# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1855_S110
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

110 Lutheran Antitheses.

"...for the worst deception of the devil in our day," then you become a perfect Adamite. (Thesis 170–178.)

66) "The Spirit is at work, dictating a new symbol to us." Which spirit? Well, the one which "fills up the church-dividing chasms" by clearing away the Gospel and the deity of Christ (p. 45), and which, together with Arianism, "maintains, for the time being," medieval legalism. (Thesis 179–184.)

67) "Coaxo, ergo sum" (Thesis 185) — in German: a "frog" saw a fat bull grazing at the edge of his "swamp." A frog is a "haughty" creature; it straightway began to puff itself up — and cried: Now let anyone still say that the nineteenth century has not reached the highest summit of scholarly and religious perfection! Even a "Stier" [bull] sings the praises of today's university wisdom and credulity; a "Stier" himself opens critical lectures on "lost reason, confused fantasy, ingenious stupidity," and sets "the thinkers, historians, and exegetes" psychological riddles to solve; the busiest agent of unionism and founder of the projected religion of the future is a "Stier"! Whoever is not astonished at that certainly never had much sense to begin with!

68) Are we not to leave our ancestral church of Scripture and move back into the newly fashionable, decorated cathedral of tradition, whose three dimensions are formed no longer by the church fathers, councils, and popes, but "by thinking speculation, reading exegesis, and history" (Thesis 186)?

69) Is Thesis 186 perhaps meant to be the hook, and the psychological riddle (Thesis 187) the bait, with which one intends to fish historians, thinkers, and exegetes out of the true-Lutheran waters and into the union-sack? By the way, the deliberately withheld — and for that very reason not exactly flattering — "conjecture about the key" to that riddle is, in any case, mistaken; it is a Lutheran key, and so it does not fit, as the unionist ones do, into kitchen and cellar locks.

70) "It is now up to us to let the mission dutifully help the Union along in return. To bring a heathen people a ready-made European churchdom means nothing other than wanting to plant a faith already tainted at the root." (Thesis 188, 189.) Well spoken, gentlemen! If you bring the heathen a believing unionism "instead of Christianity and the Gospel," then your "free mission" will never run the risk of degenerating into a Christian conversion of the heathen (Matt. 28:19), but will remain nicely what it is meant to be: a pietistic making of proselytes (Matt. 23:15).

71) Not only a religion, a confession, and a church, but also a logic, geography, and statistics "of the future" — this the world may expect from Mr. Dr. Stier. Whoever would like a little foretaste of the latter should just read Thesis 190–193. The chief sum of this future-wisdom is: the calling — not, say, of the German, that is, the evangelical, Church, but rather