# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_October 1856_S304
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

304 Lutheran-Theological Pastor's Library.

taken counsel from the theologians Musäus, Olearius, and Tenzel, and certain godly jurists, whom he summoned to Gotha for this purpose in the year 1670,) send his son, Prince Albert, and the Coburg general superintendent Verpoorten to travel to Denmark, Sweden, Holstein, and Mecklenburg, and sent others to other princes and eminent estates of the Empire — but even the godly prince's efforts failed, despite all the favor with which the proposal had at first been received at many courts, especially in Sweden. Now as to the "Διάσκεψις," it contains proof that between the Lutheran and Reformed churches a difference exists in the very ground of faith. The book gives the answer to the following three questions: 1. Which articles or doctrines constitute "the faith." 2. By which articles and doctrines the ground of faith is overthrown. 3. Whether, accordingly, the Evangelicals or Lutherans differ from the Reformed in the ground of faith. The latter (the third) part of the book falls into three chapters; in the first Hunnius shows what doctrines of the Reformed are to be reckoned as such, and that he writes all that follows not out of contentiousness and ill will toward the Reformed, but solely out of love for the truth and for true peace. The second chapter carries out the proof ad hominem, in that it is demonstrated from the writings of the Reformed themselves that they themselves have declared the difference between the Reformed and the Lutherans to be fundamental, and the alleged errors of the Lutherans to be subversive of the foundation, although, as often as their momentary advantage required it, they nevertheless asserted that we are indeed at one with them in the ground of faith, and that they might therefore well allow them entry into our congregations. In the third chapter Hunnius finally proves his thesis directly. — As excellently as Löscher illuminates the errors of the Reformed and the division of the church thereby caused, by way of history, just as excellently does Hunnius accomplish the same by way of speculation. Even apart, however, from the critique of the Reformed doctrines contained in our book, it contains so illuminating and thorough a development of the important doctrine of the fundamental articles of faith that this alone gives the work an exceedingly great value. This development has broken the path in the Lutheran church toward the systematic presentation of the individual doctrines according to their relation to one another. To cite but one judgment of an older theologian concerning it, Buddeus writes of it: "No one before him has proven so thoroughly that the dissensus between us and the teachers of the Reformed church is a fundamental one, nor has anyone since done this in a more striking way. Hence it is indeed remarkable that in our time men have been found who have wished to persuade themselves and others that from this very book of Hunnius it can be shown that that dissensus is by no means a fundamental one." (Isag. p. 1226.) Several Reformed writers have, against