# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_M rz 1858_S65
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Lehre und Wehre.

Volume IV.    March 1858.    No. 3.

(Submitted by Prof. Biewend.)
Where the Doctrine Is False, There Life Too Is Not Right.

The nature of the case and experience both teach this, and the conduct of the Rev. Prof. Schmucker, D. D., of Gettysburg, in a controversy which he recently had with the Rev. J. A. Brown, furnishes a striking example of it.

Prof. Schmucker had, in an older work entitled Popular Theology, and in a newer one entitled American Lutheranism Vindicated, made statements which were not only highly offensive to orthodox Christians, but which, given Prof. Schmucker's position as a professor of theology at an Evangelical Lutheran theological seminary, together with his influence otherwise, could not but fill them with indignation and grief. The Rev. J. A. Brown undertook to bear public witness against him. He intended at first to do this through the Lutheran Observer. But when its proprietors declared that "Prof. Schmucker's views were indeed so offensive that he deserved to have public attention drawn to them," yet that they did not wish to have such a discussion in their paper, he then turned to the Evangelical Review, and its editors, "knowing that the author of American Lutheranism had frequently been charged with errors in the doctrine of original sin and justification," took up his article in the July issue of that paper of the previous year.

In this article Prof. Schmucker is confronted, among other things, with the following.

That he says: "since regeneration does not kill the natural corruption, or the innate sinful inclinations of the Christian, but only holds them in check (for this remains in him even after conversion), it must consist chiefly in a transformation of the increased inclination toward sin that comes from acting, or of the preponderance of sinful habits which are formed through free consent to our natural corruption, after we have reached the years of moral accountability." On this Mr. Brown remarks that, according to this theory, the regenerate soul can still be "enmity against God."