# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_August 1855_S243
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

The Union. 243

Professor Müller concedes (p. 341): “Anyone who utterly rejects church union on the basis of the existing consensus must also, as a matter of principle, reject fellowship in the Lord’s Supper altogether.” Surely this must also be reversible: A church that considers fellowship in the Lord’s Supper permissible must also consider itself in agreement with the consensus; that is, it must declare both confessions equally legitimate. At most, within the Union, the individual might be permitted to decide in favor of one or the other particular confession. Yet even the individual must not attach any real importance to the particular confession, for as soon as he were to recognize the exclusive assertion of that confession, and faithfulness even in the smallest matter in this regard, as a duty, he could no longer go along with the church whose very principle is the leveling of the confessions. This has also been shown by many examples in every age; we need only recall Paul Gerhard, the “separated Lutherans,” and the Lutheran associations in Prussia.

To unite with a church which one recognizes as violating in any way, in its confession, the pure doctrine of God’s Word is sin; and the Reformed Church is such a church: these are the premises we have now established. Thus the conclusion is also inescapable: We must therefore not unite with the Reformed Church. As long as the Reformed Church remains what it is and does not change its confession, such union is contrary to divine law.

Professor Müller does, to be sure, point out that Luther “did not fail to recognize the great value of a genuine union with the Swiss and Upper German Protestants, and did much to promote it.” Indeed; but Luther never desired any union other than one in the true faith. At the time of the Wittenberg Concord, the fervor of his desire may have caused him to overlook some things that otherwise might well have been foreseen; but even then it never occurred to him “to grant toleration within the same church fellowship to a divergent form of doctrine,” as Dr. Müller alleges of him (p. 324); for Dr. Müller himself immediately afterward concedes that Luther had “not intended thereby to deviate even an inch from his doctrine of the Lord’s Supper.” The articles of the Concord contained the pure doctrine; if the private declarations of the Reformed theologians added all sorts of interpretations by which they could nevertheless retain their own view, Luther may have overlooked this more than prudence advised, but certainly only in the confidence he then held that the doctrine set forth as authoritative would soon gain acceptance. Surely this was not intended to grant toleration to a doctrine that, according to Luther’s deepest conviction, contradicted Scripture. Nor has it by any means yet been established how much Luther knew of Melanchthon’s much-discussed deviations from the pure doctrine; in any case, if he knew of them, what he was