Our school faculty meets each Wednesday afternoon for study. In the past I have led studies of our Lutheran Confessions, but this year I decided that we would study CFW Walther’s Law and Gospel. I’ve had this new edition since it came out over a decade ago and am realizing anew what a treasure it is; obviously for the theses and lectures themselves, but also for the footnotes, marginal Bible references, and introductory material. If you do not have this volume you really should get it.

In preparation for our study yesterday, it was one of those footnotes that caught my eye. Walther wrote, “The Law offers us salvation in about the same manner as refreshments were offered to Tantalus in the hell of the pagan Greeks.” (p.14) Here is the footnote (4),

In Greek mythology, King Tantalus angered the gods. He then killed his son Pelops and made a stew of him for the gods. Because of this and other atrocities, his spirit dwells in Tarterus, the deepest realm of Hades. Tantalus stands forever thirsty in water that he cannot reach, forever hungry below a fruit tree that he cannot reach, with a great stone always over his head. Walther drew on classical Greek and Latin because he was educated in the classical humanist tradition of the Gymnasium. The Missouri Synod largely retained this tradition until the late 1930s.

Our principal noted that all of our upper grades children would not need the footnote, because we are instructing them in the classical humanist tradition of Old Missouri. They all know the myth of Tantalus, as did Walther’s students at that Friday night lecture on S. Jefferson Avenue. I wondered if the editors of the new Walther volume weren’t slyly critiquing the degradation of the Missouri Synod’s educational system since the 1930s.

It is a return to the old things, rejected by the world and sadly within the Church, that will bring about revival and renewal, chief among them the Bible. And then what else? The things that flow from the Sacred Scriptures, our true tradition and heritage- The Catechism, The Lutheran Liturgy, Lutheran Hymns, sacrificial support for Lutheran Mission Work (new pulpits and altars) at home and abroad, and true Lutheran pedagogy. That old tradition served our synod well “until the late 1930s”. It can again.