# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juni 1855_S185
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Lutheran Polemics against Rome. 185

is recommended. Every Lutheran will confess with all his heart his belief that the Holy Spirit has members of the catholic Church even within the Roman Church, and with all his heart he will acknowledge whatever is catholic, that is, Christian, that appears within the papal communion. This is indisputably also the position taken in our confessional writings. But when the cited work says on p. 88 that the combatants asserted against one another only what divided them, not what united them, our confessions (cf. the Augsburg Confession and the Smalcald Articles) place what unites them first. But it even says that the standpoint of the separated tendencies (?) naturally changed after the combatants came to terms with one another in the Peace of Westphalia; that it is not only unnatural but also wrong to use the language of conflict in time of peace; and that, just as it would be unreasonable for the Prussian state in peacetime to use Blücher’s or York’s forceful expressions in its dealings with France, so it is unreasonable to continue speaking in the terminology Luther used in his dealings with Rome, since Rome knows what we think of it from our confession—then several confusions seem to have occurred here. For as concerns the treaty of the Peace of Westphalia, it was not concluded with the Pope, as peace with France was concluded after Blücher’s and York’s campaigns; rather, the Pope continues as before to assert his claims upon us. That political peace has merely deprived him, for as long as it is observed, of the secular arm for enforcing his supposed jurisdiction, but it has not changed his “language” at all. As for our language, however, it is by no means unreasonable, but on the contrary highly reasonable, to speak in our dealings with Rome as we think. Merely making our thoughts known through our confessional writings would hardly suffice for this, even if Rome possessed “perhaps the original manuscript” of the Augsburg Confession. In this we are by no means bound to Luther’s terminology, but have the freedom to express our thoughts as well as we can. Only the terminology of the present work on p. 93—“In an age such as ours, a piece of Christianity falls whenever any Roman institution falls”—we would not imitate at any price. For then even the Pope would no longer know what our confession says we think of him. In this confession we gladly confess whatever is Christian even within the Roman communion, but its institutions are rejected. The Inquisition, Propaganda, the Jesuits, celibacy, audible and silent Mass, Marian worship, the rosary, pilgrimages, indulgences, monasteries, and all self-chosen forms of worship, as well as the institution of the vicariate of Christ and the hierarchy, are things whose defense the Lutheran Church will never undertake. As gladly as it acknowledges and seeks out, in true catholicity, everything that belongs to Christ, it recognizes no less clearly that Roman institutions are the opposite of catholicity. It is true