# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Mai 1858_S138
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

138 Some Remarks on Joining the So-Called Lutheran General Synod, etc.

-monies raised unceasingly and in many forms. And yet, although this our testimony — which certainly, in both tone and expression, always maintained an objective bearing, even where it was raised against persons as representatives of the false direction — served not only for a deeper grounding and a stronger establishment in wholesome doctrine among our own people, but also, outwardly, here and there, helped to lay in this or that congregation, and in individual Lutherans who were eager for the truth, a foundation of sound understanding, and to awaken and nourish a sense for the Scripture-faithful confession of the Lutheran church: yet those and other synods in the East and West, who are for the most part still of German tongue, have paid so little heed to it and taken it so little to heart that they have instead, in active contradiction to it and against the Augsburg Confession and Luther's two catechisms, joined themselves as members to that so-called General Synod, fallen away from the faith of the church.

If we now ask after the grounds of this sad and lamentable phenomenon, this manner of acting contrary to Scripture and confession, they are, in our judgment, the following:

1) The lack, from the beginning, of a confessional grounding for the Lutheran German church of this country; for however faithful and zealous the servants of God were who first came over from Germany more than a hundred years ago, they nevertheless stemmed from a school and belonged to a movement in which the church's confession was not the shaping, guiding, and directing power, as it had been at the time of the Reformation and on beyond the middle of the seventeenth century; rather, at that time the legalistic, "work-righteous," pietistic spirit that had gone out especially from Halle — which, in combating a moribund orthodoxism (for orthodoxy itself is always alive and vigorous), strayed off to the other extreme — had gained the upper hand in Germany; and although this spirit showed itself decidedly hostile to the church's confession only among fanatical legalists and lawbound sanctification-mongers, it nevertheless undeniably exerted, even upon the sincere and believing sons of that age who had experienced the doctrine of justification in their own hearts, a distracting and weakening influence, in that it hindered them from clearly and thoroughly recognizing the norming and forming power of this doctrine within the church's confession, and that confession's foundational and guiding power for all churchly action.

Their heart's and conscience's relation to the church's confession was, therefore, more that of a historical piety than that of a power living, binding them to the church, taking root in their hearts, and bearing and guiding their whole official and churchly conduct.

To these men, then, the fathers of the Lutheran church here in America seem to us, on the whole, to belong; and however faithful, zealous, self-denying servants of the Word they may also have been — indeed, however far removed they certainly stood