THE GREAT DIVIDE

I was puzzled by the statement “Only the Southern Baptist Convention has rejected diversity in favor of fundamentalist certainty.”

This same kind of thing happened to the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod in the ‘60s and ‘70s. In 1973, then-president Jacob Preus persuaded the church convention to accept his “Statement of Scriptural and Confessional Principles.” This followed the same line of thought that the Southern Baptists are now debating: Scriptural inerrancy and literal interpretation of the Bible.

As a result, the vast majority of the faculty and students of Concordia Seminary formed a separate school. This moderate minority formed a new denomination in 1976, the Assn. of Evangelical Lutheran Churches, which became part of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America when that formed in 1988.

EDWARD BUSCH

CHAPLAIN,

SOLHEIM LUTHERAN HOME

Los Angeles