# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_M rz 1855_S74
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

74 A Statement by Pastor Löhe, etc.

...Lutheran preachers. And wherever he shows himself, the old victorious weapons should be turned against him anew.

7. We do not expect that everyone will be satisfied with our "positive" doctrine of the ministry and the Church. But we can find no proof, in the fact that not everyone is satisfied with it, that it is false. If we have demonstrated — and I am of the opinion that we have — that our positive doctrine of the Church and the ministry as well is attested in the symbolic books, as in the writings of the great dogmaticians, then it is, for every Lutheran, simply "Lutheran" and correct. How many others who call themselves Lutheran are against it cannot lead us astray.

8. It is naively asserted but poorly proved when Pastor Löhe wants to draw from the currently prevailing difference of opinion the proof "that the symbolic books, too, did not teach so decisively that a difference of opinion in the Church would have become impossible. One could assert this just as well of Scripture, as the papists do, and it would be a cheaply gained proof if one were to ask, with them: "Whence otherwise the diversity?""

9. It is just as strange to infer, from the guidance given the Lutheran Church that made the execution of the principles regarding church polity impossible in Luther's time, the falsity of the principles themselves. What, after all, does the guidance given the Church have to do with the correctness or incorrectness of a principle? Even if a principle were never carried out, would it therefore be false! If Löhe himself must confess that, "on his final principles, he has been unable to organize a congregation, but has had to see everything pass over into the hands of his summus episcopus and his consistory" — does he mean thereby also to admit that his principles are false? Luther, to be sure, had to see and tolerate much that was amiss, because the Word was indeed again in the field, but life would not follow it — but did he therefore revoke his doctrine, including that of the Church and the ministry? Let one not, then, allow one's simple, impartial eye to be clouded by pet ideas once conceived.

10. It would be desirable if Pastor Löhe would show his readers wherein the difference actually consists between his manner of speaking and that of a rationalist, when it comes to the point of the symbols. Just as the rationalist — at least still in the good old days of the rationalismus vulgaris — also took the proposition of the clarity and perspicuity of Holy Scripture out of the symbolic books, in order thereby, though in a somewhat different way than Pastor Löhe, to clear the symbolic books themselves and their binding authority out of the way, so also does Pastor Löhe. He too takes out that same proposition, and "now pays homage to the study of Scripture," hoping likewise from the study of Scripture for "the triumph of the symbols" — or indeed even a "correction of the same, through which the symbolic decisions can only become more glorious and more blessed." Corrected symbols! — Everything