# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_October 1855_S314
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

314 Miscellaneous Church News.

...for the sake of this pure confession the one holy Christian Church exists at this time — the church which confesses the Symbols as the pillar of truth and the body of Christ.. May the Lord God bless this precious and rare confession." — Ashamed of this papistical false doctrine, uttered within our pure Church, we hereby publicly and solemnly renounce it anew, so as not to become complicit in the offense which that assertion must occasion. We feel all the more called upon to make this declaration because it not infrequently happens that here — where judgment on ecclesiastical matters is usually rendered rather summarily — everything is laid at our door that is done by people who are counted among the so-called Old Lutherans. We cannot forbear to recall here a few words of Luther and of Carpzov. Thus Luther writes, first, in his exposition of the 19th Psalm: "Since it is plain from the text here (Ps. 19:5) that the sound of the apostles has gone out into all lands, and since it is nowhere read that it was ever revoked, we must be wary lest we, like the godless Donatists — be it these or those, the old ones or the new — boast of being believers alone, while we are perhaps nothing less than believers, because we hear the word and the sound of the apostles nowhere." (IV, 1488.) Further: "Therefore the Church is holy everywhere, even in those places where fanatics and sectarian spirits rule, so long as they do not altogether deny and reject the Word and the Sacrament. For those who deny these things wholly and entirely are no longer a church at all. But where Word and Sacrament remain in substance, there a holy Church remains as well, and it makes no difference even if Antichrist himself rules there — who sits not in a devil's stall, nor in a pigsty, nor among an unbelieving mob, but in the noblest and holiest place, namely in the temple of God, 2 Thess. 2:4. From this it is indeed certain and evident that God's temple must be and remain, even under the spiritual tyrants who rage and rule within it. For one finds everywhere, even among these same tyrants, those who believe rightly, etc. Therefore a short and easy answer may be given to this question: that the Church is everywhere in the whole world, wherever the Gospel and the Sacraments are. But Jews, Turks, fanatics and sectarian spirits, or heretics, are not the Church; for these deny and destroy such things." Shortly before this Luther had written: "St. Jerome raises a great question here: why St. Paul reckons the Galatians among the Christian congregation or Church, seeing that they are in fact no Christian congregation or Church at all — for St. Paul (he says) writes indeed to the Galatians, who had fallen away from Christ and grace, and had turned again to Moses and the Law? I answer thereto as follows: that St. Paul here speaks according to the figure called synecdoche, which is quite common in Scripture. As he also writes to the Corinthians, rejoicing with them over the