# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juni 1855_S183
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Voices of the Brethren in Germany, etc. 183

For years and indeed decades, the struggle waged by the North American German Evangelical Lutheran Synod of Missouri, Ohio, and Other States—whose core consists of Saxon Lutheran clergymen who immigrated in 1838—against the glaring theoretical and practical, fanatically Lutheran, or rather crypto-Catholic and hierarchical, exaggeration of the doctrine of the ministry by the Grabau–von Rohr–Kraus party, the so-called Synod of Buffalo, has held our deepest sympathies. The evangelical spiritual strength and clarity with which the American brethren, particularly at the synod in St. Louis in October 1850, kept their distance from, or rather thoroughly freed themselves from, the theories of Stephan and Löhe, stands as a towering standard in the most recent history of the Lutheran Church; and the excellent work by Professor Walther of St. Louis, “The Voice of Our Church on the Question of Church and Ministry. Erlangen, 1852,” has been no less epoch-making for Germany than for America. That Lutheran division in America has gradually migrated in full, both theoretically and even practically—particularly within the separatist Lutheran Church of Prussia—onto German soil as well; and the Leipzig Lutheran Pastoral Conference of 1853—not to mention the one at Fürth—forgetful of its great past under the auspices of Rudelbach, Harleß, and Thomasius, was unfaithful to the confessions and rash enough, provoked by the presence of Messrs. Grabau and von Rohr, to take a fairly unequivocal stand against the Synod of Missouri in a so-called letter of admonition. This synod is now responding by presenting the true historical course of events in the simplest and most theologically dignified manner. The brethren, “having by God’s grace come to recognize the false, semi-papist Lutheranism into which Stephan had led them astray, and having been alarmed to find in the Buffalo documents the very same dangerous principles that had brought them to the brink of spiritual and physical ruin” (p. 10), here firmly and manfully protest (p. 6) against “the practice of setting aside the confessions and, contrary to the already established coherence of evangelical doctrine, beginning again from the start to prove matters from Scripture, or even, under the domination of particular favorite ideas, undertaking various crisscross exegetical forays through Scripture”; “for we are convinced (p. 24) that the questions of church and ministry—around which, indeed, the great doctrinal struggles of the Reformation also revolved (p. 37), and the testimony of evangelical truth ‘concerning these two articles of doctrine has already been set down clearly enough in principle in our confessions’—are no longer open questions, but long ago, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, received their thorough answer and resolution”; “the Church of God as a whole (p. 28) has never, from the beginning, been in suspense or uncertainty concerning any article of the church’s faith necessary for the salvation of souls,” and “only if we—p. 37—had to deal with non-Lutherans, etc., would we have had to turn to Scripture itself—