In Pursuit of Religious Freedom: Bishop Martin Stephan's Journey

by Stephan, Philip

  What Marbach did was force Guenther to reveal much more than she had stated to her pastor in the confessional. He forced her to repeat her testimony from those old trials in Dresden, threatening her with excommunication from the community. Without authority from the community or from the state, Marbach forced Louise to swear an oath before God that she was telling the truth. The real truth is that Marbach did himself and the community a huge disservice by his treatment of Louise Guenther. She was excommunicated from the Society after she left.

  It has taken until the twenty-first century for someone to openly examine the role of the seal of the confessional in the Stephan ouster. In the year 2000, Rev. Stephen Wiest gave a paper in a Michigan pastoral conference titled, “Why We Are Scared to Confess: The Use and Abuse of Private Confession among Our Saxon Fathers.” Wiest is the first Missouri Synod clergyperson to point out publicly some of the gross mistakes in handling the entire accusation and subsequent expulsion of Stephan. Rev. Wiest details the story of the women who confessed sexual relations with Stephan and describes how Pastor Loeber did not even consider that breaking the seal of the confession and absolution might be a major error in the entire deposition of the bishop.3 In the minds of Loeber and the other pastors, the women who confessed to improprieties with Stephan had given them permission to tell the rest of the community about their confession. This is a rather spurious claim and, according to Forster, the pastors felt justified in releasing the private confession. Permission to release information does not allow a pastor to break the seal of the confessional nor to publicly degrade these women.4

  Loeber seems to have been blind to how the leaking of this information could harm these women. Instead, he worried about the collateral damage that Guenther’s confession would cause the whole community. It did not even dawn on him that this confession would cause no problem for anyone had he obeyed his pastoral oath of protecting the confessional seal. If he remained silent, no one would ever know. Loeber told his colleague, Pastor C. F. W. Walther, about the private confession and asked his opinion about what they should do. Walther shared the confession with other pastors and then shared it with Marbach and Vehse, who in turn shared this confessional information with many other laity.

  Wiest quotes Dr. Carl Mundinger’s comments from his book, Government in the Missouri Synod, that “so many women came forward (4) so, he (Stephan) must be guilty.” This conclusion made by Mundinger follows the benchmark used by the Society. Wiest notes the possibility of “copy cat confessions” and false memory charges, as is the case in recent sexual abuse trials.

  Wiest thinks this rush to judgment is not the point. The point is that the revelation of Guenther’s sexual relationship with Martin Stephan was made under the seal of the confessional, and the seal should never have been broken, even if she had granted Pastor G. H. Loeber permission to discuss it with others. The pledge of confidentiality by pastors is firm, but even more important is the pastors’ ordination pledge to loose or bind sins confessed to him or her.

  After his sermon on July 7,1839, Gotthold H. Loeber supposedly made an announcement to the assembled congregation about the confessions of two or three other women. Such an announcement is so extraordinary as to make one wonder about making confessions public. It is one thing to break the seal of confession to another pastor and perhaps one or two leaders of the colony, as happened with Guenther. However, a detailed announcement to the congregation about the confessions of three women is astonishing.

  Even if there were proof of the confessed facts, the announcement is a horrendous violation against Stephan, the women named, and the seal of the confessional. Apparently the copy of this pulpit announcement was borrowed from the museum manager at Trinity Church in Altenburg, Missouri, and never returned. Likewise, the letter retracting her claim of illicit sex with Stephan, which he presented to the mob at the Perry County, was written by one of the women denounced from the pulpit July 7, 1839. That letter was also lost.5

  According to Wiest, Walther employed questionable tactics in handling this confession and dealing with Stephan. On his the first trip to Perry County, Walther stayed in the men’s dormitory with twenty-four other men supposedly that night of May 15. He told a confidant in Latin of Guenther’s confession. Apparently only those educated in Latin were supposed to be privy to this information! He told everyone in Perry County to keep this news of the confession a secret from Stephan. Then he left, returning two weeks later with a mob ready to oust the bishop.

