# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1850_S118
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

— 118 —

the Lutheran name, in our own day, even several of the most gifted,
learned, and respected theologians once again see no reason to be ashamed
of being called Lutheran; and indeed several of these have again placed
themselves at the head of the German Lutheran people to lead its cause,
and the people now look up to them with great hopes — but what do
those men do? One part of them plainly remains standing on the height
of their own scholarship and the riches of their human spirit, and cannot
bring themselves to take every thought captive to the obedience of Christ,
to sit as children at the feet of our old teachers, and to have compassion
on the poor people and speak simply with them; instead they exploit the
supposed right and duty of a "further development" of doctrine in order
to destroy it. Yet among those on whom the eyes of our Lutheran people
are anxiously fixed in this time of need, as on their champions and
rescuers, we do see men of an altogether different bent as well. Among
them we find men who are plainly in earnest about thoroughly cleansing
themselves from the corruption of this sorry latter age; men who do not
stop halfway, but want to turn back entirely from the error. They see
clearly what terrible devastation rationalism and unionism have wrought
in our Church. They see with horror how the awareness of being a
member of the one holy Christian Church of all times and places is more
and more vanishing; how everywhere the bonds of the Church are more
and more dissolving; how everything is splitting apart, partly into plainly
carnal, partly into over-spiritual sects; how what Christianity outwardly
gives is pushed more and more into the background, and one's own
experience and one's own making set above it; how everything old is
increasingly thrown away as outdated, and everything new is at once
accepted uncritically as though it were a newfound treasure; how even the
faintest appearance of submission to outside authority is more and more
condemned, while submission to one's own authority is all the more
insisted upon and demanded; how the holy office is more and more
stripped of its divine dignity, reduced to a mere human institution, and
thereby robbed of its saving effectiveness: all this, I say, the latter see with
horror. Their hearts bleed at the plight of our poor, misled, and forsaken
Lutheran people. They are resolved to help, and to help thoroughly. — But
what, then, do these men do? Precisely in wanting to be, and become,
strictly Lutheran, their zeal carries them, against their will and without
their realizing it, far beyond what is truly Lutheran. With the best of
intentions — to dig up again pearls buried and trodden into the dust from
the treasury of our Church — they bring back into it things from which a
Luther once cleansed the Church, as from a grievous defilement, with
great labor and hard struggle; and with the best of intentions, to sweep our
Church clean of newly heaped-up rubbish and refuse, they throw out
jewels of holy doctrines and ordinances for whose winning our fathers once
gladly staked goods and blood. In opposition to the abandonment of the
idea of the one holy Christian Church, and to the syncretism of our day,
they unmistakably turn back, more and more, to the notion of the Church
as a visible, well-organized external institution. In opposition to the
disparagement of the means of grace and of everything objectively given,
they draw near again to the doctrine of the power of the sacraments
*ex opere operato* [by the mere performance of the act]. In opposition to the