45930 Divine Call CTCR final - The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod

pastor’s salary, they can hire and fire him at will, thus treating “the call of
the preacher as nothing other than a contract of the kind made with a cowor
sow-herder.” 41 Second, Walther rejects the practice of licensing candidates
for a set period of time as had been customary among Lutherans in
eastern America. In 1846 he wrote, “Unfortunately it has become customary
in our country to hire ministers for one year, even as we hire our servants
and cattle herders. . . . Even in emergencies these calls with a time
limit cannot be justified.” 42
On the basis of the divine nature of the call itself Walther argued
against the idea of a temporary call. The very idea that a divine call could
be issued for a set number of years was a contradiction in terms. Since God
is the one who issues the call, it is also God who terminates a person’s service
in a particular location, and this for one of two reasons. First, God
issues another call to that person to serve elsewhere. Second, God removes
the individual altogether from office due to the false teaching or immoral
life of the one who holds it.
Franz Pieper also resisted an arbitrarily determined tenure of a call. In
an article in Lehre und Wehre (1898) he was willing, however, to distinguish
between a call for temporary assistance and a temporary call. In the former
case, he looked to the extenuating circumstances and the motivation
behind such a call. He wrote that it is important to determine whether a
congregation could issue a call for temporary assistance as a result of a pastor’s
“illness,” “physical weakness,” or “because of being overburdened
with work” (for example, by taking over as a District President). In such
cases, he says, the call for temporary help stays within the bounds of the
divine order and has nothing in common with the objectionable “temporary
call.” 43
Pieper rejects the so-called “temporary call,” the essence of which does
not consist in the idea that a call is limited as to time, but rather that human
beings arbitrarily limit a call as to time. That is to say, they want to determine
how long a pastor is to be active at a certain place. Like Walther,
Pieper argues that since God places a pastor into office he also determines
the length of time that the pastor serves. “If God has placed them, men
dare not transfer them at their discretion” (emphasis added). 44 Pieper then
proceeds to discuss two ways in which God removes an individual from
office. The first is through a transfer (effected through a congregation). The
41
C. F. W. Walther, Americanisch-Lutherische Pastoraltheologie (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing
House, 1906), 427.
42
Cited from Der Lutheraner, III (1846), 8 in Carl S. Mundinger, Government in the Missouri
Synod (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1947), 197.
43
Franz Pieper, “Einige den Beruf zum Predigtamt bretreffende Fragen,” Lehre und Wehre 44
(1898): 339.
44
Ibid., 340.
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