# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1872_S54
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

[p. 54]

—continuing from the previous page— the words: "That, in a time of an almost universal falling-away from the Lutheran faith," and so on, it was further remarked: It is remarkable how clearly Luther foresaw this falling-away in a prophetic spirit. In his last sermon at Wittenberg he says: "You now have the pure and true Word of God; but guard against your own thoughts and cleverness, for the devil will kindle the light of reason and lead you away from the faith." This has been fulfilled in rationalism. The rationalists said: only what agrees with human reason is truth; what does not agree with human reason is error and superstition.

Once this principle is generally accepted, the authority of holy Scripture and Lutheran doctrine are finished, and the falling-away spreads ever further. Thus the cause of the almost universal falling-away from the Lutheran faith, and also of the great fragmentation of the Lutheran church, is this: one follows one's own thoughts and one's own cleverness. One does not take one's reason captive under the obedience of faith. At the beginning of this century things were so bad that enemies of the truth said the Christian church had ceased to exist, and that from pulpits in Germany it was said: if you feel your misery, wrap yourself in your virtue. In view of these facts we must marvel at the great grace of God, that he has given us again the light of his Gospel.

After this remark, a member of the Synod said: the words contained in the adopted minutes — "Because in Germany Scripture is not acknowledged word for word as God's Word, one cannot speak of a Lutheran church in Germany being present" — seem too harsh to him.

To this it was answered: We believe that there are many dear Lutherans, many excellent men, in Germany; but the organizations are no longer Lutheran. They are entangled in corrupted fellowships. This is simply the old *synecdoche* [a figure of speech naming a whole by a part], whereby a thing is designated now by its defects, now by its merits. By this same synecdoche our old fathers speak now of the Reformed *sect*, now of the Reformed *church*. As soon as they see that the Reformed depart from God's Word in the doctrine of election by grace, of holy Baptism, of the holy Supper, and of the person of Christ, and stubbornly persist in these their errors, they say: Reformed sect. But as soon as they see that the Reformed hold the Bible to be God's Word, defend the deity of Christ, and also teach the doctrine of justification, they say: Reformed church — meaning, of course, a corrupted church. So when we have said: there is no Lutheran church as in Luther's and Gerhard's time, we meant only to deny that there is a Lutheran church as it ought to be, as it was in its flowering—