# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_November 1855_S339
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

The So-Called American Revision of the Augsburg Confession. 339

— that stands in Art. 7 and 15 of the first part of the Augsburg Confession, and truly does not testify to their belief in such otherwise good and edifying ordinances. To be sure, the members of the Wittenberg Synod have studied — only not church history; otherwise they would not so readily have dropped the Athanasian Creed from the list of confessions of the universal church; otherwise they would not have babbled about kingdoms in which the adoption of the Formula of Concord was forced through by secular authorities, nor about a supposed majority of kingdoms which had rejected one or more of the Symbolical Books; otherwise they would not have borrowed from the enemies of our church the fable that the Formula of Concord was bound upon the consciences of the 8,000 ministers who signed it by secular authorities, when in fact, for example, in the old Duchy of Prussia the ministers themselves subscribed to it even without the secular authorities; otherwise they would have known that the secular government had a part in the drawing up of the Formula of Concord in the same way that John of Saxony and Philip of Hesse and others had in the composition of the Augsburg Confession, namely in their capacity as representatives of the congregations and holders of a part of the episcopal power, or of the government of the church; otherwise they would not have chattered so carelessly about the confessing deeds of the Lord's faithful, in which the church celebrated her victories over the world and broke a path, gave direction, and set her seal upon the noblest striving and struggle of the generations of coming centuries; otherwise they would have known that whoever sets aside doctrines or dogmas already established by the church, and wishes to retreat to the earlier indefiniteness of the teachings contained in them, leaves the historic ground of the church and becomes a sectarian; otherwise they would have known that all undertakings, like their own, to bring about unity by suppressing or using ambiguous language for contested doctrines have led to the most dreadful discords, the bitterest quarrels; otherwise they would have known that whoever, like themselves or the fathers of the end of the last and the beginning of this century, gives up a single doctrine of the confession also loses the others, until the whole crumbles in their hands.

Have pity on the poor, misled members of the Wittenberg Synod; the devil is leading them by the nose to hunt for Roman error in the Augsburg Confession and the other Lutheran confessions, so that he may all the while quietly make them thoroughly Roman themselves. The fortunate ones! They have not one pope, as the Romanists do, but many, in the shape of their professors and doctors of theology, one of whom, for example, has himself helped recommend the adoption of the mutilated Augsburg Confession. These men, who feel uneasy at the vigorous struggle of the church against the old, worn-out Rationalism and Supranaturalism, which also carries on its business in the so-called American Lutheran church, have said that the Augsburg Confession teaches falsely concerning the Holy Supper and Baptism, and confesses its faith