# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Februar 1858_S37
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

"Luther or Arndt!" 37

whatever one may call it) — instead of teaching in a manner true to the confession, it prefers to let its departures from the confession be interpreted symbolically. To speak further of this is not our purpose here; but it does no credit to our American "Lutheraner" that it lets Luther and Arndt walk arm in arm, as though that went without saying. It has thereby acquired, alongside its originally Reformation-minded physiognomy, another one as well: that edifying over-busyness which, if ever, must arouse misgivings precisely now — for do we not see that people like Bunsen, who have suffered shipwreck in the Christian faith, can never find enough terms of abuse for the evangelical-Lutheran Church on account of its lack of "commercial godliness" (1 Timothy 6:5)? So it grieves us that even the "Lutheraner" handles the "conjurer's sack" of the pious spirit of the age, namely Mission, without considering that the two kindred names Missa and Missio are the fruitful mothers of all churchly work-tinkering. The Mass has ruled everything, Luther complained — Mission rules everything, daily experience complains. — A superficial way of looking at things could, to be sure, quickly say that from the standpoint of the "Lutheraner" it is very easy to give the most satisfactory explanation for the points that have been censured. Yes — if only explanatory words had the power to halt or alter the course of events! Let each one see for himself how the Gospel has made its way these hundred years. Through amicable assurances and transactions, perhaps? No — through hard struggles, first with the stultification wrought by the rationalists, then with pietistic sanctimony, afterward with the abomination of union, and finally with church- and office-mongering. And everywhere the opponents were not lacking in brilliant words with which to document themselves as "brothers" of the evangelical Lutherans, loudly complaining of their unyielding temper whenever the course of events consolidated the separation of things that did not belong together. So, and not otherwise, will it also come to pass here in the matter under discussion. The as-yet-unfought contest over office and Church still conceals, for the present, the true state of affairs, but behind it there already lurks, recognizably enough, the question: Luther? or Arndt? (formulate it however one will). Its answer will be no peaceful one; the number of those who set the fearless fellow-combatant against heathenism, priestcraft, and Caesaro-papism beside the Reformer is, in both hemispheres, not small, and the personalities belonging to that number command respect; more painful and more damaging than in the struggles hitherto will be the rift which that question will cause among the confessors of the Augsburg Confession, and which it stands in no man's power to stop. It would also be anything but salutary for the future of the evangelical-Lutheran Church if that question were to remain without a thorough settlement; just as surely as it will only prove a blessing to our churchly future that it rises, purified through the rationalist, pietist, unionist, and office struggles, out of the present