We Have Got to Talk About Usury (Part XVIII): C.F.W. Walther and the Nineteenth Century Struggle Against Usury—The General Convention of 1869
St. Paul’s Evangelical Lutheran Church in Fort Wayne, Indiana. The previous church building was the site of the 1869 LCMS convention related below.
The following post is the eighteenth in a series on usury by the Rev. Vincent Shemwell. Rev. Shemwell serves as pastor of Bethlehem Lutheran Church in Johnson City, Tennessee. He graduated from Concordia Theological Seminary in Fort Wayne with the M.Div. in 2022, and received his STM from CTSFW in 2024, writing his thesis on Johann Georg Hamann. The previous installments can be found below:
Part I: Introduction
Part II: The Old Testament
Part III: The New Testament
Part IV: The Church Fathers—Clement of Alexandria through Hilary of Poitiers
Part V: The Church Fathers — The Cappadocians
Part VI: The Church Fathers — Church Councils and Ambrose
Part VII: The Church Fathers—Chrysostom through Leo the Great
Part VIII: Medieval Theologians
Part IX: The Medieval Church Continued—Councils, Canon Law, Dante, and Other Matters
Part X: Luther—His First Foray, in Translation
Part XI: The Strauss Affair and Luther’s Long Sermon
Part XII: Luther on Why Pastors Must Preach against Usury
Part XIII: Miscellaneous Mentions by Luther and a Few Misconceptions
Part XIV: After Luther—Spangenberg, Melanchthon, Brenz, Aepinus, Chemnitz, and Selnecker
Part XV: Rhegius, Hunnius, Gerhard, and the Setting of a Bright Sun
Part XVI: The Regensburg Dispute of 1587
Part XVII: C.F.W. Walther and the Nineteenth Century Struggle Against Usury—1838 to 1868
In the years immediately preceding the 1869 General Convention, Walther, as synodical president, advanced his opposition to lending at interest with a vehemence that was increasingly impossible to ignore. This growing boldness obviously did not go unanswered by those with a more permissive view of usury. For instance, in January 1867, an article published in the American Lutheran, commenting on Walther’s theses against usury, expressed the author’s lament over what he derisively described as the “sheer impracticality of the so-called Old Lutherans.” Rather than retreat, Walther replied to the attack with open polemic, writing (Lehre und Wehre XIII [February 1867], 54): “We firmly believe that nothing could cause the ‘American Lutherans’ to recoil from us so-called Old Lutherans more irrevocably than Luther’s teaching on usury; for a Christianity that demands more than so-called revivals, after which one continues, as a businessman, to act exactly as before, is, to them, an intolerable inconvenience.”
Furthering his polemic, in the following month, Walther publicly denounced the Rothschild banking family, much as Luther had done centuries before with the Fuggers (Der Lutheraner XXIII [1 March 1867], 101): “The following appears in a financial newspaper: ‘The wealth of the Rothschild family was stated on July 1, 1866, to be two point six billion dollars. And this amount increases every year by sixty million solely through interest.’ Here we see what usury does: in gargantuan sums it finally devours the whole world, bone and all. Having come to the topic of usury though, we are reminded that a few weeks ago we read of a local Lutheran (?) pastor (!) who threatened a congregation that had temporarily hired and dismissed him two and a half years prior with legal prosecution if they did not pay him the still outstanding portion of his salary, amounting to $10.75, together with interest for two and a half years, coming to $1.60. Evidently the Rothschild spirit has now possessed even the clergy.” For Walther, the charging of interest within the church was especially reprehensible; he saw it as an unmistakable manifestation of worldly avarice and mammonism intruding into the Holy Office itself.
In 1868, the sheer prevalence of usury as a profession was noted with open contempt (Der Lutheraner XXV [15 October 1868], 27): “In New York there are about 30,000 people who scrape out their existence by lending money at usurious rates.” The brief mention closes not with an economic analysis but with a scriptural indictment of living off the proceeds of interest rather than one’s labor, invoking 2 Thessalonians 3:11–12: “For we hear that there are some who walk among you in a disorderly manner, not working at all, but are busybodies. Now those who are such we command and exhort through our Lord Jesus Christ that they work in quietness and eat their own bread.”
