# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Mai 1858_S137
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

137

(Submitted by Prof. Dr. Sihler.)
Some Remarks on Joining the So-Called Lutheran
General Synod, and on Church Politics and
expediency.

When the writer of this came to this country more than fourteen years ago, and gradually oriented himself concerning the local circumstances of the Lutheran church, he had, to his heartfelt sorrow, to observe, among other things, how the then-still-undivided, numerous Pennsylvania Synod — within whose extent or vicinity the spokesmen of the so-called Lutheran General Synod have their office and calling — behaved with actual indifference toward the shameful defection of that latter body from the faith and confession of the Lutheran church; for one searched in vain, in any of its synodical reports, for a forceful and decided testimony from this ecclesiastical body against the pseudo-Lutherans of the General Synod, and just as little was found, within the Pennsylvania Synod and other synods not belonging to the union of the so-called Lutheran General Synod, so much earnestness and love for the truth of God's Word and of the church's confession, and at the same time so much theological substance, as would be needed to demonstrate thoroughly, in the English language, the falsity, hollowness, and shallowness of the miserable productions of a Schmucker and a Kurtz (whom our Lord God, in his wrath, and the devil, in mockery, have made doctors of theology). Rather, the theological learning and dogmatic scholarship of these two so-called doctors — who, in rare self-sufficiency, found their life and full contentment in the supranaturalist Reinhard — seemed to impress them not a little. In sum, these manifest counterfeiters, Calvinists, Methodists, and Unionists, these base traitors and destroyers of the Lutheran church, were and remained forever the dear brethren who contributed no small part to the welfare and well-being of the precious "Lutheran Zion."

So it took no prophetic spirit at all for the writer of this to have already predicted to them, in the year 1844, in the Lutheran Church Gazette of that time, that they, since they looked on so indifferently at the anticonfessional, church-destroying endeavors of the so-called General Synod — indeed, fraternized with its spokesmen — would become its prey, as indeed actually happened a few years ago.

Between that prediction, however, and the actual joining of the Pennsylvania Synod to the pseudo-Lutheran General Synod, there lie years during which, on our side, partly in the "Lutheraner," partly in our own synodical reports, the most decided testimonies were raised, unceasingly and in many forms, for the unity and purity of Lutheran doctrine and the confessional, churchly practice founded upon it, as well as against the Calvinist errors concerning the sacraments and the false unionism and the morbid pietism and Methodism of our day, testi-