# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1855_S104
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

104 Lutheran Antitheses.

to base itself on human beings and human opinions, on the changing “spirit” of the times, and to ask about their divine legitimacy.

29) Who was “this new spirit” about which so much fuss is made in Theses 79–82? What was “the newly awakened Christianity,” whose “history we ourselves in part still experienced”? Was it, as Kahnis judges far too indulgently, “at that time still in an embryonic state, scarcely to be called evangelical, much less (?) ecclesiastical”? No, it was an amphibian that lacked the courage for anti-Christian unbelief and the strength for Christian faith.

30) A little sample of Stier’s logic and jurisprudence: Since unionism has acquired its “legal standing” through “facts” (“the passive consent of the congregations to the proposed (?!) Union,” etc.), the Gospel must not likewise attain its “legal standing” through “facts” (the active consent of the congregations to the Augsburg Confession); for what is right for one is surely fair for the other. (Compare Theses 83–88 with the purpose of the whole booklet.)

31) Only a Stier could compare the history of the introduction of unionism, instead of with that of Islam, with that of the Reformation and Christianity, Theses 89–94. Christianity and the Reformation are works of God, whose advancement and spread even human perversity had to serve. But childish is the assertion that beneath the “phenomenon of the Union” there is “essentially something else present” besides the admitted ungodly “indifferentism” to which it owes its origin.

32) “The number of upright people in the Union appears overwhelmingly large in comparison with the confessionalists.” (Thesis 95). It could only be otherwise by witchcraft. After all, there is no more profitable trade in our industrial age than the godliness of a “believing” unionist, which, because it never needs to fall out with influential people, continually enjoys the goods and promises of this life.

33) When other than in the heyday of “newly awakened Christianity,” when religious darkness covered the nations, could unionism have been introduced? (Theses 96–98). But does that Egyptian night still lie over the earth today? Well, it is already beginning to yield to the light of the Gospel; at least Mr. Stier can prove the contrary only by means of an—“old woman!!”

34) Delitzsch has spoken an incontrovertible truth: “What separates the two churches can be stated in a few words and made intelligible even to the simplicity of a child.” Every child can distinguish yes from no, and precisely therein lie the points of separation between the two churches. “Those who speak this way caricature the Reformed doctrine” no more than “they forget what lay Christianity is and what theology is.” They simply do not gaze from afar, with Stier-like reverence, at the image of Sais, but lift its mysterious