Red Sea Heresy

When Moses and the Israelites fled Egypt more than 3,000 years ago, God sent a strong wind to divide the waters of the Red Sea so they could escape Pharaoh's army. The Israelites marched on dry ground between two walls of water. Or did they? So it says in Exodus 14, and so it is depicted in Cecil B. De Mille's film The Ten Commandments. But most biblical scholars nowadays believe that the Exodus story, like such other Old Testament accounts as Jonah and the "great fish" and Adam and Eve, are not strictly historical but were embroidered much later by Jewish editors.

Arlis Ehlen, a professor of Old Testament studies at Concordia Seminary in St. Louis, follows this mildly liberal interpretive trend. Many members of his denomination, the 2.9 million-member Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, do not. Because of the conflict and because the Missouri Synod controls Concordia, Ehlen, 40, finds himself at the center of Protestantism's biggest heresy fuss in a decade. "My own temperament is to stay away from such disputes," he says with some surprise. "My views are quite typical of those held by all the biblical teachers here."

Error-Free. The case came to a head last December when Ehlen went up before the seminary's board for a lifetime tenure appointment. The meeting was also attended by Church President Jacob Preus. Preus, former head of the Missouri Synod's other seminary, Concordia of Springfield, Ill., is a theological conservative who holds that the Bible is error-free and that such stories as the Exodus must be taken at face value.

Under grilling from Preus, Ehlen

said that he accepts 3he Bible as the word of God, but that he takes as factual only what the Bible intends to present as factual, a qualification that Preus labels a "hermeneutical cop-out." The board voted not to rehire Ehlen. But after the faculty and alumni protested, the board backed down and gave Ehlen another contract, without tenure.

Preus was not satisfied. This month he sent all Missouri Synod pastors and teachers his own five-page set of theological principles. In a covering letter Preus postulated a sort of Domino Theory: "It is only a short step from a denial of the miraculous elements surrounding the greatest redemptive act of the Old Testament (the Exodus) to a denial of ... the miracles of the incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ and His Resurrection from the dead."

Claiming that the church constitution gives him jurisdiction over the doctrinal purity of all church employees, Preus also bypassed the seminary board and ordered seminary President John Tietjen to prevent Ehlen from teaching any Bible courses. "It was known all over the church that a man had denied the facticity of certain miracles. I felt I had to do something," Preus explains. "We've had constant unrest." Tietjen tossed the order back to the board, which met last week without resolving the impasse.

Meanwhile the American Association of Theological Schools has sent a team to the Concordia campus to determine whether the seminary's accreditation should be withdrawn. The A.A.T.S. does not enforce academic freedom as such, but it insists that theological discipline be handled by a seminary's board and not by church officials. Regardless of whether Preus takes any further action, the Ehlen case is sure to be an issue when the denomination holds its convention in 1973, a meeting at which Preus will be bidding for a second four-year term as president.

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