# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_October 1857_S314
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

314   Church and Contemporary History.

...fashion Herr Omnes rules, abolishes confession and church discipline, casts down liturgy, agenda and hymnal, and cries: We are the church! The Lutheran pastors are mocked by him, and at last no doubt deposed and driven out, as here. At that time (1853) a Bavarian dean could not comprehend our complaints; now he understands them. Where now is the Missourian lie that their doctrine has no such consequences, but is only so misused! Had a royal consistory not power enough to preserve the right doctrinal consequences and to ward off the misuse? No, no longer! As soon as the Missourian doctrine is held orthodox, a consistory in Germany too must feel its consequences." — —

O thou unhappy Bavaria, why hast thou not sent for Mr. Pastor Grabau, or some pastor of the Buffalo Synod, say Mr. Böhm? Then all the misfortune would not have come which has now overtaken thee. Townsmen and peasants would have been rid of their rationalism that very moment and would have become pious, obedient children of the church and of the confessional; out of terror before the "church court" they would at once, without exception, have been converted; for then it would have been said: If you will not, then you must — and now unhappy Bavaria would be a true paradise. — But be of good cheer; perhaps Bavaria will yet come to its senses. Even if it does not make Mr. Böhm president of the high consistory, it may perhaps still submit itself to the Buffalo church court, and then the land is beyond doubt helped. At least so says Mr. Pastor Grabau. For he writes: "Certainly, the general or common church court of all the Lutheran synods of this land is Satan's greatest terror; for where then would remain the hitherto existing power of his lie and unrighteousness, the power of confusion which he has wielded until now?" O ye foolish Lutheran forefathers, ye supposed hitherto that the devil is overcome by God's Word, by faith, and so forth, according to Ephesians 6! Here you hear it: not the Word of God — the church court, that is what scares off the devil. Not the Word of God — the church court is his "greatest terror"! Nota bene, the church court then, when, as Mr. Pastor Grabau will have it, "its pronouncements and decisions receive force and emphasis through the active membership of the territorial government."

Dr. W. M. Reynolds had lately been described by Rev. Georg Diehl in the "Observer" as a man who would be agreeable to the "strict confessionalists" of the various Illinois synods, and only recently the latter had listed the former as a representative of the "symbolists." Against all this Dr. Reynolds protests in all earnest in the number of the "Observer" of October 2. He will know nothing of party names and now declares himself to be a General Synod man whose chief aim is not to divide but to unite. The pledging of the professors at Gettysburg to the Augsburg Confession and to the Small Catechism is to him already a nimium. He says at the same time, among other things, that by symbolists people mean those who set the symbols above God's Word. Such people, he says, do not exist at all; this is even the "position of the Buffalo brethren," who in his opinion form the extreme right in ecclesiastical questions, for even these Buffalo brethren "are by no means satisfied with the decisions of the Smalcald Articles" (Dr. Reynolds here means in any case what the Smalcald Articles say about the relation of the ministry and of the power of the keys to the church), and therefore in this set God's Word above the symbols. Whether the Buffalo men will thank Dr. Reynolds for this apology remains to be seen.

II. Abroad.

The Saxon Kirchen- und Schulblatt has since July of this year been transferred from Prof. Dr. Kahnis into the hands of Prof. Dr. Luthardt, a colleague and friend of the former. Luthardt begins his editorship with the words: "At the passing over of the editorship of the Saxon K. und Sch. Blatt into my hands there needs, I suppose, no declaration, still less any assurance, that the Christian character of the