See Part II of this article by Susan Wilds McArver
Copyright 2011 Lutheran University Press. This essay will be published by Lutheran University Press in a book entitled Sources of Authority in the Church.
1. A detailed case study of the Church of Sweden's decision has been written by Brita Stendahl, The Force of Tradition: A Case Study of Women Priests in Sweden, Fortress Press, 1985. The book contains a valuable appendix by Constance Parvey that surveys women's ordination on the wider ecumenical landscape in the World Council of Churches.
2. Sten Rodhe, "The Controversy over the Ordination of Women in Sweden", Lutheran World vol. 4, 1957–58, pp 392–404.
3. Comments after talk given by Archibishop Anders Wejryd to the Augustana Heritage Association gathering in Rock Island, Illinois, June 2010.
4. Gunnar Hillerdal to Karl Mattson, ... 1959, Mattson to Hillerdal 1960? The Mattson papers are in a private collection. The author has made copies of this and other correspondence related to Swedish American theological relationships up to 1963, when Karl Mattson died.
5. I explore this ambition in more detail in "Augustana's Theological"... Lutheran Quarterly, Spring 2010, pp.
6. In the formation of the LWF and WCC, Americans pressed for confessional subscription as the means for constituting membership. This excluded some German Lutherans from the LWF because of the unique territorial Union church polity that combined churches with differing confessional orientations. Conservative Lutherans in Germany holding the same confessional position would not subscribe to the Barmen Declaration. American Lutherans, with their conservative position on the confessions were thus entangled with many difficult moral and ethical as well as theological questions. A path forward for European Lutherans and Protestants had been to set aside these confessional tests in the favor of a more cosmopolitan and international identity.
7. The ALC, Reports and Actions, 1964, p 140.
8. The items quoted come from the compiled and bound report on the study for the ordination of women in the LCUSA archives, now located at the ELCA archives. LCUSA volume at archives in LCUSA 14/4 box 29.
9. Quoted in Naomi Frost, Golden Visions, Broken Dreams: A Short History of the Lutheran Council in the USA, LCUSA, 1987, pg 17.
10. The much smaller fourth church, the Evangelical Slovak Lutheran Synod, later joined the Missouri Synod.
11. LCUSA archives, 14/4 box 29.
12. Krister Stendahl, The Bible and the Role of Women, Fortress, 1966, cited in Reumann's report to the subcommittee, and Ray Tiemeyer's condensation of the reports published by LCUSA in 1970.
13. Golden Visions Broken Dreams, pg 21.
© October 2011
Journal of Lutheran Ethics
Volume 11, Issue 6