# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juni 1855_S162
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

162 How Are Truly Lutheran Congregations Founded, Etc.

In Saxony, a new zeal has been kindled for the church’s confession and for a practice corresponding to it. But gratifying as these facts are, in recent times many phenomena have unfortunately appeared among the German Lutherans that make us uneasy and concerned as to whether the Lutheran brethren over there, amid all their struggle against unionism, their practical work, or their study of current theological literature, have devoted themselves to a thorough study of the symbolic books and of the Lutheran body of doctrine from the writings of the older orthodox teachers of the Lutheran Church. For merely selecting this or that passage from the church’s symbols or from these teachers, especially from Luther’s writings, for one literary purpose or another, and then promptly applying it, certainly will not suffice. Rather, through a thorough and coherent study of these teachers, one must penetrate the interconnection of Lutheran doctrine and so master it that one can survey it from the standpoint of every individual article of doctrine.

Such troubling and, as it seems to us, unhealthy phenomena are chiefly these: 1. the presumptuous itch, instead of searching Holy Scripture with the enlightened eyes of the fathers and according to the understanding of the church’s confession already demonstrated from Scripture, to view the matter through the tinted spectacles of one private opinion, fantasy, or hobby or another, and accordingly to stray into all sorts of wanderings and crisscross excursions that do not conform to “the pattern of sound words” or to the church’s confession, yet are marveled at by ignorant parroters and followers as new discoveries in the field of scriptural interpretation. 2. Then there is the tendency to place special value and emphasis on one form or another of the liturgy and ceremonial of public worship, on one congregational order or church constitution or another, and on one form or another of church governance, as though the future and hope of the Lutheran Church rested upon such adiaphora.

The question therefore rightly arises: Is it conceivable that, by pursuing such a direction, which in spirit and essence is un-Lutheran, sound and truly Lutheran congregations can be founded and nurtured, whether here in this country or, insofar as the territorial churches allow room for it, over there in Germany? Answer: No! For under such circumstances only Lutheran congregations would arise and exist for a time that bore the stamp of their human founders and leaders and were held captive by the delusion that the essence of the Lutheran Church consisted in this or that form of an Old Lutheran church order, liturgy, or church governance—a delusion that would be all the more dangerous if, at the same time, through unevangelical and un-Lutheran teaching concerning the pastoral office, or at least through similar practices on the part of the pastors concerned, a yoke of the law were laid upon the necks of their parishioners and falsely justified by an appeal to God’s—