Arthur Carl Piepkorn

An excerpt from, “How I Became the Catholic I Was” By Richard John Neuhaus, First Things, April 2002:

Moving forward to my teenage years, I had in high school what our evangelical friends would call a born-again experience, and for a time viewed with contempt the ritual and sacramental formalities of what I thought to be a spiritually comatose Lutheranism. For a time, I suppose I might have been a good candidate for the Baptist ministry, but it did not last. Missouri’s traditional hostility toward “pietism”—an exaggerated emphasis on the affective dimension of Christian faith—struck me as hostility toward piety. But after a period of frequently anguished uncertainty about the possibility of sorting out subjective experience and egotistic assertiveness from the workings of grace, I came to a new appreciation of Luther’s warnings against religious enthusiasm. Several years later, at Concordia, St. Louis, I was to discover the possible synthesis of piety, clear reason, and ecclesial authority in the person and teaching of Professor Arthur Carl Piepkorn.

The students most closely gathered around him called him—behind his back, to be sure—“the Pieps,” and those who in American Lutheranism today describe themselves as “evangelical catholics”—perhaps a fourth or more of the clergy—are aptly called the Piepkornians. Piepkorn was a man of disciplined prayer and profound erudition, and was deeply engaged in the liturgical renewal and the beginnings of Lutheran-Roman Catholic dialogue. At St. Louis he taught the Lutheran confessional writings of the sixteenth century, which he insistently called “the symbolical books of the Church of the Augsburg Confession.” They were, he insisted, the “symbols” of a distinctive communion within the communion of the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church. They represented a way of being catholic as the heirs of a Reformation that was intended to be a movement of reform within and for the one Church of Christ.

Piepkorn underscored the Church’s tradition prior to the Reformation, the tradition of which Lutheranism was part. The accent was on continuity, not discontinuity. Perhaps the sixteenth century break was necessary—although that was never emphasized—but certainly the Lutheran Reformation, unlike other movements that claimed the Reformation heritage, had no delusions about being a new beginning, a so-called rediscovery of the gospel, by which the authentic and apostolic Church was reconstituted. Lutheranism was not a new beginning but another chapter in the history of the one Church. The Church is not a theological school of thought, or a society formed by allegiance to theological formulas—not even formulas such as “justification by faith”—but is, rather, the historically specifiable community of ordered discipleship through time, until the end of time. Piepkorn emphasized that we are Christians first, catholic Christians second, and Lutheran Christians third. In this understanding, the goal was to fulfill the promise of the Lutheran Reformation by bringing its gifts into full communion with the Great Tradition that is most fully and rightly ordered through time in the Roman Catholic Church.

In this understanding, the conclusion of the Augsburg Confession of 1530 was taken to be normative. There the signers declare:

Only those things have been recounted which it seemed necessary to say in order that it may be understood that nothing has been received among us, in doctrine or in ceremonies, that is contrary to Scripture or to the church catholic. For it is manifest that we have guarded diligently against the introduction into our churches of any new and ungodly doctrines.

For us Piepkornians, everything was to be held accountable to that claim. In some streams of Lutheran orthodoxy, as well as in Protestant liberalism, a very different notion of normativity was proposed. In the language of the twentieth-century Paul Tillich, catholic substance was to be held in tension with Protestant principle, with Protestant principle having the corrective and final word. But a principle that is not part of the substance inevitably undermines the substance. And what is called the Protestant principle is, as we know from sad experience, so protean, so subject to variation, that it results either in the vitiation of doctrine itself or further schism in the defense of doctrinal novelty. Theology that is not in service to “the faith once delivered to the saints” (Jude 3) turns against the faith once delivered to the saints. Ideas that are not held accountable to “the Church of the living God, the pillar and bulwark of truth” (1 Timothy 3:15) will in time become the enemy of that truth. Such was our understanding of the normative claim of the Augustana to have received nothing contrary to Scripture or to the Catholic Church.

An excerpt from, “He Threw It All Away” By Robert P. George, First Things, March 20, 2009:

In the early 1970s, Lutheran pastor Richard John Neuhaus was poised to become the nation’s next great liberal public intellectual—the Reinhold Niebuhr of his generation. He had going for him everything he needed to be not merely accepted but lionized by the liberal establishment. First, of course, there were his natural gifts as a thinker, writer, and speaker. Then there was a set of left-liberal credentials that were second to none. He had been an outspoken and prominent civil rights campaigner, indeed, someone who had marched literally arm-in-arm with his friend Martin Luther King. He had founded one of the most visible anti-Vietnam war organizations. He moved easily in elite circles and was regarded by everyone as a “right-thinking” (i.e., left-thinking) intellectual-activist operating within the world of mainline Protestant religion.