1869 began with a bang, so to speak. Early that year, an anonymous pamphlet advocating the permissibility of usury appeared, with a title rendered into English as “The Lending of Money at Interest in Light of the Commandment to Love One’s Neighbor: A Friendly Critique of the Articles in Der Lutheraner and Lehre und Wehre, Considered from a Practical Standpoint, for the Pastors and Laity of the Synod of Missouri, Ohio, and Other States.” This eighteen-page tract, which was circulated widely throughout the Synod, mounted a direct challenge to the position set forth in official synodical publications.
The pamphlet was likely authored—or at least funded—by a small group of lay businessmen drawn from several congregations in the northeastern United States. It consisted of two sections: the first signed by twenty-eight laymen, the second by thirty-four. The driving concern of the document is captured in the following passage (as quoted in James W. Albers, “The History of the Attitudes within the Missouri Synod Toward Life Insurance” (D.Th. diss., Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, 1972), 125): “The undersigned are not convinced that the position held in the synodical publications is correct and do not feel it wholesome to criticize the articles about usury and interest, and therefore request that the publishers use utmost caution in dealing with this question, lest the Synod be torn apart.”
Through this pamphlet, the authors argued that because lending at interest often yields material benefit to borrowers, it cannot, as such, violate the commandment to love one’s neighbor. They further warned that the Synod’s seemingly uncompromising stance threatened, at the time, not only the stability of individual congregations but the cohesion of the Synod itself. Finally, they pointed to what they regarded as a troubling inconsistency: synodical leaders were condemning the lending of money at interest even as many members of the Synod were, in one way or another, entangled in precisely that practice.
Several articles appeared soon thereafter in Der Lutheraner and Lehre und Wehre, including at least one authored by laymen who proudly aligned themselves with the Synod’s position. Walther’s Die Wucherfrage was likewise published without delay, in which he had already anticipated and answered nearly all of the objections advanced by the lay businessmen in their anonymous pamphlet. In addition, Rudolf Lange composed a lengthy rebuttal to the pamphlet, addressing and refuting its arguments point by point. Some of Lange’s remarks warrant quotation, not least because his polemical intensity rivals, and at times exceeds, that of Walther.
Lange writes (Lehre und Wehre XV (March 1869), 73–74): “That Scripture, when it speaks of ‘usury,’ means exactly what that term meant at the time the biblical texts were written is self-evident. If, therefore, someone presents to the public a treatise on usury addressed to Christians while remaining ignorant of the fact that Scripture long predates the modern custom of restricting the term ‘usury’ to interest exceeding a state-permitted rate, he strikes me as comparable to a man who publishes a work of history while professing ignorance as to whether Napoleon lived before or after the birth of Christ. Do you imagine that in those Mosaic passages which forbid the Israelites to practice usury toward their brothers only seven or ten percent, or any other rate hypothetically stipulated by Moses, was prohibited, when nowhere in the Jewish law, which lies fully accessible in the hands of every Christian, is any permissible rate of interest ever mentioned?”
He then affirms his confidence in the perspicuity of Scripture on this question, deliberately countering the pamphlet’s snide posture with a bit of moral severity (75): “That lending at interest—and by this I naturally also understand the common and customary lending of money at interest permitted by the state, as explained above—possesses immoral, and therefore harmful and pernicious, qualities can be denied only by those who, in this matter, have completely lost the ability to distinguish the moral from the immoral, right from wrong.”
Pressing the attack, Lange proceeds to characterize the pamphlet’s arguments as entirely “Jesuitical” (76–77), contending that such reasoning could just as easily be used to justify virtually any sin or transgression of the Lord’s commandments (79).
