# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1845 10 13_S13
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Der Lutheraner.

"God's Word and Luther's teaching shall now and nevermore pass away."

Published by C. F. W. Walther.

Volume 2.

St. Louis, Mo., October 18, 1845.

No. 4.

Terms: Der Lutheraner appears once every two weeks, at the subscription price of one dollar for out-of-town subscribers, half of which they must pay in advance, and they must also bear the postage. — In St. Louis each single issue is sold for 5 cents.

(Submitted by Th. Brohm.)

The Formula of Concord.

The Formula of Concord, the last of the symbolical books of the Lutheran Church, is, we fear, scarcely known even by name to many a reader of these pages, and has even been made suspect to some as a book of dead, rigid letter-worship, or as a book in which a hairsplitting scholasticism and an unloving, condemnation-hungry spirit prevail. For our "evangelically minded" opponents cannot to this hour forgive the Formula of Concord for having thrown up a mighty dam against the union pursued by the Reformed side for the past three hundred years, until at last, in our unhappy century, this hedge around the vineyard has been rooted up by wild boars or leapt over by foxes. It is indeed to be lamented that this excellent book has been so wantonly thrown under the bench; we must bring it out again, wipe the dust from its covers, and call out to everyone, learned and unlearned alike: read it, read it! The writer of these lines still remembers with joyful thanksgiving the time when God's good hand placed the Formula of Concord in his hands; since then it has become to him a truly beloved book and a rich treasury of wholesome knowledge. It would indeed be worth the trouble to give readers a detailed history of the origin of this work; it would be exceedingly instructive for our time to become acquainted with the controversies of that day which called this book into being. But since such an account, if it is to be at all thorough and fruitful, would exceed the limits of these pages, we will confine ourselves to bringing out a few general points that must be kept in view for a right appreciation of the Formula of Concord.

1. Concord is a beautiful name, and it means harmony. The purpose of the Formula of Concord was to bring harmony back into the Lutheran Church, which soon after Luther's death had been thrown into disorder by many controversies and false teachings. But how did it accomplish this? Certainly by a very different path than the one taken in our day. Three hundred years of experience have still not made us wise enough to recognize that unity in the church without unity of doctrine is a vain thing, a loose coat of whitewash without any hold. The ground on which people now unite is a baseless, bottomless indifferentism, which lets the disputed points — although salvation and blessedness depend on them — rest as unessential secondary doctrines; or a sweeping, general orthodoxy taken in the lump; or a merely inward sympathy of hearts without any outward sign of unity in confession, which one-sidedly elevates the individual's inner spiritual life into the point of union. The unity that the Formula of Concord aims at is of an entirely different kind; it seeks to establish a unity that is neither merely outward nor merely inward, but one resting on a concordant doctrine of the faith. Therefore the points in dispute are not passed over in silence or evaded, but rather set forth in their sharpest opposition, and then the judicial verdict of Holy Scripture is heard, with whose decision the matter is settled. Whoever humbly submits, together with the Formula, to this judicial verdict of Holy Scripture is offered a brotherly hand; whoever will not do so is regarded as one who has himself torn the bond of brotherly harmony. The Formula of Concord does not, according to its own rational judgment, know any distinction between essential and unessential doctrines; where God's Word speaks clearly, it does not dare to say, this is essential, that is not. In sum: it does not make peace at the price of surrendering the truth, but seeks rather to stop up the source of discord by exposing and overcoming error with the truth; it places unity of faith above unity of love, and makes the latter conditional upon the former. This is an important pointer for us now, when peace, union, and merger have become the order of the day, and a Christian finds it hard to find his way out of arguments so wondrously mixed with truth and error, decked out with the most dazzling appearance of spirituality and godliness.

2. It is an utterly false claim that the Formula of Concord brought forward a new confession departing from the Augsburg Confession, as the Reformed have reproached it no less than the Papists have. It intends absolutely nothing new or of its own devising, but attaches itself, just as to the ecumenical symbols of the ancient Church, so also to the Augsburg Confession; at bottom it is nothing other than a sharply drawn, faithful interpretation and vindication of certain articles of the Augsburg Confession against those who falsified it. When our fathers composed the Augsburg Confession, they naturally could not foresee all the gross and subtle distortions of the truth that the devil would devise in the times that followed; therefore they set forth the principal articles briefly and simply. Now although the Confession, for all its simplicity, is so definite and comprehensive that it leaves the truth-loving Christian in no darkness, the devil nevertheless bored a hole through it, and after Luther's death erring spirits arose who all pretended to find in the Augsburg Confession a support for their delusion; even those who in their hearts were devoted to the Calvinist false teaching concerning the Holy Supper did not shrink from signing the Augsburg Confession and entering offices of the Lutheran Church, all the while seeking by secret arts to undermine the doctrine of the very Church whose bread they ate. Against these the Formula of Concord sets a faithful interpretation of the contested articles of the Confession, and that with such precision and exactness that it leaves the dishonest no hiding place. It drives its opponents into such a corner that they must either confess: no, such Lutherans we do not wish to be; or they must surrender themselves captive to the truth and confess that they have been fanatics. On account of this sharpness and precision, it has to this hour also been a thorn in the eye of all who like to carry on their work in the dark and who, despite their inward aversion to Lutheran doctrine, do not wish to lose their citizenship in the Lutheran Church. Against this, all honest Lutherans who do not shun the light still gather gladly today around this banner and standard, and thereby distinguish themselves from all pseudo-Lutherans, whatever they may call themselves.

3. Sincerely as the Formula of Concord attaches itself to the ecumenical symbols and the Augsburg Confession, it nevertheless does not make

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