  Wiest quotes playwright Oscar Wilde, “[E]veryone has his Judas, and Walther was Stephan’s Judas.”6 While acknowledging that Walther was opportunistic, Wiest concludes that the entire Stephan expulsion was engineered by the laity to save the Credit Fund from financial disaster. Wiest stated that, once the laity had a hearsay confession of sexual improprieties, they heaped more blame on Stephan for the near bankrupt Society treasury.

  Few comments filter through reports of the whole sad debacle that acknowledge how Stephan was denied justice and shown no mercy. Even Forster, who sometimes expressed thinly veiled contempt for Stephan, wrote,

  But the fact remains that he had been condemned both in the minds and the councils of his followers, especially in the minds of the pastors, before they even saw him or investigated the matter further. That these are the standards of justice which prevailed is evident from the course of action pursued.7

  The betrayal of Stephan by Walther was secondary only to the greater “ecclesiastical disaster” Walther created by his ambivalence toward private confession, says essayist Wiest. On the one hand, he acted as if it were appropriate to let information out to prevent harm to the community. In reality, no matter whether Stephan was guilty or not, this information should not have been released. The point of the confessional is forgiveness for the penitent who comes seeking grace. In the nineteenth century, a Lutheran pastor clearly could not morally break the seal of confession. However, current Missouri Synod guidelines state the opposite. According to guideline 4, if a pastor decides that a confession provided information about possible harm to others, he is allowed to report this confession. Wiest objects to that policy. He says “the Office of Christ,” as he calls it, “is to obey the command to absolve sin or not to absolve sins.”8

  Wiest emphatically states that holy absolution has great value, and it is the seal that makes it work. Stephan and the women were robbed of the powerful means of absolution. Given this breach of the confessional and Walther’s ambivalence in defending his actions, it is no wonder that the sacrament of holy absolution—once used so effectively by Pastor Stephan, other pastors, and their congregations—has fallen into disuse.9 How ironic that this should happen among the people who left Germany partly because they objected to the state-run church’s order forbidding private confession in the German Lutheran Church. The power of God’s grace was not allowed to work its ways leading to repentance and absolution either for Louise Guenther or Pastor Stephan, or ultimately to reconciliation of the community.

  There are few answers to the incivility of Stephan’s deposition. Some historians have attempted posthumous psychoanalyses of Stephan. Some church historians surmised that the characters of the other pastors and leaders were shallow and dependent on Stephan. That answer is not satisfactory, either. Even to this day the Missouri Synod wrestles with its tainted origin and seems restless to put it aside, yet it is never quite able to forget its past. A closer answer to this question lies more in the behavior of each person in this “Saxon Society.” The lust for power, greed, fear, anxiety, sex, defensiveness, punitive spirit, and competition converge at that moment in time, in the firestorm around their leadership. This deposition was also inextricably tied to the understanding of the ministry and their role as the church in relationship to ministry. For a time these people in Perry County and St. Louis were prisoners of their own behavior.

  NOTES

  1 Louise Guenther, “Confession,” trans. John Conrads (unpublished ms., St. Louis: Concordia Historical Inst
itute, 1839), 1–3.

  2 Guenther, “Confession,” 3.

  3 Stephan Wiest, “Why We Are Scared to Confess: The Use and Abuse of Private Confession among Our Saxon Fathers” (audiotape: conference paper delivered to a pastoral conference in Michigan, 2000).

  4 Walter O. Forster, Zion on the Mississippi (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1953), 393.

  5 Forster, Zion on the Mississippi, 392–93.

  6 Wiest, “Why We Are Scared to Confess.”

  7 Forster, Zion on the Mississippi, 397.

  8 Wiest, “Why We Are Scared to Confess.” It is true that in pastoral counseling, anyone who threatens or reports harm to self and to others must be reported to the police. But pastoral counseling is not a sacrament, not the same as the pastor hearing private confession and pronouncing or withholding holy absolution.

