# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juni 1856_S187
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Miscellaneous Church News. 187

...members of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in the United States who acknowledge the unaltered Augsburg Confession as a faithful presentation of the doctrines of the divine Word, to meet with them in a free and brotherly conference on the present condition and needs of the Church in America, in the city of ——, on Wednesday, October 1 of this year.

F. Wyneken, pastor at St. Louis, votes for Columbus, O.
G. Schaller, " " " " " " " "
F. Bünger, " " " " " " " "
C. F. W. Walther, prof., " " " " " " "
A. Biewend, " " " " " " " "

Miscellaneous Church News.

The General Conference. This matter stirs even the gentlemen Reformed. How it affects them, at the prospect that the Lutherans of America might unite upon the unaltered Augsburg Confession, is made clear by an expectoration on the subject which we find in the Reformed Church Gazette of Chambersburg, Pa., of May 1. It says there: "The question now is whether these moderate Lutherans can unite upon the altered or the unaltered Augsburg Confession, and whether it is not in prospect that, in the end, the entire American Lutheran Church will come to agree upon this confession? That is precisely the question at the present time. No one thinks of forming yet another new party among the many already existing; rather, it is a united Lutheran Church, in unity of faith, of confession, and of doctrine, that is what is longed for on all sides. But in the hasty zeal for union, before the leaven of truth has leavened the whole lump, there always lies near a perilous reef on which the whole affair can founder — and so also here. If something right and lasting is to be attained by the way of union, one must not close one's eyes to certain difficulties, nor imagine that there could be no just reason why, through the unconditional adoption of the Augsburg Confession, it could never become the common confession of the Lutheran, let alone of the Reformed, Church" (very true!) "become. That confession has corners of its own" (thank God!), "which, for example, made it impossible for the Evangelical Kirchentag to adopt it unconditionally, and which also make it impossible for a large part of the American Lutheran Church to adopt it unconditionally with a good conscience and to do so, provided it is clearly aware that whoever unconditionally subscribes the Augustana thereby also obligates himself to the Formula of Concord, with all its errors and exaggerations!" (Hearty thanks, dear colleague, for this useful testimony which you furnish concerning the Formula of Concord — that it is nothing else but an expansion of the Augustana! You are entirely right. But will you thereby achieve your purpose of making a bogeyman out of the Augustana? We hope, on the contrary, that by this path you will only take from the Formula of Concord the smell of being an old ruin haunted by ghosts. Keep on in your zeal, keep on!) "The time of merely traditional adherence to the Augsburg Confession is passing. Whoever, however, sets an unconditional acceptance of it as the unalterable condition of union, and should not miscalculate in supposing that many preachers will be found ready for this, because they still lack the insight" (O you fortunate