# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1845 12 08_S29
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Der Lutheraner.

"God's Word and Luther's teaching shall pass away neither now nor ever."

Volume 2.

St. Louis, Mo., December 13, 1845.

No. 8.

Terms: The 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 number is sold for 5 cents.

(From the Lutheran Church Gazette.)

What Are the Guiding Principles for the Formation of Orthodox Synods of the Lutheran Church in This Country?

"A brotherly word, offered for discussion and deliberation to those of like mind and disposition."*

* We believe we owe it to most readers of the Lutheraner to share with them this important essay, which is addressed to them as well. May it attain its purpose — furthering also the outward union of the orthodox congregations of this country! — The Editor.

§ 1.
Introduction.
The Present Situation and Circumstances of the Lutheran Church in This Country.

However great the number — partly native-born, partly immigrant — of Lutherans, that is, of evangelical Christians of the Lutheran confession, may be in this country, the situation of the Lutheran Church is nevertheless, on the whole, sad and distressing. One part of it, namely, is scattered and dispersed in isolation through the forests and prairies (grasslands) of the West, and consists partly of such as have willfully forsaken, in a carnal spirit, the wholesome care of church and school, and partly of such as have already been born and raised there. These are now either wholly destitute of God's Word, and thereby given over to increasing degeneration and hardening — their children unbaptized, untaught, and visited by those factions and fanatical spirits who have in part abandoned the saving foundation of the pure doctrine of the Lutheran Church, and who, under the pretense and guise of Holy Scripture, seek to smuggle in their various human inventions and to win over the ignorant and inexperienced Lutherans for themselves, and not for Christ.

Another part of our church is hard pressed by the Methodists, the Albright People, and similar religious parties, who under the appearance of the Gospel set up all manner of legalistic works-mongering — as, for example, the mourners' bench and its accompaniments, their kneeling and shouting prayers along with other contrived displays, and so on — and who, through such a wish for human cooperation in and toward conversion, obscure and diminish the grace of God, the merit of Christ, and the means of grace of the Holy Spirit, and above all Holy Baptism, and accordingly bring the poor, seduced souls at best to a wavering and uncertain faith of feeling, but not to the true, justifying faith which our Church teaches, and which alone makes the heart firm and certain.

A third part of the Lutherans here is beguiled and deceived by the so-called evangelical preachers. This happens chiefly because these men hold out to the people the following delusions:

1. That it is in keeping with love, and a mark of the progress of the age, when Lutherans and Reformed peacefully and amicably join together and form one evangelical or Protestant church;

2. That the doctrines that divide them — such as, above all, the doctrine of Holy Baptism and of the Holy Supper — are not so important or essential, and that for the sake of such secondary doctrines one should not let oneself be kept from so fine a union; for in most, and in the chief, articles, both sides after all agree.

And unfortunately, indeed, a great many Lutherans are not sufficiently instructed and experienced in God's Word to know that even a little leaven — that is, false doctrine — sours the whole lump; and that the false teaching of the Reformed concerning the Holy Sacraments is by no means a small matter, since they maintain, now as before: bread is bread, and wine is wine! — and thereby, in effect, accuse the almighty and truthful Son of God of impotence, indeed of lying, when he declares: This is my body! This is my blood! — and further, since from unbelief in the efficacy of Holy Baptism there arise, for instance, so many legalistic inventions and instruments of compulsion and constraint toward and in conversion. Indeed, unfortunately, such poor, deceived Lutherans do not know how to answer those seducers, to say that Holy Scripture teaches but one truth unto salvation, and that the very same passages, on the very same subject — as, for instance, the institution of the Holy Supper — cannot state two contrary truths; and that one must stake goods and blood, body and life, in order to keep this one "truth unto salvation" pure and unfalsified, and not consent to any so-called love-union at the cost of this truth.

Moreover, the doctrine of the Holy Sacraments is no secondary doctrine, since the Holy Spirit imparts salvation in Christ to human beings only through the preaching of the Gospel and the Holy Sacraments.

A fourth part of the Lutherans (and perhaps nearly half of the Lutheran Christians here, and by far the greatest part of the English-speaking Lutherans) belongs to the so-called Lutheran General Synod. This body, however, has demonstrably fallen away from the pure doctrine of the Lutheran Church as set forth in its confessional and doctrinal writings — especially from the doctrine of the Holy Sacraments and of the Office of the Keys — and has gone over to the impure doctrine of the Reformed, as well as to the unchurchly practice of the Methodists, and likewise gives itself, with delight and affection, to the false union of our time, in which Satan once again disguises himself as an angel of light — a union which, however, by God's grace has already served, and shall yet serve, to shake our Church, as the bearer of the pure Word and Sacrament, vigorously awake once more from its sleep, and to rouse it anew to its old office of watchman and witness.

A fifth part of the Lutheran Church in this country does indeed belong to other synods which have not yet united with the so-called Lutheran General Synod, but which have just as little publicly raised a synodical testimony against the false doctrine and the apostasy of these false brethren. Again, one part of these synods does indeed outwardly profess all the symbolical books of the Lutheran Church, yet does not commit itself to them as a fixed rule in the conferring of ordination; holds fast to a Reformed and unionistic formula in the distribution of the Holy Supper; here and there even administers the Holy Supper to Reformed and Evangelical persons; and thus promotes the shameful unionism and ecclesiastical mingling of our day. But worst of all, it has rejected the urgent pleas of some of its own members for relief from even the most crying need for the preservation and furtherance of the Church, and thus is bent, in every way, on persisting in confessional indifference and slackness.

A sixth part of the Lutherans in this country — and these, for the most part, are the emigrated Prussians — seem, at least, to be falling into the very opposite extreme from this