JANITOR 004

I will get a chance to look at this this weekend when I am not obligated to preach.

We bought a generator and it is in the basement waiting for me to unpack it and put it together and figure out how to use it in case of need.

J(ohn) Schaller was president of DMLC in New Ulm before he took the call to Wauwatosa and our WELS seminary. Your Great Grandfather graduated there in 1910. John Schaller was one of the 3 Wauwatosa Theologians - August Pieper, J. P. Koehler, the other two.

Adolph Hoeneke died in 1908; the Theologisches Quartalschrif began under his guidance in 1904. Now it is the Wisconsin Lutheran Quarterly. WLQ.

Schaller died of the Spanish Influenza. He taught his classes on a Friday and died on the weekend. It was a sudden takedown sort of thing.

BTW - John Schaller wrote in English - all others in German . He wrote Biblical Christology which was in English when printed. It has been republished after my years at WLS. There were so many typos in the original it was obvious that the printer was not able to work with English whereas Schaller was. He must have been disappointed to see that. R.T. has the copy of that book owned by Schaller by which he taught the students. When he died so suddenly, he was part way thru with his notes and Augusts Pieper took over. Pieper's hand writing is seen in the book making notes for his teaching of the material thereafter.

BTW #2 - a train is passing by behind the house here going a snail's pace to the East. I would not want to be waiting in a car to cross right now.

Janitor 005 and I have read the first 10 of the 50. Interesting reading and concurrent research as we go with what is available on GOOGLE to enlighten and to obscure references.

Thanks for sending.

I wrote earlier: J(ohn) Schaller was president of DMLC in New Ulm before he took the call to Wauwatosa and our WELS seminary. This fact explains why he would know of a man who published in Morris MN. It is a smallburg.

JANITOR 002

Early Lutherans believed we live on a stationary globe, as you will see in this book by Pasche.

The Bible however does not teach a globe model at all. The Bible's cosmology says that when God looks at the earth, He can see everything at once, as if He is looking down on a level plane--and not on a globe (Job 28:24). Also, when He returns in the clouds on the Last Day, we will all be able to see Him, all of us at the same time (Rev 1:7). The surface, or face of the earth, the region consisting of seas and continents, is described in the Bible as having ends (Prov 30:4). Other verses say the earth has corners, is situated on pillars, and firmly established, among other interesting descriptions.

We might want to take these verses figuratively because they don't match the globe model, but we shouldn't take them figuratively because they are not consistent with one another. There are over 100 verses that speak of our cosmology, and they are consistent with one another in the model they describe (Job 26:7 is challenging--see video at end).

As I am studying what Lutherans taught about this 100 years ago, I am seeing that our dogmaticians did an excellent job systematizing our Cosmogony (Cosmogony answers the question: How did we get here?" Lutherans answer: six 24hr days of God speaking us into existence) but these dogmaticians never systematized the Bible verses describing our Cosmology (Cosmology answers the question: Where are we?). Pasche gets close to it by collecting verses on the firmament and on the fact that the earth is steadfast and firm. I have not in the one book of his I have read seen him systematize the verses saying the earth is on pillars. Instead he relies on the tried and true ancient human idea of a globe. I will keep reading him to see what else he says.

The problem is, if you systematize the Bible verses describing our cosmology, NONE say anything about us living on a globe.

Where did the idea of a globe come from? It arose in the world shortly after Daniel's stay in Babylon. The early Persians in the 6th century BC were the first scientific thinkers to stop relying on what the gods told them about where they lived and started collecting empirical data to form their own conclusions, further developing this approach into Natural Science where they claimed the primary cause of all causes was material.

These materialists were the first ever, as far as my research has taken me, to claim we lived on a ball. Plato, the Greek, continued the lie by saying the earth was like 12 hexagonal pieces of leather sewn together into a ball. Shortly after the apostolic age, Ptolomy, a Roman, doesn't even try to defend the globe model in his Almagest, he simply assumes it to be true and only briefly proves it with a paragraph about star gazing. The Ptolomaic cosmology says the earth is a stationary globe (as did Tycho and the Tychonian Lutherans).

Ptolomy's astronomy reigned supreme for 1500 years because it could accurately pinpoint heavenly bodies to a precision greater than a telescope could differentiate. This is because it's math did not have to account for imaginary spinning. Then around the time of the Great Reformation, (as clay was mixed with iron in the timeline of human history) all Copernicus had to do to further this great deception was to say the globe spun. The idea that we live on a globe had already long before been assumed to be true. But we are not on a globe.

This earth is observably stationary, flat, and level. The Bible describes the earth as stationary, flat, and level, and goes so far as to claim we are in a container, like an ecosphere, with water above the stars and water below the face of the earth, with a solid firmament between the air and the waters above, with the stars being fixed in their positions within the firmament. And if we really take all these verses literally (I'm not yet ready to make that claim) but if we do, we see that God's throne is right on top of the firmament. The earth is His footstool. Just look up. God is right there. Allegedly.

Anyways, just some context as you read Pasche's book.

Pasche's Reason #48 of 50 on pages 39 to 40 is very interesting. He's been speaking of proper Biblical interpretation for some time, explains how there is only one literal sense for each verse, quotes Luther on how dangerous it is to deviate from the one obvious literal reading, and then does exactly that for the Bible verses describing the "ends" and "corners" of the earth. This is where the ball lie has blinded Pasche, in my opinion. He can't conceive of a ball having corners, so he reads God's Word figuratively instead of literally in order to support his false globe model.

On page 45, Pasche says, "So let us leave the Copernican tomfoolery, and be it our battle-cry: "Back to Luther!" The only problem with this is that Luther, a man of his time, had been trained in schools teaching Aristotle, Socrates, Plato, and Ptolomy. A better battle cry would be: "Back to the Bible!"