Finally, he directly addresses the lay authors of this misguided pro-usury tract (80): “Thank God that He has not called you to be a public interpreter of His holy law; for if you were to preach ‘love of neighbor’ as you understand it, you would certainly poison unto eternal death the souls entrusted to you with that tax-collector and sinner ‘morality’ plainly condemned by the Lord.”
Right after Lange’s article was published in Lehre und Wehre, an anonymous (dear reader, please note here the recurring theme of anonymity among the pro-usury crowd) reply was published and circulated, in which the author states the following (as quoted in Albers, “The History of the Attitudes,” 128): “The usury controversy has become a burning issue…. Our professors teach that all interests, even one per cent per year, are usury and mortal sins. I hold this teaching to be an error, as an unevangelical, legalistic, Jewish doctrine, similar to the false doctrine of the Schwärmer … the forbidding of all spirited drinks, of the Sabbath, etc., as a teaching against Christian freedom, and generally that interest taking and paying belongs to adiaphora, whose misuse is forbidden, whose use is permitted.”
The author moreover maintains that not only does lending at interest not violate the seventh commandment, it actually serves to fulfill it, insofar as it helps to aid one’s neighbor in protecting and improving his income. Even more remarkably, the anonymous writer claims that Psalm 15 refers exclusively to lending to the poor, which is nowhere stated or implied in the text. However, what is most revealing is that, as with these anonymous objections more broadly, the author never engages the long-standing tradition that consistently identified usury as a violation of the first commandment. This interpretation was shared by the church fathers, the medieval theologians, Luther, and later by Walther and Lange. Even so, this tradition was evidently seldom addressed in the nineteenth century by those who were seeking to defend the practice of lending at interest. The reason may well be that, once lending at interest is properly understood as principally a sin against God, the practice becomes manifestly indefensible.
In any case, the controversy was clearly intensifying. Shortly after the publication of the anonymous pamphlet, in late March, Walther wrote to Ferdinand Sievers, a missionary to the Native Americans in Michigan, expressing grave concern over the widening dispute. In this letter, he cautions (Briefe von C.F.W. Walther, ed. Ludwig Fürbringer, vol II [St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1916], 157): “We will hardly be able to avoid discussing together the question of usury on the occasion of the upcoming sessions of our General Convention. May God be at our side in this! For Satan clearly has evil designs. But He Who is in us is greater than he who is in the world. If God compels us to take up this delicate matter, He will also help ensure that we do not become split over it.” By late 1868, Walther remained confident that the Synod could restore the biblical teaching against usury. By the spring of the following year, however, that confidence had to some extent given way to a measure of apprehension that the struggle itself might fracture the Synod, owing to the evil he perceived at work among the opposing party.
In another letter, written several months later, at the end of May, to H.C. Schwan, Walther’s future successor as president, his tone is little more resolute (Walthers Briefe II, 159): “Not without trepidation, we look forward to the outcome of the struggle concerning the question of usury at the next General Convention; for that this matter must be discussed is surely beyond all doubt. The opponents have forced it. Those opposing us from outside [the Synod] also regard this point as our Achilles’ heel. I hope to God that He will also help us to victory in this matter. To be sure … [in the works of our opponents] there speaks a ‘spirit’ that is not flesh of our flesh, nor bone of our bones. Still, I hope that this element, too, is too weak to become leaven among us. Nevertheless, it is the Lord alone Who can help here…. Ah, if only we had Luther among us as well, who could restrain even the wrath of God!”
Around the same time, Siegmund Fritschel, a professor at Wartburg Seminary of the Iowa Synod, publicly accused the Missouri Synod of judaizing in S. K. Brobst’s Theologische Monatshefte (“Die Zinsfrage: Zwölf Thesen über das Ausleihen von Geld auf Interessen”). Fritschel argued that Walther and the Missourians were reviving a law no longer binding upon Christians and were therefore illegitimately binding consciences.
