# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_November 1855_S338
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

338 The So-Called American Revision of the Augsburg Confession.

of the Reformation, and hold fast to them, so that we, wherever possible, may be drawn day by day closer to one another in love and peace, and thereby become more capable, more successful in laboring at all the high and holy works for the edification of the church and the conversion of the world, to which God's providence and the simple teachings of the Gospel point us."

"Resolved, that these resolutions be published in the Lutheran Observer and the Evangelical Lutheran, and that a copy of the same be sent to the individual synods connected with the General Synod."

So much for the two synods.

The present writer would fear to offend the reader were he to call attention once more to the outrage which the authors of the oft-mentioned Groundwork and the Wittenberg Synod have committed against the confession of the Evangelical Lutheran church. Röhr, the late chieftain of the Rationalists at Weimar, once likewise mutilated the Apostles' Creed. Yet allow me to point out a few considerations which many, in the zeal of righteous indignation, might overlook.

Have pity on the poor, ignorant members of the Wittenberg Synod; they truly know not what they do. To be sure, they have studied — only not Holy Scripture, for they deny the scriptural doctrine that God, through the mouth of the preacher, preaches Law and Gospel and, in particular, pronounces the forgiveness of sins, or absolves, him who penitently confesses his sins; they deny the scriptural doctrine that Baptism is the washing of regeneration; they deny the word of the Lord in Mark 2:27 and 28 and Colossians 2:16, and, at bottom, the whole New Testament, in that they hold the command of Sabbath observance in the time of the New Testament to be more than a necessary ordinance of the state and a fitting church order; indeed, they even deny the very word of the Lord, when He, giving the bread and wine, says: this is my body, this is my blood. To be sure, they have studied — only not the confessions of their own church; for they merely parrot what the slanderers of that church say, who interpret the conclusion of the Augsburg Confession to mean that its confessors admitted having refuted only the greater part of the Roman errors while retaining others, such as, for example, the Mass — whereas the conclusion of the Confession merely states that only the chief abuses were mentioned in it, while many others were passed over, so that those chief ones might be the better noted, and so that, on the basis of the latter, the others might easily be judged; they assert that the Augsburg Confession, in the third article of its second part, confesses its faith in the ceremonies of the Mass, whereas in truth that passage only relates that among the Evangelicals, too, the Holy Supper is distributed, which according to ancient usage is called the Mass, and that in doing so nearly all the earlier ceremonies are retained, namely all those that are not contrary to God's Word; what the Lutheran confessions held and hold concerning ceremonies, church orders, Sunday observance, exorcism, and so forth,