# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_M rz 1857_S92
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

92 On America's Present and Future Church Condition.

...of the church come together there, rub against one another, and ferment together in confusion." So Schaff. We forgo citing yet more of his statements; the reader is reminded on almost every page that North America is, quite properly, the classic soil of Calvinism. To be sure, the esteemed author wishes that "the German church, with its congenial enjoyment of Christianity, its reflective contemplation, its inwardness and depth, its historical sense and its rich theology, might beneficially and complementarily intervene in the developmental process of American Protestantism" — and since he here also has in mind the "German Reformed" church, "which was, after all, never harshly Calvinistic, but always rather Melanchthonian, moderate, mediating between Lutheranism and Calvinism, between Germanic and Romance Protestantism, and which has therefore in recent times joined the Union almost everywhere," such a "complementary intervention" will presumably in the long run not fail to occur either, just as, indeed, "a small beginning toward it has in fact been made for some years now." But when he wishes and demands the same also of the "Lutheran church," he thereby, as a consequence of his own standpoint, wholly mistakes its basic character and its essential difference from Calvinism. The evangelical Reformation can intervene in Calvinistic Protestantism neither "complementarily" nor indeed "beneficially" at all, but only destructively, because it is that church's antipode and is, as to the chief matter of religion, more foreign and dissimilar to it than even Romanism is. In our concept-confusing, union-mad age, it cannot be said often or loudly enough that the Roman and Reformed churches have in common the "legalistic strain," as Schaff puts it, which makes both of them allies against the evangelical essence of the Lutheran church. Were the latter, in America, likewise to try "to take shape, living and vigorous, out of its own genius," it would already have to pay for the first energetic attempt at this with the fate of the Mormons. For in America there exists, in fact, only a Calvinistic religious liberty, which tolerates everything that plants itself in Calvinistic soil, and casts out everything that wishes to grow on its own stock. This can be held against the United States as little as, say, an innate revulsion to cheese can be held against me. On the contrary, I even hold it to be providential that the migration of peoples now under way — one that, in a moral respect, probably still falls short of the ancient one — takes its course precisely into that land which voluntarily bows beneath the discipline of strict laws and rigoristic customs, and which compels the immigrant, with iron necessity, to the same obedience. Nor do I doubt in the least that this legalism will serve as a schoolmaster unto Christ, and will, in the distant future, yield to evangelical liberty. In the present and the nearer future, however, there is not the least prospect of this, and therefore the American standing of a church which, like the evangelical-Lutheran, has already overcome the legalistic standpoint