A.G. Doehler, a pastor from Wolcottsburg, New York, likewise published a pamphlet presenting Gerhard’s position on usury, including the claim that the biblical prohibition of usury does not really belong to the moral law. Significantly, some years later, Doehler publicly retracted this view, explicitly renouncing his assertion that the Old Testament prohibition of usury is not moral law and fully adopting the position of Luther and Walther (Lehre und Wehre XXII [October 1876], 306–7).
In June, the Synod replied in Der Lutheraner with a clear declaration that the prohibition of usury is indeed moral law, attested in Psalm 15 and Ezekiel 18 and articulated with still greater clarity in its reiteration by Christ in the chief New Testament text against lending at interest, Luke 6:35. Walther and other synodical leaders were resolute in their insistence that the prohibition of lending at interest in all its forms remains binding upon the Christian.
Fritschel and many others within the Iowa Synod strongly objected to this position, maintaining that, at a minimum, the question of usury should be regarded as an “open question.” The status of so-called open questions had long been a point of sharp disagreement between Missouri and Iowa. For Walther’s position on the topic—as the title itself frankly states—one may consult his essay: “The False Arguments for the Modern Theory of Open Questions,” translated by William Arndt and Allen Guebert, Concordia Theological Monthly 10 (April–November 1939): 254–62, 351–57, 415–420, 507–13, 587–95, 656–66, 752–59, 827–34. In his conclusion, Walther warns (833): “The principle that Scripture contains doctrines of faith which are not clearly and unmistakably revealed and must therefore be counted as open questions inevitably leads not only to unionism and syncretism, but also to thoroughgoing skepticism and indifference in doctrine, even to the most shocking unbelief.”
Still in June, following that clear statement about usury as moral law in Der Lutheraner, another anonymous pamphlet appeared, again from the northeast, entitled “Let No One Bind Your Consciences” (Albers, “The History of the Attitudes,” 132). According to the Synod’s prompt response in Der Lutheraner, the pamphlet charged Missouri with “a rigid consistency” and “a false Nomism” (Der Lutheraner XXV [15 June 1869], 157). Walther replied by protesting that it was not he who had bound consciences, but God Himself through His Holy Word. In his brief public protest, he goes on to write (158): “Anyone who reads what has been written in our Synod and by it concerning usury will know whether this doctrine is genuine gold or merely the appearance of gold [i.e., fool’s gold]; he will also know from which mine this offered gold has been dug. And even if this mine [i.e., the biblical teaching against usury] was abandoned five thousand years ago and were also abandoned by all men today, what does that matter to us? We know that the world, which lusts after glittering earthly gold, long ago abandoned this mine and rejected this teaching. But thanks be to God that Luther reopened the mine and brought this teaching back to light.”
Three years later, in 1872, the Synod issued its own pamphlet as a rejoinder of sorts, its purpose announced unequivocally in the title, translated as “Let Your Conscience Be Bound Regarding Lending at Interest, Which Is Usury—A Conversation Between Two Lutherans: Lending at Interest Presented on the Basis of Holy Scripture and the Testimony of the Oldest and Most Eminent Teachers of the Church, Especially as Clarified by Dr. Martin Luther and Dr. Martin Chemnitz, for the Instruction and Warning of the Christian People.” This pamphlet was later reissued in expanded form in 1884 (Albers, “The History of Attitudes,” 137).
The Synod’s position seemed clear in the early summer of 1869, yet a discernible shift in approach occurred sometime between then and August. The first indication of this change emerged when Walther sought foreign aid in the controversy from Friedrich Brunn, a confessional Lutheran pastor in Saxony, who agreed to join the fray and publicly announced his opposition to lending at interest (“Eine Stimme aus Deutschland über die Wucherfrage,” Der Lutheraner XXV [15 August 1869], 185–88). Although Brunn aligned himself with Walther’s cause, his arguments conspicuously bypassed the many biblical prohibitions against usury, including Luke 6:35, and instead rested entirely on an appeal to the Golden Rule.
