# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juni 1855_S161
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

How Are Truly Lutheran Congregations Founded and Nurtured? 161

Doctrine and Defense.

Volume I. June 1855. No. 6.

(Submitted by Prof. Dr. Sihler.)

How Are Truly Lutheran Congregations Founded
and Nurtured?

First Article.

It is a very lovely and comforting truth, confirmed in many ways by the history of the Church of God on earth, that every hindrance and corruption inflicted upon this Church by the devil, the world, and false brethren, through the good hand of God ultimately results in its all the more thorough healing and advancement.

So it has also been with the Lutheran Church in recent times. For the flimsy fabrication of the so-called Union (the ecclesiastical union of the Reformed and Lutherans), which the devil brought about in the guise of an angel of light, has become, in the hand of God, the occasion for bringing the Lutheran Church precisely to an awareness of its own identity, freeing it from this Pietistic mixture, placing it once again upon the firm and sound confessional foundation of the fathers, and teaching it to strive after their sincere godliness.

For more than twenty years now, this awakening and revival of the Lutheran Church in Germany has manifested itself especially in the withdrawal of the Prussian Lutherans from the united state church. As faithful champions, they rightly deserve our gratitude, honor, and love; and the more recent movement for the Lutheran confession within this state church, although it is still partial, unclear, and indecisive, at least demonstrates the untenability and impotence of the Union.

But in other regions of the German fatherland as well, under the wise direction and governance of our God, the coercive unionist measures of the princes, the uniting practices of certain ecclesiastical authorities, and the unionist writings and activities of the learned and unlearned have served to reawaken Lutheran testimony and confession and to reveal them anew as the pillar and foundation of the truth; indeed, even in Lutheran state churches where the Reformed elements necessary for a union are absent, as, for example, in the Kingdoms of Hannover and