.

1950 · The Church’s Commission and Authority

No conference met at Bad Boll this year. The three sessions were held instead at Bad Harzburg in the Harz Mountains, at the Löhe deaconess institute at Neuendettelsau, and at the Evangelisches Johannesstift in Berlin-Spandau. Herman Harms chaired all three; Landesbischöfe Meiser and Mitzenheim shared the chair at Neuendettelsau and the Johannesstift respectively.

1951 · The Church Under the Word of the Living Christ

Chairman: Herman Harms, all three sessions. A spring press announcement described conferences “of American and European Lutheran churchmen” to be held in England, France, and Germany. The British leg — Bad Boll in Britain, on the doctrine of Scripture — met 4–6 September 1951.

No session-by-session record of the England and France legs has been located.

1952 · The Proclamation of God’s Wrath and God’s Grace

Only two sessions, both at the Evangelisches Johannesstift, Berlin-Spandau — the year was compressed by the Lutheran World Federation assembly at Hanover, which the delegation attended immediately beforehand. Vice President Walter Zimmermann and Oberkirchenrat Johannes Neumann took charge.

In August of this year, days after Hanover, a separate meeting at Uelzen appointed the committee that became the first executive committee of what is now the International Lutheran Council.

1953 · Christ and the Church

The session scheduled for Berlin was cancelled after the workers’ uprising in East Germany that June and the inter-zone tensions that followed; the two remaining German-soil conferences met at Bad Boll. A third session ran in parallel at Paris — the “Free Conferences in Paris and Bad Boll” of 1953. Chairman: Herman Harms.

1954 · “It Is Written”

The last full year. The delegation’s route again included a British leg, opening at the Lutheran Church House, Collingham Gardens, London, before the party continued to Bad Boll. Chairman: Herman Harms, sharing the task in Berlin with Zimmermann and Neumann.

This is the culminating year of the verbal-inspiration debate that runs through the whole series. A number of the essays were translated and published in the Concordia Theological Monthly, and in December 1954 the commissioners arranged the mailing of Walter Roehrs’s “Das Wort im Wort” to 15,000 Lutheran pastors in Germany.

Who came

Bishops who attended one or more sessions included Hans Meiser (Bavaria), Hanns Lilje (Hanover), Julius Bender (Baden), Theophil Wurm and his successor Martin Haug (Württemberg), Teodors Grīnbergs (Latvia), Wilhelm Halfmann (Schleswig-Holstein), Moritz Mitzenheim (Thuringia), and Behnken and Bente (Schwerin).

More than fifty European professors, pastors, and church officials read essays across the seven years, drawn from Tübingen, Heidelberg, Erlangen, Marburg, Berlin, Münster, Jena, Paris, Lund, Uppsala, Oslo, Neuendettelsau, Bethel/Bielefeld, and Hamburg, among other centres.

The Free Church conferences

Alongside the conferences with the Landeskirchen catalogued above, the enterprise also met with the German Free Churches at Gemünden, Berlin-Steglitz, and Oberursel. These sites are attested, but no session programmes for them survive in the files read for the book, and no individual years are assigned to them. They are recorded here as attested sites rather than tabulated conferences.

How it ended

The conferences were cancelled in 1958 for financial reasons. The treasurer resigned that year for reasons of health. The book leaves the causation where the sources leave it.

Sources

This summary rests chiefly on three accounts, which do not always agree and are not silently reconciled:

• Paul M. Bretscher, “Review of ‘Bad Boll’ Conferences,” Concordia Theological Monthly 25, no. 11 (November 1954): 834–48 — the single retrospective spanning all seven summers.
• Hans Spalteholz, “The Bad Boll Enterprise, 1948–1954” (B.D. thesis, Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, June 1955) — reproduces the mimeographed session programmes year by year.
• Karl J. R. Arndt, “Missouri and Bad Boll, 1948,” Concordia Historical Institute Quarterly 52, no. 1 (Spring 1979): 18–31, with F. E. Mayer, The Story of Bad Boll (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1949).

Where Bretscher and Spalteholz describe the conferences at different grain, or disagree outright, the book footnotes the discrepancy rather than resolving it quietly. The complete tables of sub-themes and essayists — American and German, session by session — are printed as Appendix C of Bad Boll: Missouri at the Crossroads.

Questions and corrections are welcome at info@badbollbook.com.