# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Januar 1858_S18
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

18                                    The Evangelical Church Convention.

...which the other confession denies, and to rate it lower, but rather on the positive, that one rates highly the gifts of grace of the other confession. We believe in no catholicity of doctrine that extends beyond the true confession, but in a catholicity of the working of the Holy Spirit, which runs through all confessions. Right catholicity therefore does not exist at all now, since errors divide the church. Nor can we establish it by declaring truth and error to be non-essential. We can only wait for God to establish it."

It was an unfortunate path onto which the Kirchentag allowed itself to be led — not merely to enter upon confessional questions of principle, above all the most delicate of all questions, that of fellowship at the Lord's Table, for the debate of which such an assembly is indeed the most unsuitable subject and the most unsuitable place, but also to revile Lutheranism in a unionistic and pietistic spirit. "The most regrettable thing about those attacks, unseemly enough in themselves," writes a correspondent of the Neue Preußische Zeitung from southern Germany, dated the 28th of September, "is that through them not only brotherly love but also truth was in many ways violated. Is it indeed true that it is taught that baptism suffices for salvation and that no further conversion is needed after it? Or that if only the spiritual office of the ministry were restored, all the ills of the church would thereby be remedied? The opening sermon, so rich in gold and precious stones, would truly only have gained by the omission of these dry stubble-stalks of a caricaturing polemic. Is it further true that it was ever taught that outward membership in the Lutheran church is a condition of salvation? And was it becoming, on the strength of this insinuation, to remark that the Württembergers, thank God, had no bent toward high-churchliness? Was it becoming to call what is important and precious to our brethren wretched trifles?*) Was it, finally, true, what was said, that strictly Lutheran principles lead to Pharisaism or to Rome? Were Brenz and the two Andreaes, were Arndt, Müller, and Paul Gerhardt, were even Bengel, Spener, and Francke not wholly and decidedly Lutherans? And who has the effrontery to call these men, or even a Löscher and a Calov, Pharisees or Romanists? And if they were not such, how should those be such who have not by far attained their strictness and decisiveness? Such speeches were neither becoming nor right before God!"

All the more significant, over against such unworthy conduct, was Stahl's clear, victorious, Lutheran, and therefore genuinely catholic testimony. And we may hope — not only toward God, but so far as human eyes can judge in such matters — it was also to be perceived that it had not been in vain. May it, above all, bear fruit for the church of Württemberg, otherwise so richly endowed with grace, and help to avert the dangers,

*) Editor's note. If we are not mistaken, it was Barth of Calw who did that.