06/03/2026
Pieper
TODAY IN HISTORY: On June 3, 1931, Francis August Otto Pieper, theologian and president of Concordia Seminary St. Louis and fourth president of the Missouri Synod, died.
Franz Pieper was born in Pomerania, Germany on 27 June 1852 and immigrated to the United States in 1870. Upon completing his studies at Concordia Seminary in St. Louis, he was ordained on July 1875 in Centerville, Wisconsin. Pieper served as pastor in Centerville for one year before accepting a call to Manitowoc, Wisconsin, where he served for two years. He then became a professor at his alma mater in 1878, and in 1887 became its president. From 1882 to 1899, Pieper served on the Board of Colored Missions for the Synodical Conference. He served as President of The Lutheran Church— Missouri Synod from 1899 until 1911.
Pieper is perhaps better known that other seminary and synod presidents of yesteryear because of his three-volume Christian Dogmatics (1950–1953), translated from the German Christliche Dogmatik (1917–1924). The work still serves as an important theological work within the LCMS, and was also the basis of the condensed, single-volume Dogmatics by John Theodore Mueller.
Pieper married Minnie Koehn in 1877, and the couple had thirteen children in all. By our research, three of his sons (Francis, Theodore, and Erich) became pastors, and his daughter, Irene Therese Pieper Koenig (1895–1967), was a medical doctor and married to Rev. George Karl August Koenig, who was briefly the president of the Atlantic District. Small Lutheran world!
