# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1855_S98
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

98                              Lutheran Antitheses.

...of faith in his Lord Jesus, defying the current of opinion of his time, he has taken it upon himself to "evangelically-Lutheranly antithesize" Stier's "unlutheran Theses." This has been done in the "Zeitschrift für die gesammte Theologie und Kirche" [Journal for the Whole of Theology and Church], edited by Rudelbach and Guericke, in the first quarterly issue of the current year.

Since "Lehre und Wehre" is meant to contribute to giving its readers a vivid picture of the present state of the Church, among other things also in Germany, we believe we serve this purpose also by communicating here those Ströbel antitheses in extenso. Even one who has not read Stier's theses will easily decipher the sense of "proposition against proposition." For our American ecclesiastical circumstances, moreover, the antitheses contain much that is worth taking to heart; indeed for all ecclesiastical circumstances so much that is instructive and faith-strengthening, that surely every truth-loving reader will thank God that our Church still has men to show like Ströbel. False spirits, prattlers of love, hucksters of truth, sneaks, and suchlike "vermin" will, to be sure, find little edification in it; but they are written not for the edification of the swamp of the human heart, but upon the rock-foundation of Jesus Christ and his pure Gospel, upon which the Church is built. One will, of course, further speak, from the aforementioned quarter, of a Ströbel "tendency," just as one is pleased here to speak of a particular "tendency" of the Missouri Synod: but this the members of the true, orthodox Church have always had to put up with — that their catholic faith has been called, by soft goose-quills, a particular "tendency," and by hard vulture-quills, "heresy and sectarianism." (Acts 28:27.) It will finally appear ridiculous to all readers, surely, when they hear that Herr Pastor Grabau, in order to render ineffective the powerful testimony of the Licentiate of Theology Ströbel — a testimony against a Romanizing tendency and for the old evangelical Lutheranism — introduces him to his readers as "the United Church Gymnasium teacher (?) Ströbel"! In the peculiar manner of his polemic, Herr Pastor Grabau does indeed, as noted, add a question mark, but in such a way that one does not know whether the question mark is meant to refer only to Ströbel's character as a Gymnasium teacher, or as a member of the Union Church. (See Inform., Vol. 3, page 166.)

We now let the Ströbel antitheses themselves follow.

* *

"Hard against hard!" stands on the back of the title page; we do not wish to disgrace the motto, and will set a rough wedge to the rough block, making use of the thesis-form ourselves as well, so as to be no less "plain for everyone."

So then: 1) There are only two principal religions in the world: the religion of Christ, or of faith, and the religion of natural man, or