# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Januar 1857_S3
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Preface to Jahrgang 1857.                    3

have? Whoever did not know this would truly have to be poorly versed in the history of our Church — how the Lutheran churches which had introduced the entire Concordia as their symbol never dealt otherwise than sisterly with those who had introduced only this or that out of their confessions, namely at least the "apple of the eye" of our Church, as their normative confession; naturally provided that they did not do this openly in a false manner, and did not contradict the authentic explanations and elaborations, given in the other confessions, of the doctrine contained in the fundamental confession. Those who did this became, as for instance in Palatinate-Zweibrücken, all too soon manifestly anti-Lutheran, and at last also joined the Reformed outwardly. Finally, it would still have to be asked whether it might not be dangerous, at least for the members of those synods in which all the Lutheran confessions have symbolical, normative authority, to take part in a conference which has the Augsburg Confession alone as symbolical norm for its foundation. Might this not perhaps become a way by which Satan could succeed in bringing these synods to give up the great treasure of so glorious, so extensive, so rich a doctrinal confession, which contains the results and the spoils of victory of such faithful labors and such great struggles of our fathers? It would indeed be foolish to deny this danger. But if by an action the faith is not injured, while that same action is well commanded by love toward the brethren individually and toward the Church as a whole, then it would be equally a work of unbelief and of lovelessness to omit such an action for fear of a possible danger. Add to this: when those who are graced by God to recognize the glory of all our churchly confessions withdraw shyly from all those who, although holding the same faith, do not have the same insight, then the no less alarming danger lies near that the one party fall into a pharisaical, fleshly, spiritually proud, loveless insistence on its own strict confessionalism, while the other, instead of being filled with trust and love toward the building-up and the further fortification of our confessional stronghold, shrinks back from it more and more as from a prison tower of the spirit and of faith — so that the work of a rejuvenation of our Church, manifestly begun by God in America upon the old, tried foundation, is hindered in the very effort, meant in the best sense, to further it.

It is not human counsels of prudence which have moved a company of Lutherans to undertake the arrangement of such a conference to help the Church; these might indeed easily prove utterly foolish. God cannot bear it when men wish to preserve and govern the Church by their own cleverness — he will do that himself, through his Word and his Spirit. Nor are these new experiments which one, despairing of the old means, has made for the building of the Church by such a gathering; these might indeed all too easily fail;