# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_M rz 1855_S88
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

88 The Modified Confession to the Symbols.

—erners and of the spiritualist Alexandrians, of the dyophysite Catholics and of the monophysite as well as the Nestorian heretics, etc.; so too in the more recent conflicts of the Orthodox and the Pietists, and so also in the most recent ones. With energy and skill, for example, the party of the so-called Kreuzzeitung and of the Halle People's Paper champions the cause of the Gospel over against unbelief, while at the same time, through an amalgamation of Christianity with crass and blindly political tendencies and through the Jesuitical manner of conducting that cause, it disgraces and in part corrupts the great cause. With the sharpest and most excellent weapons, an evangelical theological faction opposes the pseudo-Lutheran, unsymbolical and antisymbolical hierarchical pretensions—a faction whose organ is chiefly the German journal for Christian science and Christian life, and whose foremost figure is Dr. J. Müller—while at the same time, on unionist principle, it disregards and scorns the most legitimate demands of a purely confessional development. And the very same thing, indeed, shows itself now also on the other side, namely in the writing before us. The resolutions of a Stade pastoral conference of 1853 had occasioned a memorial from the theological faculty at Göttingen, to which a single distinguished member of that conference now here replies. In the most victorious manner the esteemed author repels the reproach "that we wished to restore the Lutheran church of the seventeenth century," and at the same time positively vindicates the faithful stance toward the Lutheran confession over against the pretensions of newfangled unionist scholarship, with a deliberately provoked exposure especially of all the weak points of the theological faculty at Göttingen bearing on this. In all this respect a faithful Lutheran might well call out to the author a macte virtute esto. And yet it is not the simple confessional Lutheranism that he means, but a new one—not merely developed further, but transformed—one that is shot through with Catholicizing, Puseyite forces and tendencies, and that thereby displaces, dislodges, and in part annihilates the very core and star of Reformation Lutheranism, the universal priesthood, or in other words the royal word of justification, putting something else in its place. To be sure, the author emphasizes forcefully (p. 4) that "fortunately today's Lutherans, for all their differences in particulars, form an essentially uniform and compact mass," and he grants in particular even to the reviewer—which the latter gratefully and warmly acknowledges—his good Lutheran name (pp. 9, 57); but however leniently and with however adiaphoristic an air he depicts the divergences on the question of the ministry, it is precisely the untruthfulness in his assessment of this fundamental struggle that testifies to how little adiaphoristic this struggle actually is, even to him himself. How else could he otherwise (p. 9) find "Reformed spiritualism no less far removed from Lutheran realism than Catholic materialism"; and how else could he otherwise speak of the alleged "deep unity of today's Lutherans on the basis of a common confession, which is not disturbed by all those divergences"