This same methodological shift reappeared the following month at the General Convention, when Theodor Brohm, tasked with presenting the Synod’s case against usury, for some reason adopted essentially the same line of argumentation. In retrospect, this retreat from explicit biblical prohibition to a purely ethical appeal, one informed foremost by outcomes rather than God’s plainly stated will, may be regarded as the decisive weakness that ultimately undermined Walther and Lange’s sustained efforts.
The fourteenth General Convention convened at St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in Fort Wayne, Indiana, through the first eleven days of September. Among the principal items of business was formalizing the declaration of altar and pulpit fellowship with the Wisconsin Synod, a matter that had been actively pursued and prepared over the course of the preceding decade, as well as the establishment of the Synod’s own publishing house, Concordia Publishing House. By far the most contentious issue, however, was that of usury. Brohm, with Walther’s full blessing, presented the following fourteen theses on usury for the Synod’s consideration, which were taken up, in part, over the course of six morning sessions. These theses, together with the lengthy discussion of the first five—beyond which time did not allow further treatment—can be found in the Convention Proceedings, pp. 51–85.
The rule that orders and governs the Christian’s conduct toward the neighbor is the commandment to love one’s neighbor: you shall love your neighbor as yourself. The right interpretation of this commandment is this: whatever you want men to do to you, do also to them.
This commandment binds the Christian to enter into no contract with his neighbor except a just one, that is, one which does not advantage one contracting party at the expense of the other.
The ordinary loan contract at interest is one by which the creditor secures not only the principal but also a profit upon it—to the extent that such security is even possible among men—while leaving the potential loss, or at least the risk of it, entirely to the debtor.
All earthly property, money included, indeed every product of human labor, has, since the Fall into sin, become uncertain and subject to manifold misfortunes. Even if such misfortunes are not the rule, they nonetheless occur as exceptions to it, and by no means as rare ones.
All such exceptional cases the ordinary loan contract at interest leaves unconsidered, obligating the debtor to pay in every instance; it is precisely this that renders it unjust.
Granted that the creditor does not always make use of the strictness of this loan contract, the loan contract nevertheless remains, according to its letter, the same unjust contract. Granted further that the creditor has the honest intention of relaxing the strictness of the loan contract, such honest intention does not justify the act by which he concludes the loan contract; in part, he acts against sincerity, which does nothing other than what it truly intends, and in part, he exposes himself to the danger of inflicting harm upon his debtor even after his own death.
Just as it would be unjust on the creditor’s part to leave the loss, or the risk of loss, entirely to the debtor, so it would be no less unjust on the part of a well-to-do debtor to keep for himself alone the profit made with the borrowed capital and not to share it with the creditor in an equitable manner. From this there arises a contract by which justice is done to both parties, call it what one will.
This proof against the lending of money at interest, derived from the commandment to love one’s neighbor, casts an explanatory light upon all passages of Holy Scripture that treat of usury or of lending, and teaches us not merely how they might be understood, but how they must be understood. Exod. 22:25; Lev. 25:35–38; Deut. 15:7–8; Deut. 23:19; Ezek. 18:8, 13; 22:12; Ps. 37:26; Deut. 23:20; Ps. 15:5; Prov. 28:8; Matt. 5:42; Luke 6:35.
If one sets aside the proof derived from the commandment to love one’s neighbor, those passages of Scripture could perhaps be interpreted to mean that only usury practiced against the poor is forbidden; or that the prohibition of usury is merely Jewish; and that the commandment concerning lending has only the needy in view and would not oppose lending to the rich at interest.
From the proof given above, however, it follows with necessity that the prohibitions of usury are universal moral prohibitions binding also upon Christians; that usury against the rich no less than against the poor is sin; and that no lending is permitted except lending without interest.
