# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1855_S112
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

112 Lutheran Antitheses.

to present it as the exclusively correct “scriptural division of the commandments,” although it is merely the personal opinion of its defenders. Evangelical Christendom has never regarded Luther’s numbering as anything more than an adiaphoron, possessing equal legitimacy with the Calvinist method of numbering.

76) I commend Theses 201 and 202 to the most careful consideration of all fellow believers; there the “fanatics of the new Lutheranism” are discussed once again. The meaning and purpose of these statements are clear, at least to me: Divide and rule is the enemy’s watchword. Therefore be on your guard! “A leading journal of this ‘Lutheran theology and church’ maligns and abuses the most venerable men with the crudest vulgarity and, as a matter of principle, recognizes nothing coming from Union people.” No, no! Your hostility has another cause; we see what is lurking behind your words. Despite all its human frailty, our journal has nevertheless become the banner waving high around which the members of the Evangelical Lutheran Church who are oppressed by the Union rally. In it, the persecuted Gospel has gained a tongue whose loud, fearless testimony to the Redeemer and to justification by faith alone in His merit has reached across the Atlantic Ocean and inflicted great harm on the unionistic realm of the Antichrist. Hence those tears. To tear down the banner, to paralyze and cut out the tongue if it cannot be made subservient to Unionism—that is your plan, which you confidently hope to accomplish by inciting one man against another. You seek to dissuade one through flattery from further collaboration, and forcibly to displace another by lowering him in the esteem of the rest. But to those who remain you say quite openly: “It is better to fraternize with anything that has not grown on Lutheran soil, so that people may know where they stand with you.” (pp. 51–52.) Your scheme is clever enough; whether it will succeed, of course, is another question.

77) Our journal is further described as follows: “At times it generally uses language that must strike anyone who does not stand within its magic circle—I will not say how” (why not? Our ears have long been accustomed to unionistic compliments). “We ask these Lutherans: Why do you not at least speak more decently and sensibly, so that one might be able to engage with you at all?”—Is this question perhaps directed chiefly at me? I have reason to suppose so, and therefore I will give my answer—let it be clearly understood: not the answer of the editors or the other contributors, who have not authorized me to do so, but solely my own answer, in accordance with the rule that applies among us: “No one bears collective responsibility for another.”—When and where have I ever asked you to “engage” with me? And if you do so without being asked, what prompts you? Surely not the hope of making an acquisition of me? Then spare your pietistic hops and your unionistic