# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Januar 1856_S7
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Some Glosses on Bunsen's Aphorisms and His "Position and Task," etc.                    7

the Reformed, the Unionist, the Moravian, the Lutheran — as different, indeed as mutually contradictory, and yet before God's holy countenance and His Word as equally justified. Neither is to be wholly right nor wholly wrong; the whole, full, sure way to salvation is supposedly not yet found; the poor pilgrims to the kingdom of heaven must, springing back and forth from the doctrinal proposition of one confession to the doctrinal proposition of another, or even, as trick riders of a higher sort, race toward the goal standing astride several confessions at once. This is that dismal unbelief in a providence of God, which will not credit Him — who indeed gives the poor blind creatures clothing and shoes — with having also told them clearly, plainly, and distinctly the most important thing of all: the way and the means to salvation. This lack of earnestness and holy anger, which brands every deviation from the Word of God a shameful sin. Why do the Union gentlemen, when they recognize that, for example, the doctrine of unconditional election of grace, or that of the bread and wine in the Holy Supper as mere empty signs of the body and blood of Christ, and so on, are contrary to the Word of God — why do they not, for God's honor and for the salvation of erring brethren, call these also what they are, namely, condemned false doctrines, and those teachers who spread these and similar false doctrines, following the example of the holy Apostle Paul, who esteemed love as the greatest thing, "evil workers" and "dogs"? Why not? Simply because they are "liberal," Christian-liberal gentlemen!

A specimen of such liberality is found at once in the first aphorism: "Christianity proves itself to be the world religion in that it has been able to pass through the necessary developmental crisis which, as such, it had to undergo. No Jew could have imagined it possible for a religion to exist without a sanctuary . . . Likewise neither Augustine nor Jerome would have thought it possible that Christianity could maintain itself in controversy without a formula of excommunication, or Christian communal ordinances without religious exclusion and intolerance." The holy Apostle Paul teaches that no Christian congregation shall tolerate the wicked; it is to put them out, to exclude them, and the Lord Christ Himself gives us the formula of excommunication for this: we are to regard them as "publicans and heathen." — It was, until now, unknown to me that Union-Christianity also considers lack of discipline a necessary developmental crisis, a liberal advance. — But that just such an undisciplined spirit haunts the Union is confirmed even by Stahl, who says: "the weapon of the church, with which she wins her victory over the world, is the sword of the Word of God, which pierces the heart — not the scourge with which the money-changers were driven from the temple." As if any reasonable Christian had ever wanted to overcome the world by means of church discipline! The church discipline commanded by Christ is quite simply a defensive, not an offensive, weapon. The one thing is to be done, and the other not left undone.

Very liberal indeed, that — but truly neither "Christian" nor "churchly" do the following sentences sound: "Above all, the nations of the pre-