# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_September 1855_S261
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

How Are Truly Lutheran Congregations Founded, etc. 261

wove. — For this reason alone the Holy Spirit has left us this glorious example of St. Paul in Holy Scripture: so that from it we may recognize the omnipotence of God’s nurturing grace and apply all diligence and earnestness not only to equal him in purity of doctrine, but also to become ever more like him in the purity, depth, breadth, inwardness, and tenderness of love, so that we may increasingly become fathers in Christ, who not only beget spiritual children through the divine seed of the Gospel and through Baptism, as fellow workers and helpers of the Holy Spirit, but also, through the grace and power of this Spirit, nurture them and lead them toward mature manhood in Christ. Yet it is not only in the Lord’s chosen instrument, the great Apostle Paul, that we have the noble example of an upright evangelical pastor and spiritual father. Lest we dwarfs and weaklings of these last sorrowful times, who have more words than works, be crushed by this giant and hero of love, most delightful models of pastoral faithfulness and wisdom have also been preserved for us in the books of our teachers and fathers from the Reformation era, so that we may form ourselves after them and gladly and diligently sit at their feet and learn from them. Indeed, in this branch of theological literature as well, the Lutheran Church possesses glorious treasures, though most of them can be unlocked only with the key of the Latin language and unfortunately have still been very little utilized for our use even in this country—works with which scarcely any modern pastoral work can be compared. For just as our age has thus far produced few sound and thorough Christians who live in justifying faith, who have been instructed in the Word of God for the kingdom of heaven, trained in the ways of God, tested under the cross, inwardly schooled by the Holy Spirit through manifold spiritual experience, faithful to the confession, and fervent in love—but rather some, even within the Lutheran Church, are more or less tainted with pietistic-unionistic leaven, while others seek true Christianity, the true Church, and true Lutheranism in this or that form of ceremony, government, and constitution, or in a more external, school-made orthodoxy—so, in particular, there are now exceedingly few sound, thorough, truly evangelical-Lutheran teachers and writers, and fewest of all in the field of pastoral theology and casuistry, even over in Germany. The genuinely evangelical shepherds and pastors of the earlier, better age have mostly disappeared there and have not yet properly reemerged; in their place there are, for the most part (here I leave aside openly unbelieving preachers who, to the shame of the German church authorities be it said, are not only retained in their offices as before but are also newly appointed), spiritual businessmen, ecclesiastical civil servants or state church officials, disciples of this or that theological school, pupils and adherents of this or that master and hero of current theological literature