# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Mai 1856_S153
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

From the Earlier History of the American-Lutheran Church, etc. 153

3. A German-Lutheran minister outside our synod, in the East, who in a letter to us has ordered our periodicals for himself, writes therein, among other things, the following: "Rumors are in circulation that a general church convention of such ministers as hold the unaltered Augsburg Confession as their confession is to be convened. I believe I may say, in the name of the majority of Lutheran ministers of this city, that it is a general wish that such a day should come to pass. May it happen very soon! May the time soon come when the dear Lutheran Church shall be freed from the controversies" (this wish of the dear brother evidently goes too far, for were the Lutheran Church no longer one that contends against the unbiblical, both outside and within her, she would then also no longer be a true one), "from unbelief, from the new measures of the newest age! I do not hold this wish alone. I know many who sigh for the day on which the unaltered Augsburg Confession is acknowledged as the symbol of the (whole American) Lutheran Church... I sigh with thousands for the day on which such unity shall be established in the torn Church."

From the Earlier History of the American-Lutheran Church and Its Literature.

In the year 1708 the evangelical-Lutheran minister at New York and Albany, Justus Falckner — born at Zwickau in the Kingdom of Saxony — published a work in the Dutch language under the following title:

Grondlyke Onderricht van sekere voorname Hoofdstuecken der waren, loutern, saligmakenden, Christelyken Leere, gegrondet op den Grondt van de Apostelen en Propheten, daer Jesus Christus de Hoeksteen is. Angewesen in eenvoudige, dog stigtlyke Vragen en Antwoorden. Gedrukt te Nieuw-York by W. Bradfordt, 1708. in 8.

In the so-called Unschuldige Nachrichten of E. V. Löscher, in the volume for 1726, pp. 411–416, a detailed account of the contents of the work is given, from which one sees that it is, as Löscher himself says, a "Compendium doctrinae Anti-Calvinianum," written in consequence of severe struggles which Falckner had to wage with the Calvinists. Falckner was, as we learn from the Unschuldige Nachrichten of 1731, p. 89, ordained by a Swedish minister named Rudman, whom the Archbishop of Sweden had appointed suffragan, or vice-bishop, for America.

Falckner's successor in office was Wilhelm Christoph Berckenmeyer, born at Bodenteich in the Lüneburg territory. A deputy of the New York Lutheran congregation namely came, after the death of the first-