# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Dezember 1856_S380
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

380
Miscellaneous Church News.

this union is now, more than ever, needed, inasmuch as the struggle in our church demands from day to day a more intimate union of those who manifest sincere love and faithfulness — even if often in weakness — toward the symbols of our church." (We remark on this, first for our own part, that we receive this exhortation with heartfelt thanks, yet also give the beloved brethren to consider that we know only one way to true peace, and that is unity in doctrine. So long as the pure evangelical Lutheran doctrine, which we represent over against the Buffalo Synod, is condemned, slandered, and distorted by it, no peace is possible; and even should it abandon this course, our Synod still cannot, for conscience's sake, bring itself to do penance for having, in the time when the Buffalo Synod condemned our Lutheran doctrine, received those who separated from it for the sake of doctrine. So long as such "glances" are still cast at the Missouri Synod as in the current issues of the "Informatorium," in which even pieces are treacherously published by a former clerk of our Synod that had been officially entrusted to him and that were suppressed by the Synod because it did not approve them; so long as the Buffalo Synod continues at all to attack ours spitefully: so long our Synod cannot, for the sake of its own defense, keep silent either. But should a union in doctrine, though impossible for the present, nevertheless be met by the Buffalo Synod's abandoning the condemnation of our doctrine, and by its letting rest what has occurred on our side in the past on that account, and by its accepting the hand of reconciliation that we offer: then we would regard ourselves as sacredly bound, despite the doctrinal difference not yet resolved, to preserve a brotherly relationship between us and those of the Buffalo Synod.)

The "Missionary" of Pittsburgh still cannot reconcile itself with the principle followed by the "General Conference," of granting seat and vote within its circle only to those who confess without reservation the Unaltered Augsburg Confession. In a report on the proceedings of the aforesaid Conference, which the "Missionary" gives in its issue of October 23, it makes, at the close, the proposal that in October of next year, in the week before the holding of the General Synod at Reading, Pa., a general conference be held, "which shall stand open to all preachers and members of the Lutheran Church who wish to take part in it." The "Missionary" does not consider that it is thereby actually following the very principle it rejects, for only those are preachers and members of the Lutheran Church who confess, at the very least without reservation, the fundamental confession of this church. Presumably the sense is that all are to be invited who call themselves Lutheran.

The Wittenberg Synod, having met on September 5, adopted the following resolution: "That, in view of the importance of the Platform movement and the cordial reception it has found among the laity, we recommend the Platform to our congregations for adoption." At the same time the Synod expresses its joy that the Platform has been adopted by the English Synod of Ohio, the Olive Branch Synod of Indiana, the Northern Synod of the same state, and the Kentucky Synod; that the Augsburg Confession, in the sense of the Platform, has been accepted by the Miami Synod; and that such influence has been granted to it by the Pittsburgh Synod that the latter is now secured against the inroad of "symbolism."

The "Evangelical Association," whose organ is the "Christliche Botschafter" published in Cleveland, likewise seems more and more to be awakening to the awareness that it stands in need of reformation. In the said paper, in an article running through many issues, a great number of failings are censured from which the ministry of this fellowship suffers. Of the so-called local preachers it says there, in the issue of November 5: "Such men are faithful fellow-laborers in the vineyard of the Lord.. It is only a pity that their number is proportionally so small!" Of