(Though written in the 1920-1950 era, Dr. Maier's messages...)
Though written in the 1920-1950 era, Dr. Maier's messages have a timeless relevance also for the present age. Dr. Paul L. Maier, who is widely known also for his other books, has edited his father's works only by judicious cutting of some material, not through changes of Walter A. Maier's original words and phrases.
(This searching analysis of the Book of Nahum is the resul...)
This searching analysis of the Book of Nahum is the result of ten years of diligent research by an accomplished Hebrew scholar. It is one of the most thorough commentaries written in recent times, representing the highest standards in the tradition of evangelical Bible commentaries. The author, himself a modern-day prophet, accepted the masoretic text of Nahum as essentially authentic and exegeted it accordingly. He frequently pointed out the inadequacy of the liberal higher-critical approach by pitting the various reconstructions of the text against each other. Walter A. Maier (1893-1950), professor of semitic languages and Old Testament at Concordia Seminary for twenty-eight years, held a Ph.D. degree from Harvard University.
America, turn to Christ!: Radio messages of the Lutheran Hour from Easter through Christmastide, 1943,
(Cloth hardcover, missing jacket. 1944 First Edition, Conc...)
Cloth hardcover, missing jacket. 1944 First Edition, Concordia Publishing House S.T Louis. 341 pages. 7.6 x 5.1 x 1.4 inches Sewn binding. The book show some l;thigh tanning, and mini wear on cover, otherwise: excellent condition. (Please see the pictures) Quick and safe shipping. M-30
Walter A. Maier was an American lutheran minister and radio preacher.
Background
Walter A. Maier was born on October 4, 1893, in Boston, Massachusetts. He was the second son and fourth of five children of Emil William Maier (pronounced "Mire") and Anna Katharine (Schad) Maier.
His parents emigrated from Germany in 1880. The father was an organ and piano builder and tuner. The mother, a remarkable, energetic woman, added to the family income by running a grocery store.
Maier was baptized in the Lutheran church and was a member of the Missouri Synod, the most German and conservative of the major Lutheran bodies of the time.
Education
Maier's elementary education in Boston public schools rather than a Lutheran parochial school, his residence in the East, and his intellectual curiosity helped produce perspectives different from those of the Midwestern German Lutheran enclave, the synod's traditional core, and his education beyond the eighth grade included unusual detours.
He graduated in 1912 from the synod's Concordia Collegiate Institute in Bronxville, New York, but attended Boston University to earn the B. A. (1913) before going on to Concordia Theological Seminary in St. Louis, from which he graduated in 1916. He was ordained in 1917, but found the opportunity, during part-time or temporary pastoral duties, to begin graduate work in Old Testament studies and Semitics at Harvard Divinity School (1916 - 1918) and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (1918 - 1920), where he earned the M. A. in 1920 and began a doctoral dissertation.
The pace of his subsequent activities, and difficulties at Harvard, perhaps partly over his conservatism, delayed his completion of the Ph. D. until 1929.
Career
In 1920, Maier became executive secretary of the Walther League, the Missouri Synod's youth organization, and editor of its Messenger. His involvement with the league came at a time when large numbers of Lutheran young people were still close enough to the church to desire organizational identity but sufficiently alienated from the ethnic ghetto to insist on an American idiom.
Maier's outlook coincided nicely. The Messenger's popularity rose sharply, and league membership doubled in two years. Maier resigned his secretaryship in 1922 to become a professor of Old Testament interpretation and history at Concordia Theological Seminary, a position he held until given an indefinite leave of absence in 1944.
In the 1920's and early 1930's, Maier was one of a small group influential in shifting Missouri Synod missionary orientation from German immigrants to native Americans, a development basic to the synod's later remarkable growth. His interest in evangelism, when added to his rhetorical talents, all but guaranteed his participation in early Lutheran experiments in radio broadcasting.
In 1930, Maier was invited to be the series speaker for the first "Lutheran Hour, " a network program sponsored by the synod's Lutheran Laymen's League. Although suspended the next year because of lack of funds, the program was reestablished in 1935 with Maier as a regular speaker, and fan mail receipts thereafter underwrote its continuance.
By 1950 it was using two American networks and was being broadcast in fifty-five countries in thirty-six languages. "Lutheran Hour" rallies could boast the attendance of as many as 25, 000 people. Estimates of the program's radio audience ran as high as 20, 000, 000. Maier gained an extremely large and devoted following far beyond his own denomination.
Maier died of congestive heart failure at Lutheran Hospital in St. Louis, Missouri, and was buried at that city's Concordia Cemetery. In 1951, his body was moved to an imposing memorial in Our Redeemer Cemetery, St. Louis.
Achievements
Maier is best known as the speaker for The Lutheran Hour radio broadcast from 1930 to 1950. He was one of the pioneers of international broadcasting. Men such as Dr. Billy Graham credit Maier’s work as inspirational for their own ministries. Maier fought for religious freedom and for the fairness of Jeffersonian policies toward church-state relations.
Maier's Lutheranism prevented complete congruence with revivalism, but his style and the cast of his message were not foreign to that tradition. Much of his popularity rested on his emergence after Billy Sunday, in a period characterized by upheavals and uncertainty at home and abroad. His sermons were often denunciatory; fashionable, liberal preachers, the moral laxity of society, and communism were his favorite targets.
His indictments were generally severe and unqualified, and his solutions individualistic and often simplistic. He persisted even through the late 1940's in vociferous attacks on Modernism but usually refrained from setting himself off explicitly from Fundamentalism. When once asked to preach more of the whole of Lutheran theology, he replied characteristically that he was teaching people how to die.
His rhetorical style rapid, prolix and alliterative, tense, loud and often strident was for many an important part of his appeal. A compactly built man with regular features, ebullient and assertive in personality, Maier possessed, in addition, a compelling personal charisma.
Connections
On June 14, 1924, Maier married Hulda Augusta Eickhoff of Indianapolis, Ind. , a former schoolteacher whom he had hired to work for the Walther League. They had two children, Walter Arthur and Paul Luther.
