# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_August 1855_S251
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Liturgy and Agenda, etc. 251

prayers that have been retained from the earlier Agenda; we shall highlight only three points that appeared to us the most objectionable. For 1. alongside an acceptable baptismal form there is a second one that savors only too strongly of Semi-Pelagianism and Rationalism. As evidence that we are not unjust in our judgment, we quote the Agenda’s own words. Thus, in the address to the sponsors, it says: “Our children, too, already receive as their inheritance the seed of many kinds of corruption, and the part we have in their existence will soon enough reveal itself in the great power of their carnal inclinations. Furthermore, a struggle between flesh and spirit will inevitably arise, and we would have to fear its outcome if help were to come to our children from us alone,” etc.; and, turning to the child, the baptizer says: “Then let yourself be brought to Jesus. Receive the consecration of Christianity and, in remembrance of this hour, your Christian name. I baptize you in the name,” etc. How the Agenda intends to reconcile such statements with Articles 18 and 9 of the Augsburg Confession is for someone else to comprehend; or if, in including this second form, it intended to be guided by the principle of becoming all things to all people, as we are almost inclined to believe, then we would have to observe that it has entirely missed and misunderstood Paul’s wisdom. 2. While in the first and second Communion forms the Lutheran confession has indeed been emphasized more strongly, the third form, by contrast, quite clearly accommodates the Reformed or unionist tendency and thereby weakens the antithesis of Article 10 of the Augsburg Confession. 3. We cannot leave uncensured the fact that the preliminary note to the marriage forms sanctions the transgression of the Fourth Commandment by those children who, insisting upon their legal majority, believe that they do not need their parents’ consent to marry.

Finally, we must indeed marvel at the boldness with which the Agenda gives itself the title of a church book of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in the United States. Against this extravagant title we must raise a modest protest, first because of the factual untruth it contains, but even more because of its heresy-mongering tendency, since it strikes from the list of the Evangelical Lutheran Church all those who have no part in this Agenda and do not intend to adopt it, or else ignores them as an absurd sect.

If the earlier Agenda of 1842 became obsolete within the brief span of thirteen years, we hope that the Agenda of 1855 may, in an even shorter time, give way to one that, in full agreement with the Augsburg Confession, is capable of fulfilling its purpose of serving the entire Evangelical Lutheran Church in the United States in the Lord’s beautiful services of worship.