  9 Wiest, “Why We are Scared to Confess.”

  25

  The Saxon Colony Struggles

  After Stephan’s deposition as bishop and forcible eviction, the colonists became a confused lot. Like the early disciples locked in the upper room after Christ’s resurrection, they were afraid. They feared the Romans and the Jews, the civil and the religious authorities. Possibly they secretly feared each other. They doubted everything they had seen and heard; how could it all have ended this way? Some they knew about, like Peter, but how many others had actually denied Him? How many had been caught up in the crowd demanding the release of Barabbas? Maybe they shouldn’t trust their leaders. Perhaps Jesus had been a false teacher and was not the Messiah after all. And they were suspicious of the women’s reports. Of course, Jesus wasn’t walking in the garden—He was dead. John was there by the cross; he saw it all. What were these women talking about? It would be almost two months before the disciples gathered their wits and began to move ahead.

  Now that Stephan was safely gone, the colonists were bewildered and the pastors were left holding the bag:

  The clergy seem to have assumed that with Stephan out of the way they would simply continue the system and everything would be fine. Their intention was to collectively govern both the religious and the secular life of the colonists.... Since a major reason for the deposition of Stephan was the financial plight in which the colony found itself, it was necessary for the pastors to form a committee involving the lay leaders, which was to administer the financial affairs. However, as they formed this committee, the pastors made sure that the pastors would remain a majority of committee members. This meant that as long as they acted as a unity they could always outvote the laymen. To make matters worse, the pastors insisted that they alone were qualified to make decisions in theological matters, and they had a way of making a theological matter out of every issue.1

  Not knowing what else to do, these colonists simply carried on their daily lives. They had made barely enough cabins for the workers and for Stephan when, on that fateful May 28, 1839, about three hundred more of their group from St. Louis joined the hundred or so already living there. “Primitive shelter” is a euphemism for their living conditions. Some built lean-tos for shelter from the rain. There were no sanitary toilet facilities. The young medical student Ernest Buenger was busy around the clock giving aid to those who were suffering from fever caused by frequent summer rains and many insects. It is a wonder that no major disease outbreak occurred. Many of the colonists were in dire straits for adequate housing and food.

  Since no land had yet been cleared, crops were still not planted by June 6,1839. It was now too late in the season to plant the crops to sustain them through the winter. What they ate and how they found food is something of a miracle. Their larder was less than meager in some foods but bountiful in others.

  Wheat, coffee and butter were, at time scarce, but there was no lack of corn, . pork, wild turkeys, milk pumpkins and pumpkin syrup, nuts and honey. Their bread was “jonny cakes” made of corn. They ground the corn by hand or in a coffee mill. Apples were plentiful and were the main gifts that neighboring farmers offered them in wagon load quantities. Neighbors realized the stark conditions and came to their rescue with flour and other food stuffs. A general merchandise store was opened at Wittenberg Landing and liberal credit was available to all who needed it.2

  The 4,473 acres that the colony had purchased was divided into small plots and allotted to the individual families. Even the poorest received enough land for their immediate housing needs. The land was allocated according to the parishes of the towns or cities from which the colonists had emigrated; they named their new settlements after their hometowns in Germany. The New York group named their settlement “Johannisberg,” and the town named “Dresden” was assigned to C. F. W. Walther and his congregation. Larger housing was built in Dresden to accommodate Pastors Keyl, Loeber, and Buerger as well as their families. Other towns were named Altenburg, Frohna, Seelitz, and Wittenberg, Martin Stephan’s home before his ouster.

