A hometown paper in Moline recorded a young man’s summer in 1953. Nineteen years later he wrote the sentence this book takes as its warrant. Why the series runs on Thursdays, and what Edward Schroeder was doing at Bad Boll at twenty-two.Text, documents and sources: badbollbook.com
The last post promised the next one in September. A reader had other ideas.Within a day of the first post, more than thirty people had subscribed; by Sunday it was nearly sixty. One of them was Johannes Oesch, a retired parish pastor of the Evangelical Landeskirche in Württemberg, who wrote the same day to ask two questions — what were my contacts with the church archives in Stuttgart, and with the Evangelical Academy at Bad Boll? The honest answer to both was: none.Then he sent three pages from a German church history published last year, and in them were two paragraphs and a photograph of the American this book has been writing about since 2019.And then he told me who his grandfathers were, and both of them turned out to be in my own appendix.Written and researched by Rev. Dr. Albert B. Collver III. Text, sources and notes at badbollbook.com.
He was born in Minnesota, raised in China, trained at a St. Louis seminary, and spent his life writing the history of Württembergers who left. Then he came back with an American army.Karl John Richard Arndt is the man who secured Bad Boll. He is also the man in a photograph a reader in Württemberg sent me last week — the only likeness of him I have, captioned by his office and silent about everything else.This episode is the rest of it. The boy who learned Mandarin in Hankow because his father had founded the Missouri Synod's mission there and would not come home. The seminary graduate who did not become a pastor, took a doctorate without ever holding a bachelor's degree, and made himself the historian of the Harmony Society — the Separatists who left Württemberg because the territorial church would not have them. And the man who was then sent to Stuttgart to decide what that same territorial church could and could not do.Also: who else was born at Hankow while the elder Arndt was still there, and what he later became.Written and researched by Albert B. Collver III. Text, sources, and notes at badbollbook.com.
Bad is the German for bath. Stuttgart is a stud farm, Württemberg is a hill — and the town this whole series is named after is a spa, whose sulfur springs were found in 1595 and whose Wunderbad a pastor named Blumhardt bought in 1852 so that people could come and stay and be prayed for. This episode is the story of the house: the wonder-bath and its two generations of Blumhardts; the olive grove outside Athens that gave the Evangelical Academy its name; Bishop Wurm's journey through the ruins in June 1945, three brothers named Müller in the car, and the academy Wurm and Eberhard Müller founded at Bad Boll on Michaelmas that year — the first in Germany. And the reason the Missouri Synod's seven men ended up arguing the Augsburg Confession in a health resort: it was the only house in Germany that belonged to nobody in the argument. Also: what the archive at Bad Boll has just sent across the ocean — the Kurhaus's own letter of January 1948 (85 beds, 65 cots, bring your own linen), and the Academy's library copy of Missouri's little 1949 booklet, filed in pencil under one word: Gasttagung. A guest conference. Written and researched by Albert B. Collver III. Text, sources, and notes at badbollbook.com.
Emergency is a Latin word about water: emergere, to rise up out of it — what is emergent is what breaks the surface. In 1932 the Missouri Synod was going under, a million dollars in debt in the worst year of the Depression, and what surfaced was a committee with no birth certificate: the Emergency Collection Committee, which first enters the record already at work, on its own letterhead, over the signature of a returned China missionary named Lawrence Meyer.This episode opens the series proper, and it opens with the money: President Pfotenhauer's October appeal to the pastors ("our debts will paralyze Synod at the beginning of the new year"), the nickel-a-week collection, the two-cent schoolchildren, and the one-cent-a-day arithmetic of Meyer's November letter. Then the second emergency: June 1942, six months after Pearl Harbor, when President Behnken appointed the Emergency Planning Council — "everybody's concern in general, but nobody's business in particular" — run by the same Lawrence Meyer, until it was the one part of the Synod that knew how to move money, goods, and men across an ocean.The machine that carried Missouri to Germany in 1948 was built to collect nickels. This is the story of how it was built.Written and researched by Albert B. Collver III. Text, sources, and notes at badbollbook.com.
Relief is a Latin word about weight: relevare, to lift again. Before the Missouri Synod sent Germany a single theologian, it sent $1.9 million worth of milk, clothing, and books — and a telegram its editors printed exactly as the wire delivered it, slip of the key and all. The relief years, 1945–1947, and the first public notice of Bad Boll.Read the post, with the documents and sources, at badbollbook.com/the-telegram
Conference is a Latin word about carrying: conferre, to bring things together. The documents that planned Bad Boll kept reaching for a different word — one with "against" hidden inside it. A Stuttgart living room, December 3, 1947; Bishop Meiser's one request; and the printed invitation that promised not a conference but an encounter.Read the post, with the documents and sources, at badbollbook.com/begegnung
Decide is a Latin word about cutting: decidere, to cut off. In February 1948 a cable from Stuttgart demanded a cut — Bad Boll, or Hermann Sasse in Saint Louis. Nobody in Saint Louis wanted to make it, and no document records that anyone did. The file simply goes cold, and that is the story.Read the post, with the documents and sources, at badbollbook.com/boll-or-sasse
Ebenezer is Hebrew for "stone of help." It is also the name of a Welsh tune that two Bad Boll men turned into one of the Missouri Synod's best-loved hymns, "Thy Strong Word" (LSB 578). Did the conferences have anything to do with it? The documents say more than a coincidence and less than a cause.Read the post, with the chart and sources, at badbollbook.com/ebenezerPrint edition with footnotes (PDF): misc.collver.biz/ebenezer.pdf
Three days before the first seminar opened, Germany changed its money. Three hundred eleven German churchmen came to a Swabian spa anyway, to read the Augsburg Confession article by article with theologians from Saint Louis. They agreed on justification and the Lord's Supper, disagreed on the Church, and on the doctrine of Scripture asked a question early that was never argued through.Read the post, with the photograph and sources, at badbollbook.com/augsburg-confession
At Bad Boll in 1948 the Americans showed films after supper. Three were about the Synod's work: Bible schools, the Walther League, the colleges. The fourth, The Call of the Cross, was a drama about the Saxon emigration, in which a German territorial church is the villain. It was the first film shown, and the German pastors had questions.Read the post, with the film frames and sources, at badbollbook.com/the-fourth-film
In May 1948 Hermann Sasse wrote President Behnken six pages on what Bad Boll would face: the long slide of the German territorial churches toward unionism, the Free Churches as the conscience of German Lutheranism, and verbal inspiration as the one serious obstacle. He crossed the ocean that summer as Missouri's guest. The faculty that had invited him to teach did not let him teach.Read the post, with the letter's first page and sources, at badbollbook.com/the-professorship
Erlangen, 31 October 1948: Hermann Sasse leaves the Bavarian church with an open letter to Bishop Meiser, written on the day the Prussian Union had chosen for itself in 1817. Five months earlier he had typed six pages to President Behnken, the Bad Boll paper that Bad Boll never heard: unmask the sociological thinking about the church, spare the German theologians nothing, strengthen the free churches, and sit down together over verbal inspiration. This episode reads that letter beside the one that followed it.Read the post, with the documents and sources, at badbollbook.com/reformation-day-1948
In 1949, and in no other year, the National Lutheran Council shared the Bad Boll platform with the Missouri Synod. The summer was fought over before it was held: a funding deadline, President Behnken's "I shall not participate," a planning meeting at Bielefeld without Missouri at the table, four institutes under three chairmanships, and in September a verdict of three words in the committee's minutes: "N.L.C. an exception."Read the post, with the 1949 press release, the Bielefeld photograph, and sources, at badbollbook.com/came-twice