# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Februar 1858_S34
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

34 "Luther or Arndt!"

confession as it obtains and is repeated in the Formula Concordiae (to which I also confess with heart and mouth, and desire also that these writings be understood in no other way than according to it), the holy Christian life too might be propagated." Let those take note of this who now so often sit in inquisitorial judgment over the dear Arndt, and who have perhaps themselves never confessed so sincerely and heartily to the symbolic books of our Church, nor ever wished their own affairs to be directed according to them. But let those also take note of this who regard and declare every zeal for pure doctrine and every earnest holding fast to the church's confession to be a mark of dead orthodoxy, while they nevertheless build graves for an Arndt and other departed, godly theologians who clung with zeal and faithfulness to pure doctrine and the Church, and who fought and condemned false doctrine, of which combination scarcely anything is now to be found anywhere." These passages, the latter especially, imply a censuring rebuke against the whole of the former, faith-faithful evangelical-Lutheran Church, even though they seem at first to be directed only against the Buffalo crypto-papistry. For this latter had, among other things, in its second synodical letter (of 1850), p. 49, delivered the following judgment on Arndt: "Books such as those of Ph. J. Spener, A. H. Francke, Schubert of Potsdam, Fuhrmann of Silesia, Woltersdorf, Bogatzky, Rambach, Rieger, Brastberger, Richter of Barmen (the House Bible — to which also belongs the Berleburg Bible commentary), and others, teach little or nothing of the holy sacraments, of holy absolution, and of the office of the keys. So it is also with Hofacker's book of sermons. This same deficiency is, unfortunately, also found in the popular Arndt's True Christianity.

Erdmann Neumeister's judgment on Arndt's True Christianity, in his Geistliche Bibliothek, p. 860, runs thus: The dear man has, through oversight and ignorance, given occasion for much strife and discord by a book which he wrote on true Christianity. It cannot be denied that expressions occur in it which cannot stand together with the model of wholesome doctrine and the analogy of faith. For this reason it has also been eagerly seized upon and misused by fanatics. Yet Arndt's heart and intention were purer than his pen, inasmuch as it was not from deliberate purpose but from a lack of caution, to which mystical