Against this proof no objection can reasonably be raised on the following grounds: (a) the lease or rental contract; (b) interesse and usury from necessity; (c) 2 Corinthians 8:13; (d) that usury is nowhere forbidden in the New Testament; (e) that the loan contract at interest is sanctioned by the civil authorities; (f) the distinction between the Christian and the citizen; (g) that misuse does not abolish proper use; (h) that the doctrine of usury leads to communism; (i) that it must hinder all business activity; (j) that no one would be willing to lend; (k) that Luther himself, in the Large Catechism, does not appear to attach such weight to the doctrine of usury, and that the Symbolical Books are silent concerning it; (l) that Luther himself permits a moderate usury; (m) and that recognized orthodox theologians hold a certain usury to be permissible.
The sum is this: love of neighbor commands the Christian: (1) to give to the poor; (2) to lend freely to those in temporary distress; (3) to enter into no ordinary loan contract at interest, even with the well-to-do; (4) to work with his money himself or to enter with another into a partnership contract, according to which profit and loss are shared in a just manner; and (5) if he wishes to enter with such a person into an improper loan contract, to remove from it, in an unambiguous manner, whatever is oppressive and unjust.
With respect to particular casuistic questions in certain business transactions, namely, to what extent interesse may be sought as compensation for demonstrable damages, judgment must be left to conscientious and competent persons who possess scriptural knowledge concerning usury.
The duty of the Lutheran preacher in this matter is: (1) to recall to the memory of those entrusted to him the doctrine of usury, which in our day has been forgotten or misunderstood even within the Lutheran Church; (2) to seek to remove the manifold prejudices against it with all humility, frankness, and patience; (3) to promote in his hearers a scriptural and spiritual understanding of the commandment to love one’s neighbor in its full extent; (4) to demonstrate to them the incompatibility of usury with this commandment; and (5) since in this demonstration conclusions must be drawn which not every Christian is capable of following in equal degree, the preacher must, together with persevering diligence, also show untiring patience toward those who cannot immediately see the probative force of these conclusions.
Before the first five theses were discussed, a few other introductory statements were made, which were each adopted by the Synod, including the following:
(pg. 53) “For some time now, the question whether the lending of money at interest is sin or not has come to the foreground within our Synod. Some answer ‘Yes’; others say ‘No,’ and hold only the charging of interest from the needy, or the charging of interest exceeding the legal rate, to be sin. This difference in conviction is certainly not insignificant. The apostolic word, ‘Endeavor to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace,’ lays it upon all our hearts to do everything we can so that we, who confess ourselves to be united in the fundamental articles of the faith, may also become united in this teaching, which so closely touches the Christian life. For to promote and to preserve unity of doctrine is indeed one of the ultimate purposes of our synodical assemblies.”
(55) “However desirable a prompt agreement on this matter may be, we nonetheless cannot demand an immediate decision, indeed we can hardly expect one, nor can we set a definite time by which the question must be decided. Patience, gentleness, mutual brotherly respect, and frankness in the exchange of our respective convictions are, next to diligent searching of the Scriptures and persistent prayer, the most necessary weapons with which we must be equipped in order to attain that longed-for agreement and to thwart the evil designs of the devil. We must not allow ourselves to be driven, by fear of being accused of inconsistency by ill-disposed persons, to bring the question to a premature conclusion.”
(57) “Not the prevailing custom, sanctioned by a hundred years of use; not pecuniary advantages or disadvantages; not the pronouncements and authorities of men, neither those of a Luther or a Chemnitz, nor those of an Andreae or a Gerhard, but Holy Scripture must be the sole standard by which we measure this doctrine. Nor may we employ all manner of casuistical questions as our principle; rather, these must be judged and answered according to the principle of Scripture alone.”
Discussion of the theses then ensued. It was first asserted that, although the usury question does not concern a fundamental article of faith, it is not therefore “unimportant, since it touches Christian life very closely … and concerns a doctrine which is clearly and distinctly contained in Holy Scripture” (54). Accordingly, it was urged that the usury question must not be treated as an “open question,” for Missouri “decisively condemns … the modern theory of so-called open questions,” by which “the Unionists assert that certain errors must be tolerated for the sake of love” (56–57). The usury question admits of a right answer, it was maintained, and “Christians are obligated to accept the doctrine of usury,” just as they are “to believe all the doctrines of Holy Scripture.”
