# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_M rz 1855_S67
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

A Statement by the Reverend Pastor Löhe's, etc. 67

Ohio and other states." The long letter closes with the words:

"Finally we assure the dear brethren that we seek peace from the heart
and would be highly gladdened if we could come to agreement with our
opponents about truly Lutheran-minded men of learning and experience
from our common, beloved mother church in Germany — men who, for the
sake of God's honor and the peace of many souls, would not shrink from
the sacrifice and would willingly undertake to come over here, and to
examine our controversies on the spot according to God's Word and the
symbols of our church — to which two alone, and to no others, we promise
unconditional obedience — and, through God's grace and help, to settle
them in the peace we desire; and it shall not be for want of trying on
our part to take the fitting steps toward this. May the gracious and
merciful God be with you." — May it be permitted (says Löhe) to state
here in writing what we have already so often stated by word of mouth,
namely that even the sending of German delegates will not have the
effect that would be desired. Neither of the two parties will, from the
outset, accept peacemakers who do not belong to its own direction, and
the higher up the quarrel is carried, the more irreconcilable it will
become.

There follows, in the double number named, the "Answer of the German
Evangelical Lutheran Synod of Missouri to the Letter Addressed to It by a
Venerable Pastoral Conference Assembled at Fürth in Bavaria on September
20 of Last Year, 1853." We leave it to the Correspondenzblatt of the
Gesellschaft f. i. M. i. S. d. l. K., as the organ of the Fürth
Conferences, to communicate their letter and the answer in full. Here
only the following passage will be cited:

"If, finally, you demand of us that we 'understand our good confessions
according to the guidance of Scripture' together with you, we as
Lutherans cannot consent to such a demand — indeed we marvel that you,
being yourselves Lutherans, should direct it to us, since as such we
already possess the pure understanding and the unfalsified interpretation
of the divine Word in our churchly confession; and only if we had to deal
with non-Lutherans who expressed misgivings and doubts about the
scriptural conformity of our confession, or if somewhere in our symbols
(which, however, is not the case) some interpretation were unclear, would
we indeed have to go back to Scripture itself and demonstrate from it,
to the other party, the scriptural conformity of our confession.

Lutherans, however, as such, are not to interpret their symbols according
to Scripture, but Scripture according to their symbols, and are to hold
fast and unmoved to the quia (because); for if we let go of the quia
anywhere, where our symbols believe, teach, and confess clearly and
irresistibly, and inclined anywhere toward the quatenus (insofar as), then