# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Januar 1858_S16
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

16                                    The Evangelical Church Convention.

...theraner. Everyone listened to this calmly; but when Stahl, as president, used his summary to set forth his own view and that of his like-minded colleagues — a view which up to that point had not been given the floor at all — and did so after expressly requesting permission, there arose against it a tumult such as was, for a gathering of this kind, and especially in a church, least of all fitting. We give the essential content of his address, in which, as will be noted, he does not touch on the question of fellowship at the Lord's Table, for understandable reasons, following the report in Hengstenberg's Evangelische Kirchenzeitung: "The opposition that truly exists has not yet been brought out at all in the proceedings, and my conviction has not yet been represented at all. I shall point out the opposition, but also the point of our unity. What is understood here by catholicity was foreign to the Reformers. They placed catholicity in the unity and universality of the true doctrine. Here, by contrast, a catholicity is demanded that is supposed to reach beyond the confessional church, that is, beyond the true church. Such a conception of catholicity can be a means toward establishing the unity of the church; but it also carries within it a great danger of destruction. Standing opposed to one another are catholicity in the sense of the Evangelicals — that is our standpoint — and catholicity among the Evangelicals — that is the standpoint of the Evangelical Alliance. According to the latter, catholicity rests on the consensus of doctrine among all evangelical denominations. Whatever lies outside this consensus is not fundamental, and has no bearing on salvation. We Lutherans contradict this. We have therefore been charged today with Lutheran high-churchism, doctrinairism, and Pharisaism. But we have never built the salvation of the soul on membership in the Lutheran church rather than on the new birth. We have no zeal for the documents or the doctrinal definitions of our confessions as such, but for the sacred realities that they contain. The distinction between fundamental and non-fundamental doctrines is a piece of scholasticism, exactly like the Roman distinction between mortal and venial sins. Catholic semi-Pelagianism and predestination, seven sacraments and the rejection of infant baptism — why should the one be fundamental and the other not? The catholicity of the Evangelical Alliance rests on a flip-flopping between the visible and the invisible church. On the ground of sonship to God, which belongs to the invisible church, one contents oneself with the insufficient nine articles; and on the ground of pure doctrine, which belongs to the visible church, one excludes the Catholics. That is not catholicity, but evangelical partisanship. If we fraternize with the extremes of the Reformation, the whole of Protestantism becomes one extreme set against the extreme of Catholicism. Luther did not merely make a beginning of the Reformation, which the founders of the churches after him then completed. He, perhaps, rather carried it further himself in some respects —