# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1858_S108
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

108    Answer to a Voice from the Lutheran Church of Germany, etc.

...passes resolutions and issues commands, which reach the congregations
through the preachers, as the executive power, and are applied to the
consciences by the authority of the government, of the office! Or let me
ask you yourself, what does it mean, indeed, and can it, all things duly
considered, properly mean anything else, when, in contrast to our
genuinely Lutheran and apostolic manner of setting up the power of the
Word alone, it is asserted: that alone does not suffice; office, church
government, and congregation, constituted in harmonious order, must do
it — than that the church cannot be governed by the authority of the
Word alone, but that the authority of the church government, of the
office, must come to the aid of the powerless Word and drive it into the
consciences? But that is precisely the innermost contrast between us and
the falsely Lutheran direction of our day — a contrast that, to be
sure, amounts to nothing less than the contrast between gospel and law,
Christianity and anti-Christianity, Lutheranism and popery in whatever
form.

Believe us, beloved brother: it is the secret hatred against the sole
validity of the Word — to which one would indeed have to submit oneself
unconditionally, and thereby let go of one's own hierarchical-papistic
cravings and all the whole rubbish of externalized, materializing views
of church and ministry — it is this hatred that so embitters our
opponents against us and lets them, against their better knowledge,
revile us so, as though sheer arbitrariness ruled among us, and "Mr.
Everybody" governed, and the prerogatives of the holy preaching office
were brazenly trampled underfoot. Do not lend your ear to such
calumnies; you would do us a crying injustice, we who, to God's honor,
can indeed say that in this latest troubled time we do not grow weary of
setting up the divine power of the Word, and of continually fighting
with it against all the strongholds of the devil. But guard yourself
also against the false principles of our opponents, as against a harmful
and deadly poison. To be sure, you shrink back from most of their
consequences, and can therefore believe yourself to be one with us in
principle. But we would think ourselves to be failing against love if we
kept silent that your views still, for the most part, are rooted in
those very principles, and that you have by no means yet fully overcome
them within yourself. But the consequences do not fail to follow, even
if they should only be fully drawn by the coming generation — which may
the merciful God, in grace, for Christ's sake, prevent. Do not think
that we judge too severely of you. We would have to judge so, for
conscience's sake, on account of the conclusion of your discussion
alone. You say there that over in Germany too there are some who flatly
declare the Lutheran Church to be "the Church," the body of Christ, but
that, since these same persons guard themselves against the consequences
that follow from this, the matter seems to you to run out into dark,
confused, inwardly self-contradictory turns of phrase, in which it is
only to be regretted that one thereby departs from the manner of
speaking of the old fathers and gives occasion for confusion, but that
otherwise it is not worth the trouble to argue much about it,