Is there anywhere to get a good overview of what you guys are talking about?
Yea just do what Cos mentioned. Goggle "crisis in LCMS and you will have hours of reading.
One such supposedly contentious person that nobody wants to hear about is Herman Otten and Cascione. But rest assured Otten might be questionable in certain things he has been a Christian soldier for the confessional stance since 1957 and after when he helped quench the takeover of Seminex. Here are some articles about him.
Go to Reclaiming Walther or
http://www.concordtx.org/ to find views from Cascione and other concerned individuals about LCMS.
Here are some articles about Otten. He has been accused of being anti-semitic but if you read more of his works they are considered very plausible. He is renowned enough to be quoted many times in "Historical Review" and has been in a national movement to bring out the truth about the holocaust.
Herman Otten and the Conservative Movement
In the spring of 1960 Walter Lang (Founder of Creationism) contacted Dr. William Beck, who had served as his instructor during several summers in the early 1950s when he did graduate work at Concordia Seminary in St. Louis. Dr. Beck was translating the Bible into modern English. At about that time there was discussion on publishing a conservative-oriented theological paper. Five years later, when Lang wrote to Beck offering to assist with such a project, Beck replied that his time was completely taken up with the Bible translation, and he suggested that Lang contact Herman Otten, a newly-graduated Concordia student. During his student days, Otten had zealously attacked the liberalism of his professors. For this he was denied ordination in the church which had called him. Lang and Otten gathered about 800 names of conservative pastors and teachers in the LCMS. The first Free Conference met in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1961 in connection with the Synodical Conference. Attendance was about 500. Though frowned upon by many Synodical officials, some of them attended in order to learn firsthand what was going on.
A group of conservative leaders met in 1962 in Chicago, and Grace Lutheran sent Lang to the meeting. At that meeting Otten solicited financial aid to publish the Lutheran News, later re-named Christian News.38 Some people credit Otten and his paper for much of the success of turning around the LCMS from a liberal theological stance back to the original conservative position. At the Chicago meeting a group of conservatives, led by Rev. Romoser of Chicago and Rev. McKenzie of Detroit, organized a new church body known as the Church of the Reformation. This group has been fragmented often and has given rise to other bodies, all of them still small, struggling groups.
At this time Otten was also working with Rev. Riley of Bisbee, Arizona, who was engaged in activities opposing communism. This work did not appeal to Lang at the time, and he suggested that Rev. Reinhold Goetjen, then of Coos Bay, Oregon, be recruited in his place.
Lang was not interested in political action to restore conservatism, but rather, he hoped Christians could regain the initiative through education and this would lead to a return of conservatism within the church. As evidenced by splitting of church bodies in the past, separation of itself does not guarantee conservatism.
We find contemporary examples of good men who practice the virtue of humility. One thinks, for example, of Rev. Herman Otten, editor of The Christian News (RR1, Box 309A, New Haven, MO 63068), who has for several years as a minister and editor/writer taken noble and courageous stands on explosive issues like abortion, euthanasia, infanticide, "gay" rights, pornography, the importance of good family life, and religious faith versus secular humanism. Despite Rev. Otten's moral and religious certitude about such issues, however, he is humble enough to remain open to criticism and is willing to consider views contrary to his own. In each issue of The Christian News, therefore, we find letters to the editor critical of Rev. Otten's positions, which lead to a lively debate in the pages of his weekly publication.
Lawsuits Against Missouri Publisher Dismissed 'With Prejudice'
Reverend Herman Otten is the publisher of the Lutheran publication,
The Christian News. He has written extensively about the dangers of
recovered memory therapy. As a part of this effort, he published
information about the beliefs and teachings of Dr. Joseph Barbour who
was a professional counselor and a Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod
clergyman and a teacher at the LCMS's Concordia Seminary in St. Louis
Missouri. Dr. Barbour sued Reverend Otten. The case was dismissed on
January 24, 1997.
Rev. Otten began his expose when he learned that Barbour had a
client who claimed that her father (who was on the staff at Concordia
Seminary) had sexually abused her and that she had sacrificed babies
on an altar to the devil. While these wild charges were known to the
faculty members and other church leaders, they chose to defend
Barbour. Otten decided to investigate the role that Barbour may have
had in the emergence of these bizarre and impossible memories. He
learned that Barbour relied on the book, The Courage to Heal. Otten
subsequently published some sections from it that he claimed promoted
adultery and lesbianism. He wrote that Barbour was practicing "voodoo
psychology."
What did Barbour believe? A segment of his deposition was printed in
Christian News.
Question: Have you had any clients who believed that she or her
father or her parents sacrificed a living or aborted baby to the
devil?
Barbour: Uh-huh.
Q. How many of those would you say you had?
Barbour: Fifty maybe. Not necessarily their fetus that they were
pregnant with, but that fetuses were used in ritual.
Q: Fetuses were used, okay. And a ritual meaning -- what are you
referring to as a ritual?
Barbour: Ritual can be all kinds of things from a family who are
basically pedophiles to -- you understand that pedophiles tend to
group together, they carry pictures and so forth. Sometimes they'll
meet under the guise of like a satanic ritual abuse kind of thing.
