Expedient Lutherans

With the same expediency which has marked 400 years of Lutheranism, the United Lutheran Church in America at Milwaukee last week modified two old tenets to accommodate existing conditions.

Their old rule was that adultery was the only cause for divorce. But they were obliged to recognize that divorce "is now accepted in large circles as a necessary and salutary expedient of modern life, affording a convenient means of escape when the continuance in the marriage relationship has ceased for any reason to be desirable." The United Lutherans voted to add "malicious desertion" to adultery as a divorce cause. The innocent party of a Lutheran divorce may remarry, after one year.

The Augsburg Confession admonishes Lutherans to "engage in just wars." But many modern Lutherans are thoroughgoing pacifists. The Milwaukee meeting decided: "The State is a divine institution, and under certain circumstances it may become the duty of a Christian to defend the State even at the cost of human life; but what these circumstances must be cannot be determined by the Church. Here the individual conscience alone can serve as a sufficient guide."

Probably because he is a personification of their mixture of mysticism and practicality, the United Lutherans elected for his seventh term as president Frederick Hermann Knubel, 60, of Manhattan. He is a tall, wiry, active man who does not require his Vandyke beard to point up his distinguished bearing. He hates procrastination or inactivity, despises every form of cant, characteristics which he showed 37 years ago when he won first honors at Gettysburg (Pa.) College, venerable Lutheran preparatory school for the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Gettysburg. The year the Seminary graduated him he married Christine Ritscher of Jersey City, N. J., took her to the University of Leipzig for a year's honeymoon and study. They returned to Manhattan, she to set up a household, he to be ordained in the Evangelical Lutheran Church. Young, bold and persuasive, that same summer he organized for his pastorate the Church of the Atonement, now called Church of Our Savior's Atonement, important Lutheran congregation in upper Manhattan. Seven years ago Mrs. Knubel died. After two years' grief he married Jennie C. Christ of Manhattan. Presidency of the United Lutheran Church caused him to drop pastorate. Now he commutes daily from his New Rochelle home to his Manhattan office off Fifth Avenue, whither the half-dozen religious organizations of which he is a trustee or officer go for counsel.

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