# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_M rz 1858_S73
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

On the Divisions in the Lutheran Congregations Here. 73

reach into one another in confusion with their efforts; so it often happens that in one place there are various Lutheran congregations, each belonging as a member to a different Lutheran synod, whose members nevertheless all live intermingled among one another, so that every kind of evil partisanship and incitement is given free rein, and when — as also very often happens — the discontented of one congregation are, without further ado, taken in by another and admitted to the Holy Sacrament, that is plainly a wholly ruinous disorder, utterly displeasing to God, whereby many souls, confirmed in their impenitence, are spiritually murdered, the Lutheran Church destroys herself, and becomes a mockery to the world. —

Before we seek to recognize more closely the great sin of these divisions and separations, we wish, in order to forestall possible and obvious misunderstandings, first to treat of the commendable divisions and of the separations commanded by God. For it is just as sinful to unite what God has separated as it is to separate what God has united. And it is, alas, only too true that our Lutheran Church here also still suffers greatly from false unions and from an indifferentism that dishonors God's Word and truth. The Church of Christ, which lets herself be ruled by the Spirit of Jesus, her King, inexorably separates and divides truth from falsehood, for Christ and Belial simply have nothing whatever in common with one another. The true Church seeks with all fervor and cultivates with all faithfulness brotherly union and fellowship, but never at the cost of her union with the Lord, at the cost of the truth, of the Word of God; for she knows that such unions are displeasing to God, mere sham bonds lacking inner truth, whitewashed tombs full of dead men's bones within. — Let us hear the Word of God:

Romans 16:17-18: "Now I beseech you, brethren, mark them which cause divisions and offenses contrary to the doctrine which ye have learned, and avoid them. For they that are such serve not our Lord Jesus Christ, but their own belly; and by good words and fair speeches deceive the hearts of the simple."

According to this it is God's will that the Lutherans, who hold the true doctrine of the Word of God, should separate, that they should turn away from those who wish to press false doctrine alongside the doctrine which they have learned and which the fathers have confessed in the confessional writings as the sole true doctrine of Holy Scripture — so that it is not the Lutherans but those who hold the false doctrine who thereby cause "division and offense." "Avoid them," then, the holy apostle Paul calls to the Lutherans in the "united" congregations, where alongside Lutheran doctrine the Reformed doctrine is also supposed to hold validity, or in the congregations which dishonestly call themselves "Lutheran" but which, in reality and in the eyes of God — who is not deceived by fine-sounding names — are merely unionist, in that the Reformed and unionists in the "Lutheran" congregations