# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_M rz 1855_S95
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Let Everyone Take Note. 95

...leads and crushes to death. But it remains false to call the corrupted papal sect still a part — even an improper part — of the universal Christian Church. For such a thing, set in the place of the universal Church of Jesus, is an unsymbolical thing, and a symbolical absurdity.

We have rightly been astonished at this for a long time already, and it would long since have been necessary to ask how the Lutheran Church of Germany can endure the constant, shameless boast-cry of the Missouri Synod, as though it alone taught symbolically! Indeed, we ask how one can bear it, that the audacious Missourians mock, before all the world, those who are not devoted to their supposed symbolical doctrine of the Church, and slander them as being on the road to Rome! We are rightly astonished at the deep cunning which, with the fairest words, and to the deception of many souls, praises and exalts Lutherum and the symbols, and boasts of confessing them, while an utterly unsymbolical doctrine of the Church is being taught!

It is just the same with the Missourian doctrine of the holy Ministry in the Church of Jesus. Missourian obstinacy wants to force it through as symbolical, that it is merely a spiritual collective priesthood, which the believing members of the local congregation transfer to one man! After this has long since, and most recently, been refuted by Wucherer, a learned Missourian journal is now to begin by attempting, through a review, to overturn Wucherer's blessed labor! We may say in advance: O foolish undertaking! For preaching does not come from the faith and priesthood of the local congregation's members, but from God's Word by means of a rightful call. Romans 10. That is symbolical, for Christ sends by the Word, in his order, not through the faith of the congregation's members.

If, finally, the brothers hostile to us from Missouri were peaceable, their hearts would now have far more to do with making good the crying, public wrong which they have committed and still commit against us by sending sectarian preachers, than with proclaiming, in every issue, their doctrine to be symbolical — indeed, alone symbolical*) — and calling themselves the only orthodox synod.

The consciousness that they have hitherto lacked all proof of their right, the evil conscience, may well drive them to extol their often-refuted doctrine as symbolical, because the reputation of being symbolical is now supposed to give them also the power to send the unsymbolical Lutheran sectarian preachers into the congregations and dwelling-places of others. —

The list of the Missourian sectarian preachers still consists of the following ten: **)

*) According to Herr P. Grabau, then, can two different doctrines both be symbolical? L. u. W.

**) Here follow nine "gentlemen," who are named individually as pastors of our synod, with Herr Past. Klügel added as No. 10 for good measure. L. u. W.