It's really just an opportunity to share children, sexual partners.
And then I believe that there are groups. I don't know how many,
that go out in the woods and light fires and do things like that.
Dr. Barbour has left Concordia Seminary and has resigned from the
clergy roster of the LCMS.
LUTHERAN - EPISCOPALIAN AGREEMENTAfter decades of dialogue, the 5.2 million-member Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and the 2.5 million-member Episcopal Church, USA celebrated a "full communion" agreement (Jan. 6). Amid declining memberships, this enables both denominations to share clergy and pool other resources, but is "more like a marriage than a merger." Christian News Editor Herman Otten comments: "Both ELCA and ECUSA are "anything goes" churches. They both support the killing of unborn infants while they oppose the right of the government to put convicted murderers to death. They both ordain women. They both allow their theologians to deny every doctrine of the Christian faith. The confessions of both bodies are no longer considered binding. The Episcopal Church includes such radicals as Bishop John Shelby Spong who promotes the ordination of homosexuals and says the Apostle Paul was a homosexual. Spong has long attacked the deity and resurrection of Jesus Christ. ELCA has
similar radicals
as Spong." Otten concludes that all "anything goes" churches should merge. He says most of the major denominations today (including the Catholic Church), either teach or allow their theologians to teach that Jesus Christ is not the only way to heaven and that Christianity is not the only true and saving faith. The ELCA and ECUSA are members of the NCC/WCC.
Christian Responsibility to Truth
Herman Otten
While most revisionists appear to be opposed to the construction of the [U.S. government] Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, right next to some of our nations's most cherished monuments, I say: Let it be built! One day it will serve as a monument to the stupidity of modern man, who can still accept a hoax as a fact. Hopefully it will then serve as a reminder to study all the facts and evidence, and repudiate all hoaxes.
The day is surely coming when all the evidence showing that the Germans never exterminated six million Jews can no longer be suppressed. Truth is not determined by majority vote. I learned this lesson in high school, and since then have repeatedly discovered how the majority of scholars, even within our churches, can be in error. That our presidents, senators and congressmen are all supposed to be convinced that the Germans killed six million Jews, that almost all of our nation's professors and churchmen are said to maintain that the Holocaust is a fact, doesn't make it a fact.
There is no dispute over the fact that large numbers of Jews were deported to concentration camps and ghettos, or that many Jews died or were killed during World War II. Revisionist scholars have presented evidence, which "exterminationists" have not been able to refute, showing that there was no German program to exterminate Europe's Jews, and that the estimate of six million Jewish wartime dead is an irresponsible exaggeration.
The Holocaust -- the alleged extermination of some six million Jews (most of them by gassing) -- is a hoax and should be recognized as such by Christians and all informed, honest and truthful men everywhere.
Here are the reasons that have impressed me as particularly persuasive in coming to my own conclusion that the Revisionist view of the Holocaust story is the correct one:
* There is no convincing or substantial evidence for the allegation of mass killings in gas chambers in the wartime German camps. Careful investigation -- in particular that carried out by American engineer Fred Leuchter -- has thoroughly discredited the "gas chamber" extermination claims.
* The most reliable statistics available cannot be reconciled with the legendary "six million" figure. The best evidence indicates that no more than a million, or perhaps a million and a half, European Jews perished from all causes during the war years.
* Neither the major Jewish organizations in the United States, nor the wartime Allied governments, nor the International Red Cross, nor the Vatican acted as if they seriously believed the wartime extermination propaganda.
* Although the German government kept extensive and detailed records of its wartime Jewish policy, not a single document has ever been found which substantiates or even refers to an extermination program or policy. Instead, the voluminous German records confiscated by the Allies at the end of the war clearly show that the German "final solution" program was one of emigration and deportation, not extermination.
* Even prominent Jewish "exterminationist" historians now acknowledge that the stories of gassings and extermination in camps in Germany proper are not true, in spite of the fact that such claims were once seriously made, particularly at the great Nuremberg Trial of 1945-1946.
* The Holocaust story now centers on just six former camps in Poland. The so-called "evidence" presented to prove mass exterminations in these camps is qualitatively no better than the now discredited "evidence" once cited for extermination in the camps in Germany proper.
* Much of the co-called "evidence" presented by "exterminationists" over the years has already been thoroughly discredited. For example, the well-known horrific photographs of piles of corpses taken in camps in western Germany at the end of the war are now acknowledged to be photos of victims of disease and malnutrition who perished as indirect victims of the war in the final weeks and months of the conflict. Also, so-called "confessions" -- such as those of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Häss -- have been shown to be untruthful and extracted by torture. Many of the official reports and testimonies presented as "evidence" by the prosecution in the Nuremberg trials have since been shown to be lies.
* The fact that so many Jews "survived" German rule during the war -- many of them even in so-called "extermination" centers such as Auschwitz-Birkenau -- is enough to show that there was no German program or policy to exterminate the Jews of Europe.
to be continued............................
I truly have no idea. Somebody please tell me so I can explain or apologize.
