In this year, what was to become the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod was founded in Chicago, with Dr. C.F.W. Walther as it's first president.
As a member of the LCMS, perhaps a few brief remarks on my part would be in order.
A lot of people will tell you that LCMS is like the Catholics, except that our Pope lives in St. Louis. That's a good one, and not totally impertinent in that we do agree with the Catholics in at least one very important matter.
We believe that the Bible is without error. The book that says that Jesus died for your sins is the same book that says that Jonah was in the belly of the fish for 3 days.
If one selects certain passages from the Bible to believe and others to reject, is he not just inventing his own religion, one based on Christianity?
The notion that some impossible things are more impossible than other impossible things, is the product of sloppy thinking.
God created time and space and matter and energy, and He can do anything He wants with them. The Bible tells us what He did do.
I think a lot of people go wrong when they try to interperet the Bible: they are influenced by their own opinions about what they think they would do if they were God.
This is why we need to just let the Bible interperet itself. Go on down to the Bible store and buy yourself one with about 10-20 cross-references per page, open it to Habakkuk (or Isaiah 53 or John 17 or wherever) and study it. The devil really hates it when we do that! Praise God!
If such a purchase is impossible, just try to get the context of the passage. Some of the parables of Jesus can be a little hard to understand unless one looks back a few verses to see what the Pharisees were muttering about just before, or what the disciples were asking Him about, or what the people in the crowd were yelling out to Him.
Sometimes people have trouble because they are not familiar with life in 1st century Palestine.
People today do not know that the shepherd's rod was used to guide the sheep along the trail, keeping them from falling off the cliff.
They don't know about how in a vinyard, all the roots graft themselves together, forming what is in reality one gigantic vine, connected underground where we can't see.
Today, bread comes sliced in a plastic bag, and everyone gets their own cup of wine.