# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juni 1855_S184
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

184 Lutheran Polemics against Rome.

to go back to Scripture and from it demonstrate to the other party that our confession is in accordance with Scripture; Lutherans as such, however, are not to interpret their symbols according to Scripture, but Scripture according to their symbols, and are to hold firmly and unwaveringly to the quia”; without any longing for the ambiguous European “bridle of the Christian state” (pp. 30 ff.), they testify: “We do not locate the essence of truly Lutheran congregations in this or that form of so-called apostolic or Old Lutheran church orders, liturgical services, confessionalist pageantry, and pietistically legalistic holiness, but in living and moving in justifying faith” (p. 33), “for this faith alone is the true Christian and Lutheran lifeblood, without which all the formal correctness of Lutheran church skeletons and mechanical machinery has no value”—and with that reservation and this testimony they have made their answer an act of church history, one of the most shaming and at the same time most uplifting acts of these wretched days; and even the crypto-Catholic Lutheranism of Germany will be least able to undo it, whether it now repentantly accepts the chastisement or obstinately returns it while complaining and grumbling about misunderstanding and misinterpretation.

Lutheran Polemics against Rome.

The more strongly a certain circle of so-called Old Lutherans now feels its kinship with the Roman Church pressing itself upon them, the more natural it is that they should now wish to hear a different language spoken against Rome from that once used by Luther and his faithful successors against this mother of Antichristianity. In the second quarterly issue of this year of the Guericke-Rudelbach journal, we find a testimony concerning this matter against Professor Dr. Kahnis which we cannot refrain from sharing with our readers, all the more because the present condition of our Evangelical Lutheran Church urgently calls upon every faithful Lutheran to pay particular attention to everything that belongs among the signs of a renewed rapprochement of our theologians with Rome.

The article (signed: “A Reader of Concordia”) reads as follows:

The work The Cause of the Lutheran Church vis-à-vis the Union: An Open Letter to Mr. O. C. R. Dr. Nitzsch, by Kahnis, Leipzig 1854, also contains statements concerning the cause of the Lutheran Church against Rome, which gain all the more weight when one reads that this work was described in the Evang.-Luth. Missionsblatt, Leipzig 1854, No. 4, as

“free, fresh, and clear; and, for all its confessional decisiveness, truly catholic”