# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1855_S97
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Lehre und Wehre.

Volume I.          April 1855.          No. 4.

Lutheran Antitheses.

Last year there appeared, published by Schwetschke and Son in Braunschweig, a small pamphlet of 53 octavo pages under the title: "Unlutheran Theses. Plain for Everyone." The author is the Royal Prussian United-Evangelical Superintendent at Schkeuditz, Dr. Rudolph Stier. These (212) theses — properly anti-Lutheran, though also with full justice called "unlutheran" by their own compiler — surpass everything that has ever been written by so-called "believers" from the Union church in favor of the Babel of Union and against a confessionally faithful Church. They testify to the despair that has arisen in such gentlemen upon perceiving that the Union Church is rapidly approaching its unavoidable fate, namely ruin, while the Evangelical Lutheran Church, proving its indestructibility, irresistibly rises again from the dust. The theses evidently belong among the last desperate means now being employed to call the sick, dying man back to life; they are a veritable "eat, bird, or die." As far as the Lutheran Church is concerned, they are, in Dr. Rudelbach's apt phrase, a "bull of excommunication" hurled against her. For thus, among others, runs the 173rd thesis: "I" (Rudolph Stier) "would rather unite myself, were it only possible, and were they only in some way willing to confess my Lord Christ, with all the honestly seeking rationalists, from whom your idol of dogma" (you Lutherans) "has hitherto" (understand: "my," that is, Rudolph Stier's) "kept them from finding Christ, than with you, who altogether retain the desire to quarrel in the congregations of God."

No one, so far as we are aware, has examined these theses — this disgrace to "believing Christian" literature — according to their true merit and worth (probably because Stier, as a "believing scholar" of the Union Church, enjoys a not inconsiderable reputation*), except the Licentiate of Theology, Herr Karl Ströbel. He, however, a faithful son of our Church, a man upon whom something of Luther's own peculiar spirit evidently rests, a man of German honesty, uprightness, integrity, and bluntness, in the strength of the

*) So much so that even Herr Pastor Grabau himself cites him as an authority. See Inform., 3rd year, No. 20.

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