# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_M rz 1857_S91
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

On America's Present and Future Church Condition. 91

...spirit of Calvinism resists confessional unity as a matter of course. The mutually disunited Calvinistic "denominations," however, will, when the occasion arises, hold together harmoniously, Cretan-fashion, against anything that has not grown up on their own stock. And such occasions will not fail to arise; the next collision, perhaps a bloody one, Schaff expects with the Mormons, once they shall have grown, in their present territory, to the size of a state and demand admission into the Union. Not much later, if not indeed sooner, the struggle of Calvinism with Romanism is to be expected; the sweet papal dream of a sole-saving church to be erected upon the ruins of the sects that have worn themselves out against one another may easily find just the opposite fulfillment. But even the American church of the evangelical-Lutheran Reformation will be able to escape a hostile collision with Calvinism only if, and only by, being content with an illusory existence; for its true fundamental idea stands too sharply opposed to Calvinism for it to find room alongside it. Little reliance is to be placed here on the religious liberty prevailing in the United States; that has its own peculiar bearing on the matter."

Let us hear what Schaff further declares: "North America has, when one looks at the great whole, in religious respect a predominantly Reformed character, by which even the Lutheran church there is involuntarily carried along, so that on the one hand it indeed gains (?), but on the other hand also loses. If one wishes to gain a clear view of the enormous influence which Calvin's personality, moral earnestness, and legislative genius have exercised on history, one must above all travel to Scotland and to the United States. The Reformed church, where it takes shape, living and vigorous, out of its own genius, presses with particular emphasis for thoroughgoing moral reform, for individual, personal Christianity, for a free, self-standing congregational life, and for strict church discipline. It draws a sharp line between God and world, church and state, the regenerate and the unregenerate. It is essentially oriented practically outward, engaging with the conditions of the world, organizing and congregation-forming, aggressive and missionary. But it also has a legalistic strain, and in this, though from an opposite standpoint, it coincides with the Roman church. It holds the Bible in the highest esteem (?) and wishes ever anew to reshape church life directly out of it, without troubling itself much about tradition and the historical mediations. All these characteristics stand out sharply and clearly in the ecclesiastical-religious life of America, amid all the differences of the individual branches.... In America, all the conditions are, in a sense, given for the most comprehensive task of union, precisely because there not only the Lutheran and Reformed confessions but also the English and all the other European sections and forms of appearance