# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Januar 1857_S27
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

27

Definite Platform.

In the Lutheran Observer of Dec. 26, 1856, there is found an article, signed S. Kitz, which deserves our attention on account of the good hope which it awakens. The author seeks, before his numerous friends, to clear himself of the undeserved suspicion of having become an Old Lutheran, that is, an adherent of the five dreadful heresies which the Definite Platform has sniffed out in our confession: "Old Lutheranism" — in plain German, simple Lutheranism — has, he says, always been a millstone around the leg of "Evangelical Lutheranism" (that which has found its adequate expression only in the Def. Platform). At the beginning of the organization of the General Synod, the C. A. [Augsburg Confession] was indeed adopted as the basis — but, mind you, only according to its essential component parts. Unfortunately, however, it turned out that the matter would not work that way. Naturally, simple people, when they say black, do not mean white. So there came many simple people, who took themselves for Lutherans because, in confessing the Augsburg Confession, they actually understood the Augsburg Confession, and who, when they called themselves Lutherans, quite naively believed that the confession of the Lutheran Church truly contained neither more nor less than everything that God's Word makes known to us for the soul's salvation. Of course, so foolish a childlike faith was nothing for the lofty spirits. For the crude, unpolished fellows threw everything into confusion: when they heard the figurative expression, "Baptism is a bath of regeneration," they supposed that the Holy Spirit really came to the little children; and when it was said of the Sacrament, "this is my body, my blood," they were bound and determined to insist that the Savior had really given them His body and blood to eat. Indeed, still more dreadful: they stood fast, like blockheads, on the notion that God's Word and the Sacraments are the true means of grace; and that, even if no one were converted, the Holy Spirit still willed to come only through the Word, and paid no heed at all to any of its other lofty arts. It came within a hair's breadth of putting an end to all the great revivals and wholesale conversions; and yet how splendid it would be, if the Observer could parade a dozen revivals, visitations, outpourings, refreshing showers, etc., in every issue! — As has been said, the thing did not work. They set about stopping up the hole through which the devil had come in. And this indeed very nearly succeeded; for the Definite Platform, so far as the confession is concerned, makes a clean sweep — the Augustana is happily purified of all heresies; so now the devil can accomplish nothing more there.

Our author is, thus far, quite satisfied; but now comes the limping messenger after. The Platform offers to live in peace and concord with all who, in their simplicity, cannot yet free themselves from some of the alleged heresies, provided only that they do not consider them essential. There is a compromise again — again a hole, through which all the crude