Just found this interesting little blurb in a journal –
“The remark is heard on all sides that we are living in stirring times, that epochal events are happening in quick succession, that many pillars of the old order are crashing to the ground and great fundamental changes are introduced. In breath-less amazement, often mingled with undisguised terror, the inhabitants of the world observe the upheavals going on in the social and political sphere, and many do not conceal their feeling that humanity is, as it were, sitting on a vast powder-keg with ominous sparks dancing about, threatening any minute to cause a cataclysmic, all-destructive blast. It is not our intention here to discuss (all the “isms), or the bitter struggle between capital and labor, the scrapping of the traditional economic system under which our Republic developed and became strong; the evident ascendancy of Socialism, the existence of want and famine in the midst of more abundant crops than can be consumed, the lure of schemes promising happiness and security without toil by a sort of financial magic, the confusion and bewilderment pertaining to educational aims and objectives, and other topics of a politico-social nature which at present absorb much of the attention of thinking people.” (Slightly altered)
The author went on to talk about denominational confusion which to him was endemic among the Reformed with Presbyterians and Methodists and Baptist losing what he believed to be their identity and sinking into a kind of mushy creed that “we like Jesus”, while the robust confessions of their fathers was relegated to a “limbo of oblivion”. It reminded me of a day when a stranger came to church and asked to change his membership. When informed that he was from Nebraska and had moved to our community and wanted to join our church I had a hunch and asked the question, “what denomination was your church in Nebraska?” He didn’t know. Thinking it might be my pleasing personality that attracted him to Zion Lutheran in Grafton I was disappointed to hear him say. “I attended Zion in Nebraska. This is Zion. I figured I need to join Zion”. There is a depressing rational there that is inescapable, but depressing none the less.
Anyway the article was written in 1939 by William Arndt at Professor at Concordia St. Louis
