Two-Legged Stool: The Twin Props of the Church Growth Movement – Karl Barl and Napoleon Hill. The Celebrated Lives of the Noble Frauds

 Karl Barth – my conservative Calvinist professor friend
wigged out when I called the Great Barth a fraud.
More connections are linked here.

Biographies are fun to read. So are biographical novels and movies – like Cheaper by the Dozen – which move us to check out the actual facts. I just ordered the autobiography of Pioneer Woman, because she turned blogging into a national business and TV show. Some biographies are meant to be edifying – like Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans.

Best of all are the hagiographies, which combine a smattering of facts with hilarious exaggerations. The term hagiography was first used about saints who were portrayed as nearly perfect and almost divine – to promote the income at Roman Catholic shrines and congregations. The Glories of Mary is a classic. Hagiographies have a certain style, which strikes the analytical historian as energetic, comical, and contrived. Walther biographies, like Servant of the Word, are excellent examples of this genre.

Charlotte Kirschbaum worked for pennies and did the most difficult research work for Barth, who was ill-equipped for his professor’s position. He plagiarized her work, giving her no credit and no salary, and he also plagiarized those who gave him extensive contributions, simply copying them into “his” Dogmatics. I blame Barth for Ski, Glende, and Engelbrecht.

Napoleon Hill and Karl Barth
Napoleon Hill is synonymous with the success, get-rich-quick, sales people. Some Napoleon Hill Foundation winners are Robert Schuller and Mary Kay, who won the honors for exemplifying the principles of that life-long criminal and self-centered fraud.

Karl Barth is doubtless the leading figure of Protestant and Catholic theology today. Former Barth Society President Frank Fiorenza taught in the 1970s at Notre Dame that Barth’s mistress wrote the small-print in the Dogmatics, and Karl the large print. But there is far more to the tale than that. Fiorenza is now at Harvard, enjoying an endowed chair, so his opinions did not hamper his academic career. He did not dedicate any volumes to his wife Nellie until his mistress Charlotte died. Understandably, Barth’s writing ended with the death of his mistress.

Robert Schuller claimed, with justice, to be the founder of the Church Growth Movement. Fuller Seminary, so close to Disneyland, became its academic center. Like Halle University, other cancerous Church Growth nodes have spread and lay claim to the same dogmas, but they remain centered, fostered, and festering at Fuller. No liberal activist mainline church leader is taken seriously unless he praises Walter Rauschenbusch, and no Evangelical or Lutheran leader is promoted unless he has been trained in some way at Fuller Seminary or its clones.

Valleskey and the rest of the liars are not Church Growth – oh no! But say one word against their precious dogma and they get out the Find him, Kill him! rubber stamp.
I caught Waldo Werning lying about Fuller Seminary
and he went nuts (behind my back, of course.)

The leadership of Fuller Seminary took their weak version of inerrancy and replaced it with Barth’s concept of the Bible “containing the Word of God” but “not being the Word of God.” Barth was a Universalist who did not even bother with the Subjective Justification evasion of Universal Objective Justification. I read and quoted Fuller’s repudiation of any form of inerrancy because they did not have time to quarrel about such topics when they had so much mission work to do. Doubtless my students of John’s Gospel in Greek would have much to say about that!

A WELS pastor who studied at Fuller Seminary wrote to me to say, “You were correct. Barth is the official theologian of Fuller.”

Hill
Napoleon Hill is especially significant because the anti-faith, marketing attitude of Fuller lives in perfect harmony with the dogma and deceptions of Napoleon Hill. If evangelism is nothing but salesmanship and persuasion, then the ultimate lying salesman is Napoleon Hill.

Hill changed his first name from Oliver to his middle name – Napoleon. Many people were looking for him in his early days of buying on credit, selling cheaply, and running away with the money. He was also known for keeping company with prostitutes. He married five times, treating his wives and his own children with great cruelty. He enjoyed being on the move and had to be, to avoid the people he swindled.

Probably no one can really discover what is the actual doctrine of Hill. Like Barth, he was a pompous and insecure plagiarist, who always put on airs about being a great genius. Some, like Nightingale Conant and W. Clement Stone, honestly claim to be Hill followers, but the canonical laws of success are endlessly repeated and recirculated. As Little Ichabod said to me, “There are 50 statements they all use.”

Hill began with the false claim that he interviewed Andrew Carnegie to learn the secrets of his success. Later, Hill added many other famous names to his list of successful Americans, all eager to teach him. But all Hill did was give Carnegie a medal, which the steel magnate returned to the little phony.

