# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Mai 1857_S145
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

145

(From the "Freimund.")
Something about the Lutheran Church at Frankfurt am Main.

(Conclusion.)

If one now asks, after all this, by what then is the Frankfurt church to be recognized as a Lutheran one? it becomes difficult to give a comforting answer, for the church must after all be recognized by its confession from the books actually in use. What good does it do that formerly a good Lutheran agenda existed? now there is none left! For surely one cannot take as evidence the old one, lying under the dust of the Ministerium's files, which is entirely out of use — any more than one can still call a deposed and banished king a reigning one. So too there is no longer any Lutheran hymnal, and the confessional catechism has in fact been abolished, for it is no longer to be found even in the schools. Accordingly one would have to deny the Frankfurt church entirely the character of a Lutheran one.

Yet there remains one essential piece, namely the ordination, which, so far as has become known to me, is still administered with a commitment to the confessional writings of the Lutheran Church, following the old agenda. That could still be a fence against ruin, and, as in a shipwreck, one looks about for it as for a saving plank, full of hope. But alas, it is only a false appearance! Of what use is all commitment to the confessions, if the preachers do not abide by it, and if no one is there to remind faithless preachers of their duty and their dreadful accountability on that day, to admonish them, and finally, where they persist, to remove them as destroyers of church and souls. And that is in fact how it stands in Frankfurt. Almost all the preachers pay homage to rationalism, one more crudely, another more covertly, and among the latter I mean especially those who count it a disgrace still to be rationalists, and who therefore adorn their speeches with the name of Jesus, but everywhere, at every corner and turn, let their old nature peep out from under the borrowed foreign cloak — people such as are described by St. Paul in Romans 16:18. Indeed there is not one there who is not infected by the union-plague that reigns in this most lamentable of times. And that is also the spirit prevailing in the church at Frankfurt, which, since examples prove best, I wish to substantiate with a few examples, from which the reader may judge for himself how matters stand. —

In the year 1817, at the Reformation festival, the Lutherans and the Reformed celebrated the Lord's Supper together, for which the then senior minister, Dr. Hufnagel, drew up a special printed formula. Whether this was so before that time or only from then on is unknown to the present writer, but nowadays there exists, with regard to the administration of the holy Lord's Supper, such an un-