The church in motion: Wilhelm Loehe, mission, and the church today

In recent years there has been much scholarship into those historical figures who have largely disappeared and been forgotten but who are now being retrieved so that their wisdom might be shared with the church. Wilhelm Loehe is one of those figures. Although there has been a resurgence of interest in Loehe, he still remains an obscure, shadowy figure in Lutheran history.

I want to explore some themes in his theology of mission. Although it is not my main purpose, I hope to lay to rest some misconceptions about Loehe's theology. Nearly everybody who has heard of him and has a passing familiarity with him assumes that his theology is largely either that of the nineteenth century Erlangen School (Neo-Lutheranism) or a repristinated version of Lutheran Orthodoxy. (1) Both of these interpretations are true only in so far as they mislead. At important points in his theology Loehe departs from Lutheran Orthodoxy and from the Erlangen school. Furthermore, both of these movements are about doctrine, and, as Christian Weber rightly points out, "the church had not only a teaching obligation, but also a 'gathering' obligation." (2) His theology is creative and innovative. Finally, I intend to consider possibilities for retrieving Loehe's theology of mission for the beginning of the third millennium.

Loehe always had a strong evangelical sense of mission. As a student at the university he organized a mission society and distributed religious tracts. (3) On the day of his ordination he prayed that he would receive a sign, a word, from the mouth of God. He opened his Bible and three times was confronted with the commissioning text in Isa 6:8-10 which speaks of going out to the people with a message that they will not hear. Loehe responded, "Here I am, Lord, send me." (4) This pietistic sense of service in the work of mission and proclamation was a predominant motif in Loehe's own discipleship and in what he asked of others.

In 1840, he read an appeal for help in North America. The Lutheran church in North America was in desperate need of pastors and others willing to serve the German emigrants there. Almost immediately Loehe wrote an article, which generated a missionary enthusiasm that he had not foreseen. Loehe was flooded with donations. This was the beginning of Loehe's missionary activity in the U.S. At first Loehe and his colleague Johann Wucherer did not know what to do with the money that they received for the "German mission in North America." The problem was soon solved by the appearance of a volunteer, Adam Ernst. Loehe decided to train Ernst in the basics of theology and provide him with a general education so that Ernst could serve as a school teacher. Soon after, Ernst was joined in his instruction by another volunteer, Georg Burger. These two men were instructed and in 1842 commissioned for missionary service in North America.

In the final decade of his life, Loehe turned his attention to a quiet reformation and renewal of the church by establishing diaconal orders or associations. Already in 1849 he was instrumental in the founding of a missionary society, the Society for Inner and Outer Mission in the Sense of the Lutheran Church, and, four years later, the founding of a female diaconate, the Lutheran Association for Women's Diaconal Service, which consecrated its motherhouse a year later in 1854 in Neuendettelsau. These two societies aimed to quietly (and sometimes not so quietly) reform and renew the Lutheran church in Bavaria. (5)

The women's diaconate had a twofold aim. Its more specific aim was for the awakening and formation of a sense of service to those who were suffering among the Lutheran population in Bavaria, particularly among women. Its second and broader--and one might say more subversive--aim was the continuing formation of the "apostolic-episcopal church." Its life was organized around service and worship, specifically Lutheran worship.

Despite his earnest efforts to develop "apostolic" communities (notably the communities in Michigan), Loehe did not succeed. He died in 1872 a disappointed man whose goals, he felt, for the Bavarian church had not been adequately realized.

Themes in Loehe's theology of mission and ministry

There are many themes or motifs that could be discussed. However I want to focus on a few that I think are particularly significant for his understanding of ministry and mission: (1) community and fellowship, (2) catholicity and unity, (3) apostolicity, (4) confession, (5) Word and sacrament, and (6) context.

1. Community and fellowship

Loehe wrote:

A landscape painted with the most bewitching brush of a master artist
leaves us unsatisfied, no matter how beautiful it is, if there is no
human form in it. There is a strange melancholy and anxiety which seizes
a person when they see that they are forsaken by their fellow human
beings, even if only in a painting. Naturally a person feels this
anxious melancholy even more when he views an actual spot in nature
which is devoid of humans. Yes, the more beautiful the spot in which we
find no one like ourselves, the more bitter is our loneliness. Such a
spot is more like a wilderness than a paradise. For those who are lonely
all the treasures of the world are no substitute for companionship.
Narrower than a prison is the wide earth to those who are abandoned and
lonely. From the very beginning humans were so created that they cannot
be happy alone.
  I shall say more. As long as a person is along they cannot even be
blessed. (6)