I’ve been listening to Issues Etc since I was in high school, back when it was broadcast on KFUO from the CSL campus. The show took me from the Lutheranism of my home congregation in Missouri that focused on the Bible, small Catechism and TLH to a deeper level of confessional Lutheranism I never imagined possible. However, over a long period of time and the very biased and unfair programming Pastor Todd arranged against the LCMS pastors promoting Infant Communion among confessional Lutheranism and in other topics like liturgy with Dr Just, I began to realize slowly that Issues Etc engaged in something called Theological Impressionism in its attempt to help lure non-Lutherans away from going to Rome or Orthodoxy. I was given one perspective one what confessional Lutheranism might be. What I was really drawn to in the programming was aspects of Orthodoxy that their Lutherans guests borrow and never tell you that they’re borrowing from someone else in order to make Lutheranism appear to be more historically grounded and patristic than she really is.
Pastor Wilken, the host, gave me a false impression of Lutheranism, and for that he gets one star and prospective converts to Lutheranism should know that many of Pastor Wilken’s Lutheran guests are not giving you genuine Lutheranism but an imaginary Lutheranism, always recruiting you to change Lutheranism while the change never delivers. Meanwhile you waste a decade or more of your life on this cause.
However, without the years of Cognitive Dissonance that this show started for me, I would never have left Lutheranism for Orthodoxy. So what man intended as an evangelistic tool to grow Luther’s church, God used to bring me into the bosom and fullness of Orthodoxy, which the Church founded by Jesus Christ and perpetuated by His Apostles and their successors.