  Each family established its own housing, gradually vacating their tents or tree-branch shelters. They began to clear the land and to find employment at neighboring farms. Koepchen reports that over time many were able to pay back the Credit Fund, and the controller, Fredrick Barthel, was able to pay the creditors at the promised 10 percent rate. Due to the method of dividing and distributing the land, Martin Stephan’s eighty-acre plot was soon inhabited and probably subdivided. This made legal claims extremely difficult later, as Martin Stephan Jr. wrote in a letter to his brother-in-law Georg Schick.3

  Of course, this all did not happen overnight. Considering the kind of labor and tools needed to clear the land and cut the timber for the housing, it was an overwhelming task for these novice carpenters. These city people included only a few skilled carpenters and very few farmers. Not only did they lack the finery they had enjoyed in Dresden, but the backwoods life in America was a pure struggle for survival.

  Those colonists who had stayed in St. Louis were joined by some people who returned there from Perry County. It is also not known how many people “defected” because of either the internal conflict or the physical hardships. The colonists who stayed in St. Louis called as their minister Pastor Otto H. Walther, C. F. W. Walther’s brother. He was installed June 9,1839, shortly after Stephan’s deposition, supposedly to serve there only until the colony at Perry County could house everyone. The St. Louis contingent continued their worship in the Christ Church Cathedral space they had been renting. Many men of this group were mechanics who earned good wages before moving to Perry County.4

  By November 25, 1839, colonists in Altenburg had built a structure on sixteen acres that they dedicated as their first church building. In December of 1839, Pastor C. F. Gruber arrived from Saxony with an additional 141 people. A neighbor of pastors Keyl and Loeber, Gruber had resided in the village of Reust, Saxony. Stephan had invited him to come with the Saxon Emigration Society, but the Saxon Consistory persuaded him to stay in Germany. When conditions in Saxony worsened, he gathered his flock and left, arriving in Perry County on December 13, 1839. The immigrants were already experiencing their first tough winter in Perry County, and the new group put further pressure on their resources. People in Altenburg and Frohna generously took them in and shared their quarters until they could claim their own settlement, which they called Paitzdorf.

  Four days before this new contingent arrived, Concordia College, the first Lutheran college west of the Mississippi, opened in Altenburg. A complete, church-related higher education system free of state intervention had been one of the reasons they left Germany. They stated their goals in the Regulations Code, saying that they were to build first a church, then a town hall, a seminary, and schools. One can imagine their pride when, on the 9th day of December in 1839, the first students enrolled in the college. The course of study was structured much like the gymnasium of Germany that prepares students for the university and is roughly equivalent to the American high school plus the first two years of college. Once the students graduated from gymnasium, they made a choice to enter either a skille
d trade program or the university.

  This temporary college was a log cabin twenty-one by sixteen feet on four acres of land. It cost $12 to build. The congregation in St. Louis contributed the window glass and door hinges. Four months earlier in August of 1839, the colonists had published an advance notice of the college in the St. Louis German paper:

  We the undersigned, intend to establish an institution of instruction and education which distinguishes itself from ordinary elementary schools, especially by this that it comprises, beside the ordinary branches, all gymnasium sciences necessary to a true Christian and scientific educations as religion, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, German, French and English languages; History, Elementary Philosophy, Music and Drawing. The pupils of our institution are to be so far advanced in the above named studies, that they, after absolving a complete course of study, shall be qualified for university studies ... etc.5

  The college curriculum was a broad liberal arts program based on the classics providing students with an education to serve them in all facets of their lives. According to most accounts, Martin Stephan Jr. was among the first class of ten students: seven boys and three girls.

  All this productive activity occurred against the backdrop of the community’s disappointment and confusion about their leadership. Once they lost their charismatic leader, it is surprising that the whole wounded community did not just pack up and leave. In addition to great anger over finding themselves in a new and sometimes hostile country, they felt betrayed by their former bishop. His leadership soon became the target for all their pent up frustrations and anything that did not go well. Once he was out of the community, they still had to struggle with what was left. For many the confusion was enormous and took some time to sort out.