Then something happened: Abortion. It became something it had never been before, namely, a contentious issue in American culture and politics. Neuhaus opposed abortion for the same reasons he had fought for civil rights and against the Vietnam War. At the root of his thinking was the conviction that human beings, as creatures fashioned in the image and likeness of God, possess a profound, inherent, and equal dignity. This dignity must be respected by all and protected by law. That, so far as Neuhaus was concerned, was not only a biblical mandate but also the bedrock principle of the American constitutional order. Respect for the dignity of human beings meant, among other things, not subjecting them to a system of racial oppression; not wasting their lives in futile wars; not slaughtering them in the womb.

It is important to remember that in those days it was not yet clear whether support for “abortion rights” would be a litmus test for standing as a “liberal.” After all, the early movement for abortion included many conservatives, such as James J. Kilpatrick, who viewed abortion not only as a solution for the private difficulties of a “girl in trouble,” but also as a way of dealing with the public problem of impoverished (and often unmarried) women giving birth to children who would increase welfare costs to taxpayers.

At the same time, more than a few notable liberals were outspokenly pro-life. In the early 1970s, Massachusetts Senator Edward M. Kennedy, for example, replied to constituents’ inquiries about his position on abortion by saying that it was a form of “violence” incompatible with his vision of an America generous enough to care for and protect all its children, born and unborn. Some of the most eloquent and passionate pro-life speeches of the time were given by the Rev. Jesse Jackson. In condemning abortion, Jackson never failed to note that he himself was born to an unwed mother who would likely have been tempted to abort him had abortion been legal and easily available at the time.

The liberal argument against abortion was straightforward and powerful. “We liberals believe in the inherent and equal dignity of every member of the human family. We believe that the role of government is to protect all members of the community against brutality and oppression, especially the weakest and most vulnerable. We do not believe in solving personal or social problems by means of violence. We seek a fairer, nobler, more humane way. The personal and social problems created by unwanted pregnancy should not be solved by offering women the ‘choice’ of destroying their children in utero; rather, as a society we should reach out in love and compassion to mother and child alike.”

So it was that Pastor Neuhaus and many like him saw no contradiction between their commitment to liberalism and their devotion to the pro-life cause. On the contrary, they understood their pro-life convictions to be part and parcel of what it meant to be a liberal. They were “for the little guy” and the unborn child was “the littlest guy of all.”

Arthur Carl Piepkorn Biography:

After graduating from Concordia College, Milwaukee, in 1925, and Concordia Seminary, Clayton, Missouri, in 1928, Arthur wanted to become a missionary to China, but was too young to be ordained. Encouraged by Seminary professor and Lutheran Hour founder Walter A. Maier to study Oriental languages and literature, he earned a doctorate at the University of Chicago by 1932 with a specialty in Babylonian archaeology. His dissertation re-dated the fall of Thebes in Egypt by five years.

While at the University, he discovered on his own the catholicity of the Book of Concord of 1580, which he had only been required to read cursorily while at the Seminary, where greater emphasis was placed on Francis Pieper’s dogmatics. This discovery led him to describe himself as a Christian first, a Western Christian second, a Lutheran third and a Missouri–Synod Lutheran fourth. Noting that Martin Luther and his fellow reformers called themselves “evangelicals,” he described himself as an “evangelical catholic.

. . .While working for the Lutheran Hour, he also served as vacancy pastor for a church in St. Louis. In 1937 he became the pastor of Saint Trinity Lutheran Church in Cleveland, Ohio. A chaplain in the U.S. Army Reserves since 1936, he accepted a call to active duty in November of 1940. After serving as the senior Chaplain of the XXIII Corps in early 1945, he was assigned in June to the personal staff of LTG Omar Bradley, commander of the Allied Occupational Forces. Two weeks later he was assigned to the personal staff of General Dwight D. Eisenhower, making him the Senior Chaplain in the European Theater. After the war he accompanied President Eisenhower to a conference in Switzerland where he served as Eisenhower’s interpreter.

Following the end of World War II he served as Commandant of the U.S. Army ChaplainSchool (1948-50), and President of the U.S. Army Chaplain Board (1950-51). His thirteen medals and decorations include the Legion of Merit. He retired from the Reserves in the rank of Colonel. 

. . .His magnum opus was the four volume classic, Profiles in Belief: The Religious Bodies of  the United States and Canada (Harper and Row, 1977ff), which is still the standard in the field (published posthumously under the editorship of John H. Tietjen).

Video Title: TLHP 03 Arthur Carl Piepkorn: Chaplain to the Greatest Generation with John Hannah. Source: The Lutheran History Channel. Date Published: February 28, 2024. Description:

Pastor Hannah has extensively researched the military service of Arthur Carl Piepkorn, calling him “the foremost of men who became Lutheran chaplains in WWII.”  While Piepkorn would later be known among Lutherans as a notable professor and theologian of the 20th century, very little work has been done on Piepkorn’s remarkable service as a U.S. Army chaplain during and after WWII.  Hannah’s work sheds new light on this period of Peipkorn’s work and helps us understand Lutheran chaplaincy.