Oliver was a friend, chaplain, professor, author, and loyal church reformer. This Gnesio-Lutheran giant will be missed.
Earlier this week, the church lost a giant. Oliver K. Olson died at age 98 in Minneapolis, MN. Oliver was born in Superior, WI, and grew up in Climax, MN, where his father was a Lutheran pastor. He attended St. Olaf College and went on to Luther Northwestern for his M.Div. Oliver and Lutheran theologian Gerhard Forde were seminary classmates. Oliver said he and Gerhard would ditch class to discuss theology, and that he learned more from those conversations than he did from his professors.
Oliver enlisted in the Navy as a career chaplain, retiring after 22 years with the rank of commander. During his time in the Navy, Oliver received his Doctorate from the University of Hamburg, Germany.
After the Navy, Oliver took a position with the history faculty at Marquette University. When I met Oliver in 1998, he had moved to Minneapolis and was teaching as an adjunct at Luther Seminary. I took two confession classes that year, one from Oliver and the other from Jim Nestingen and Forde. As a historian, Oliver was more knowledgeable than most. After my class with him, he asked if I would tutor him in a DOS-based writing program called Note Bene. We spent two afternoons a week going through the various keyboard commands to create and edit footnotes from his exquisite, curated library. Some days, I would bring him some obscure quote from a book I had found in the Seminary’s library that hadn’t been checked out in decades.
Oliver would listen and then proceed to tell me more about the subject than the author. Oliver said that a professor’s job is to provide “efficient questions” to their students. These Socratic questions keep you digging in the library a little longer, hoping to find the answer that satisfies.
He never married and so had a gruff exterior, typical of men of his time, but he was overwhelmingly kind. His passion for the Lutheran church could not be suppressed, and he was always scheming about ways, big and small, to reestablish the Lutheran Church as the treasure of Protestant theology.
Olson is perhaps best known for his work in resurrecting Lutheran Quarterly in 1986. He saw value in a peer-reviewed Journal that brought together scholars from both Scandinavian and German traditions:
- for the discussion of Christian faith and life on the basis of the Lutheran confession;
- for the application of the principles of the Lutheran church to the changing problems of religion and society;
- for the fostering of world Lutheranism, and;
- for the promotion of understanding between Lutherans and other Christians.
In addition to restarting Lutheran Quarterly, Oliver published Matthias Flacius and the Survival of Luther's Reform (2002). His book highlighted the work of the Croatian Lutheran Reformer, Matthias Flacius, during the years after Luther’s death through the Augsburg Interim. Oliver championed Flacius’ uncompromising loyalty to Martin Luther and his theology, securing Luther’s history with Luther’s theology unsullied by the Catholic Church's interim demands. For his work with Flacius, Oliver was celebrated as a hero of the Croatian people. This gorgeously printed book with margin notes is a treasure.
His work with the Adiaphoristic Controversy (1548-1555) found its way into his other publications. In 2007, Oliver published Reclaiming the Lutheran Liturgical Heritage, followed in 2015 with Reclaiming Lutheran Confirmation, along with numerous articles in Lutheran Quarterly.
The term “Gnesio” means authentic or genuine. It was applied to Flacius and those who agreed with him by the Philippists (Phillip Melanchthon and his followers) as a term of derision. However, the opposition party ran with the name because they believed that they were the “true” followers of Luther’s theology. The Gnesio-Lutherans wore the name like a badge of honor, convinced they were carrying Luther’s theology without watering it down. Their clash with the Philippists (who believed some compromises with the Roman Catholic were necessary) wasn’t just a spat over words, but a showdown over the very heart of the gospel.
The real issue, then and now, isn’t just ritual or vocabulary, it’s whether the conscience stands free and confident in Christ’s finished work, or gets bent to fit someone else’s terms for peace.
Today, the term is still used as both a pejorative and a badge of honor. In addition to Original Sin, the doctrines of the Real Presence in the Lord’s Supper, rejection of the Eucharistic Prayer, and fractio panis (Breaking of the sacramental bread) have become modern-day points of defining the Gnesio/Philippist divide. Though it is also true that the modern “Gnesio/Philippist” squabbles over things like the Real Presence, the Eucharistic Prayer, and the fractio panis aren’t carbon copies of the 16th-century fight, and Robert Kolb is likely right that a lot of today’s self-styled Gnesios would have been wearing Philippist jerseys back then. The real issue, then and now, isn’t just ritual or vocabulary, it’s whether the conscience stands free and confident in Christ’s finished work, or gets bent to fit someone else’s terms for peace.
Olson saw this clearly, and his debates with modern liturgists like Luther Reed (author of The Lutheran Liturgy) and his endless petitions to the Inter-Lutheran Commission ensured that at least in some circles, the liturgy maintained its original Gnesio character: keeping those things that are in service to the gospel and remove those that are done for symbology alone and detract from the gospel.
After my graduation from Luther Seminary, Oliver would spend a few weeks with our family in California each year, visiting friends and family, and watching cartoons with our eldest daughter, Eve. Oliver was a friend, chaplain, professor, author, and loyal church reformer. This Gnesio-Lutheran giant will be missed, but his writings will be read for generations to come.
This article was written by Aaron Pederson. Aaron is a husband, father of four, theologian, and craftsman.
