# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1855_S106
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

106 Lutheran Antitheses.

religion, but rather the faith of the "una sancta ecclesia catholica, the holy Christian Church") is the Lutheran fundamental character — how can Mr. Stier think of a union in which the Catholic, Christian element is to exist peacefully alongside the rationalistic, heathen one?

40) "Let one finally make complete earnest with the Sola Scriptura, and we have the union as the only rightful conclusion of the Reformation." (Thesis 106.) That sounds comical enough coming from a man who, barely two pages earlier, threw the sola scriptura under the bench and referred people to the highly learned exegetes since 1746. We now understand well enough what we must do in order to become as good unionists as he.

41) "Accordingly it is no wrong, but rather the fullest, rightly recognized and validly asserted right, when our Church, in all the drafts of its reconstitution, does not wish to stand upon the Symbols as its ground and foundation, but upon the ground and foundation on which the Symbols themselves stand." (Thesis 107.) You really must take us for the most utterly stupid beasts, that you trot out such logic. So then, because you stand on biblical ground and foundation, you reject the Symbols, "which stand on that very same ground and foundation." How hard it is for you indeed to conceal, however feebly, your enmity against Christ and his Word. Just say it plainly and freely: We hate the Symbols because we hate Holy Scripture.

42) Of what religion is Mr. Dr. Stier, who rejects the "fides catholica, the Christian faith," the faith of the ecumenical, pre-papal Christendom, "without which no one can be saved" (Symb. Athanas.)? Ah yes, of course — he rejects only the confessions, which contain this faith, and because they contain it. I keep falling, every moment, out of the unionist logic and phraseology.

43) Do you Lutherans, then, take no notice of what abominations I and others bring forward? Such as: the two "evangelical" churches are, in their fundamental nature, two different religions — of both Reformations only the Reformed and the United speak — it is not persecution but persecuted truth that makes the martyr — the Roman and Reformed branches of the Church stand in relation to the Evangelical Lutheran Church as the earth does to another celestial body — the Christian Church has been declared by the Reformers to be no handmaid of the State — in the present controversy the spirit of the Reformation wrestles with the spirit of the Union, and so on. (Thesis 108–111, 166.) "One should indeed be alarmed at such offshoots of overwrought Lutheranism!"

44) Will you Lutherans not soon push your foolish Reformers into the corner? Just listen to what the Oracle of Schkeuditz says: "Are we to command all thinkers and researchers, in this day and age, after everything that the intervening centuries have brought forth, to arrive at no other result than the expression of the earliest Reformation theology?" (p. 28.) Go ahead, then, and build yourselves up on the ground of the "thinkers" and "researchers," where