Strangers to Sisters - Wisconsin Lutheran Seminary Library: Essays

None of this is to say the Wauwatosa method ever sought to despise the fathers or
the heritage that was bequeathed to the church through them. The Wauwatosa method
simply believes the best way of honoring the fathers is to have every generation directly
study the Scriptures and proclaim the unchanging truth to each age. Martin Westerhaus
has ably captured the “accent” of the Wauwatosa men with this analysis,
For us in the Wisconsin Synod for whom this heritage (both
Hoenecke-Walther as well as Wauwatosa) has been in the
family for three or four generations, the familiar words of
Goethe apply:
Was du erebt von deinen Vatern hast,
Erwirb es um es zu besitzen.
We need to study and reflect on these truths again and
again lest we lose them. 111
The Norwegian Accent
The Norwegians, on the other hand, are fond of talking about “the old paths” or
“the faith of our fathers.” Far from keeping the father’s writings and expressions on
reserve, they actively employ them, in their proper context, to show the unity of the
church’s confession. One, of course, sees immediately that the Norwegian accent is
created from the historical circumstances surrounding the founding of the ELS. The
faithful few needed to show that, regardless of how much of the membership of the
Norwegian Synod went into the merger, they were spiritually and confessionally the true
heirs of Preus, Ottesen, and Koren. These words from H.M. Tjernagel’s 1937 address to
the ELS have the clear “Norwegian” accent,
111 Martin Westerhaus, “The Wauwatosa Theology: The Men and Their Message,” in Wauwatosa Theology
Volume I, edited by Curtis Jahn (Milwaukee: Northwestern Publishing House, 1997), 85.
63