The official biography is full of hilarious quotations and claims from Hill, including a long passage at the end about what Carnegie supposedly said to him. The way other details are piled on reminds me of many other hagiographies, funny and sad at the same time. Hill never interviewed any famous person and he was not a counselor to several US presidents, as he claimed.

Some parallels in Walther hagiography – 

• “He did not sign the document making Stephan his bishop.”
• “Walther did not know about Stephan’s adultery until one woman confessed.” The confession legend was based on the woman who had a cabin near Stephan on the trip to America, while Mrs. Stephan was left in Dresden. Hanky-panky that no one knew about? Or a co-inky-dinky that they were dumb and mute until they had a chance to rob and kidnap their bishop-for-life?
• Walther allowed that Stephan’s marriage problems were the fault of his wife! Servant of the Word. Senator Franken take note.
• Walther said, “Stephan was a bit of a Pietist.” That claim overlooks Walther’s solid devotion to Pietism and cell groups.
• “Walther studied Luther!” At one time, every decent theology student did. Now they study Fuller and Barth.

The Think System
The Music Man has a great satire of Napoleon Hill and all lying salesmen in the great Think System promoted by Professor Harold Hill. Was the last name a coincidence?

The children do not need training in music, They only need “to think!” They think the song and out comes a horrid cacophony of burbling and honks. One mother shouts out, “That’s my Barney. That tuba’s my Barney!” She is pleased, weeping with joy.

Napoleon Hill’s famous best seller is Thing and Grow Rich. The book was largely written by his fourth wife. He assigned all royalties to her, so he could not be tapped for the money he owed to various creditors. They made a fortune, lost a fortune and a half. Then she sued him for divorce, took what Napoleon had left, and married the divorce lawyer.

Hill was broke but started over again, making a partnership with a leader in a small town, marrying a fifth and final time, and later partnering with W. Clement Stone, the insurance guru who stuck to Hill and became president of his foundation, modestly named The Napoleon Hill Foundation.

 Barth used the same two-step to excuse his struggle with marriage versus love, and how he had to live with both – both concepts and both women. Barth’s mom called him an adulterer, so there we have it.
The Church Growth pastors are known for the adultery and perversions. One pastor was a LCMS CG hero, arrested in a men’s restroom….

 Bivens, like Valleskey, has two stories about Fuller.
They went there and loved it – or they never went there. 
That is a lie!

Some Fuller and Napoleon Hill Co-Inky-Dinks
Hill promoted the idea of master partnerships where both people help each other.

WELS pastors David Valleskey and Frosty Bivens were pals out West. Both went to Fuller Seminary and lied about it. Valleskey was first to become a professor at Mordor in Mequon. Then Bivens was nominated and became a professor too. Both were in the mould of Barth and UOJ. Master partnerships?

 Master partnership?

I am not sure Barth’s reputation will suffer permanent harm from everyone knowing what was commonly discussed. After all, when he toured America with his mistress and stayed at someone’s home, he only needed on bedroom.

Nor has Fuller’s reputation for creating soap bubble congregations suffered much from reality.

The glorious founder of Church Growth, Robert Schuller, ended his career with no congregation and the entire church campus sold to the Roman Catholics, an act apparently done to spite him. Another offer was made to turn it into a secular academic campus.

 Partners in crime – this makes Patterson so angry!

Soap Bubbles Pop
How many yuuuuuuuge congregations can be named where everyone scattered when the Church Growth pastor was discovered in flagrante delicto? My Wesleyan friend said his congregation of 2,000 was wrecked by one such minister with a great personality, a gift for embezzling, and a penchant for adultery. The scandals made it to the front pages of the local paper.

Of course, the Lutheran officials, so keen to protect their reputations, never admit to the smaller scandals that led to the bigger ones. As Gaylin Schmeling warned, glaring at me, “Airing dirty laundry hurts the face of the church.” So we must be enemies of the truth to promote the pristine reputation of doctrinal and marital adulterers?

Mark Jeske’s Cathedral
You’re bringing me down
You coulda been Lutheran
But now you’re a clown.

You could have shunned ELCA
But you didn’t try
You sold out to Thrivent
You built a pig sty.


Now everyone knows just how much we needed a church.
She wouldn’t have gone far downhill
If only you hadn’t acted like jerks.


Mark Jeske’s Cathedral
You’re bringing me down
You coulda been Lutheran
But now you’re a clown.