# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_M rz 1856_S86
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

86 A Free Conference.

honored friend and brother writes above, „participation in the conference is conditioned on unreserved assent to the Book of Concord of 1580.“ We have indeed no doubt that whoever subscribes without reservation to the unaltered Augsburg Confession can also reject not a single proposition in the remaining confessions, since these are nothing other than further developments and defenses of what is contained in the Augustana. But, given how the churchly conditions have been here in the last decades, and in part still are, there may well be many an honest Lutheran who is sincerely devoted to the unaltered Augsburg Confession without standing in the clear conviction that he would be right to be able to subscribe to the whole Concordia already now. But such Lutherans too are without doubt our brothers. The free general conference should therefore, in our opinion, place itself on no foundation by which it would give the appearance of being unwilling or unable to extend the hand of brotherhood to sincere, honest fellow confessors of that general confession of all Lutherans; nor should it, in our opinion, renounce the blessing that might also grow from this, if on its basis it made room even for such Lutherans who, with all decisiveness for the doctrine of our basic confession, still harbor scruples against the capstone of our edifice of confession, the Formula of Concord. It seems to us that one of the most important tasks of the conference would be precisely this: to remove these scruples from our brothers who are filled with misgivings about the consistent carrying-through of the doctrine confessed at Augsburg, and to lead them, through God's grace, to the blessed and joyful conviction that in the Augustana which they have accepted, all the remaining symbols of our Church are already implicitly contained.

In accordance with this our conviction, we cannot, then, until we are instructed better, agree that the conference should make theses submitted for this purpose the guiding thread of its discussions. In this regard we concur with a German-Lutheran preacher from a northern region who, as the honored readers will see further below, makes the proposal that in the conference the Augsburg Confession itself be read aloud and that the mutual discussion be attached to it, with the necessary deliberations carried out upon it. With this the conference would have the best means of coming to know itself, and the surest foundation on which it could further build itself up — from Scripture itself the most uncontested major premise for its subsumptions and conclusions.

It goes without saying that in this we do nothing but wish to add our own voice.

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