Strangers to Sisters - Wisconsin Lutheran Seminary Library: Essays

Paul, MN the possibility Ohio and Iowa joining the Synodical Conference looked like
more and more like a genuine reality. By 1917, the Missouri, Wisconsin, Ohio, and Iowa
Synods (the Buffalo Synod joining later) had turned the unofficial action into an official
board that would meet for the next 12 years to resolve the theological differences that had
separated them.
But there was a problem with the procedure that had spawned these various sets
of theses. First, using the Madison Settlement as a basis for discussion was a bad idea. It
was a unionistic document created by a unionistic procedure. The Madison Settlement
had been produced only one year after previous union committees had declared that they
had come to an impasse. Yet, after the appointment of new committee members, and in
the miraculously short span of a year, the Madison Settlement claimed all past differences
now settled.
This should have raised red flags to say the least. Rather than real resolution, the
document was a cleverly-worded compromise fueled political and cultural pressures to
form a single Norwegian Lutheran church body in America. O.K. Teisberg gives this
insightful anecdote about some of the pressure tactics used and double talk employed by
the Madison Settlement’s chief architect, H.G. Stub,
During the Synod meeting at Sioux Falls, 1914, Dr. Stub
stopped me on the street…and said to me I now must be a
good boy and vote for union. I must not be stubborn as
before. I then asked him, “Are the church bodies now
united in faith?” He answered, “Yes.” I then asked him if
he himself had changed position in doctrine…to this he
answered, “No.” I further asked him if the United Church
had changed its standpoint. To this he answered the United
Church stood on the same point as before. I asked him,
then, how he could say that there was unity in doctrine?
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