At the same time, it was acknowledged early on that the subject was a sensitive one, since it “is very closely connected with the service of mammon, which lies so deep in man’s flesh” (55). For this reason, it was said to require a treatment marked by both “persevering diligence” and “untiring patience.”
Although the discussion began on promising footing, it soon became absorbed in the first thesis and devolved into a protracted dispute over whether the command to love one’s neighbor as oneself implicitly entails a command to love oneself. Numerous passages of Scripture were advanced against this scholastic claim, including 1 Corinthians 10:24 and 13:5, Philippians 2:4, and especially Luke 14:26. Yet the debate remained largely tangential and contributed little to clarifying the substantive question of usury. Those pressing the notion of a commanded self-love appear to have done so on the assumption that it would somehow justify the charging of interest to wealthy borrowers.
Eventually, once it was clarified that the first thesis only affirms that the command to love one’s neighbor obligates Christians to refrain from any practice that might harm the neighbor, including “acts of selfishness, self-love, and disregard toward one’s neighbor” (72), the thesis was formally adopted. The second thesis followed shortly thereafter and was adopted with little discussion.
The conversation then turned to the third thesis, where the question arose whether it is fair to claim that a creditor suffers no risk of loss, given that all earthly property remains perpetually endangered, since no man is God. While this observation was readily granted, extended debate still unfolded, resulting in the addition of the following—arguably unnecessary—clarification (76): “It is self-evident that creditor and debtor each share some degree of risk and loss insofar as all earthly property is subject to risk and loss.” With this addition, the third thesis was adopted.
The fourth thesis was then presented and adopted in its original form. The remaining discussion centered entirely on the fifth thesis and the question of whether interest-bearing loans are, in most cases, unjust by their very nature (77–85).
At issue was the claim that the ordinary loan contract at interest is unjust because it obligates the debtor to pay interest in every case, without regard for misfortune or loss. Brohm and the other proponents of the theses argued that since all earthly enterprises are subject to the possibility of unforeseeable failure, justice requires that this risk be contractually acknowledged. A loan agreement that demands a fixed return regardless of outcome, they contended, transfers all risk to the debtor while securing gain for the creditor, thereby violating justice and, consequently, love.
This claim was developed through several lines of reasoning. First, it was emphasized that profit derived from capital is never certain, since success and failure rest in God’s hands. To demand interest in advance therefore presupposes a certainty that does not, in fact, exist. Second, while it was conceded that many debtors do profit materially from borrowed money, it was argued that the existence of cases in which debtors suffer loss is sufficient to render such contracts unjust, since justice must account for all cases, not just the typical or expected ones. When a debtor incurs loss and is required to pay interest regardless, he is made poorer beyond the misfortune itself, while the creditor exacts more than he has given. Third, Brohm and others rejected the notion that appeals to Christian love could remedy this injustice after the fact. Contracts, they claimed, must be grounded in justice, not in the uncertain hope that love might later mitigate their strict terms.
It was further maintained that if a creditor wishes to share in potential gain, he must also share in the risk of loss. A contract that provides for gain while disregarding loss was thus characterized as inherently unequal and unjust. On this basis, unconditional interest was thoroughly rejected, while conditional arrangements, such as contracts that remit interest in cases of loss, or partnership-like agreements in which profit and loss are shared, were acknowledged as potentially just. In support of this principle, Luther was repeatedly cited as affirming that a claim to gain necessarily entails an acceptance of risk.
The discussion concluded by affirming that the matter was not merely practical or economic, but moral and theological, touching upon conscience, sin, and salvation. Because the ordinary loan contract at interest could, in certain cases, make unjust demands, it was held that it could not be entered into with a clear conscience. Christians were therefore exhorted to reject unconditional interest and to insist upon contracts that reckon with both gain and loss, even when such demands place them at odds with prevailing economic practice and civil law.
Unfortunately, the debate came to an abrupt end at this point. The fifth thesis was never formally adopted, and the Convention moved on to other business. In one respect, Brohm may be said to have prevailed, insofar as the few theses adopted more or less reflected his position. Yet the discussion itself had become so unfocused and peripheral that little sustained attention was given to the central underlying question: whether the charging of interest is inherently sinful, no matter the outcome.
The deeper disappointment lies in Brohm’s argumentative strategy. Rather than grounding his case in the explicit biblical prohibitions against lending at interest and leaning into the historic arguments against usury, he appealed instead to the commandment to love one’s neighbor. This shift in approach may have been calculated to sidestep certain interpretive objections commonly raised against the prohibitory passages. (Indeed, in the eighth thesis, he appears to concede that the commandment to love one’s neighbor provides the only hermeneutical lens through which Christians are to make sense of the prohibitions.) Yet such interpretive objections had already been consistently rebutted in synodical publications prior to the General Convention. Throughout the spring and summer of 1869, Synod had spoken with perfect lucidity: the prohibitions against usury in both the Old and New Testaments were neither obscure nor ambiguous, and any attempt to cast them as an “open question” was emphatically rejected. Alternatively, Brohm may simply have been acting out of political expediency, presuming this to be his most viable path toward some degree of consensus.
Either way, once the discussion shifted from biblical prohibition to the Golden Rule and practical outcomes, the Convention fell into the same error evident in earlier debates, an error committed by Andreae, Gerhard, and others, and expressly criticized in print by Walther, Lange, and many of their contemporaries. As Walther states in his thirty-first thesis on usury (Lehre und Wehre XII [November–December 1866], 342): “An action is not to be judged first according to its consequences, but above all according to its agreement with God’s command.” Regrettably, this displacement of the biblical norm in favor of consequentialist reasoning set the trajectory for subsequent treatments of the usury question within the LCMS.
Even more troubling, however, is what the Convention failed to address altogether. At no point did the debate engage the claim, most clearly attested in Psalm 15 and Ezekiel 18, that lending at interest constitutes, at its core, a violation of the first commandment. This concern had already been relegated by certain Lutheran scholastics inclined toward a more permissive position. Yet it had been central for the preponderance of the church fathers, the medieval theologians, Luther and Chemnitz, and, in the nineteenth century, for Walther and Lange. Above all, Walther was persistent in insisting that usury is a form of idolatry: a concrete expression of mammonism that threatens the spiritual integrity of the church in America. And still, at St. Paul’s in 1869, this crucial theological judgment appears never to have been raised.
This silence is all the more striking in light of one of the Convention’s stated purposes. At the outset of the discussion on usury, the following was declared (57): “Since a difference of opinion on the question of usury has now revealed itself even among us, we indeed acknowledge it to be our duty to have patience with our erring brothers; yet we may not tolerate any error which, on this point, seeks to raise its head. And that we do not intend to tolerate it, we demonstrate by the very fact that we have assembled in order to remove this difference.” Despite this lofty aim, in the end, the discussion resolved fairly little.
At the very least, the debate leading up to 1869, as well as the proceedings of the Convention itself, reveal some measure of common ground, even among some of those inclined toward a much more permissive view of lending at interest. Broad agreement emerged on three points: first, that interest should never be taken from the poor or from those experiencing temporary hardship; second, that risk, and therefore both profit and loss, must be shared by lender and borrower; and third, that the question of usury is an important one, in need of an eventual conclusive answer from Synod.
Although the outcome of the General Convention must have been deeply discouraging for Walther, Lange, and their allies, they did not give up the fight. God willing, in the next part of our series, we will pick up in 1870 with the ongoing struggle against usury, tracing the continuation of the debate and following its development to its sudden end in the early decades of the twentieth century.
Stay tuned.