# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Mai 1858_S139
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Some Remarks on Joining the So-Called Lutheran General Synod, etc. 139

from today's unionism and the confessional indifference of their fallen sons, they were nevertheless, in our estimation, simply as children of an age that partly governed and partly influenced them with the spirit of a morbid pietism, not in a position to build the Lutheran church here in this country, in a strong and lastingly effective manner, truly upon the foundation of its confession.

2) The gradual extinguishing and dying-out of that pietistic Christianity — in which, after all, there was still a life of faith — into a traditional Lutheran popular faith, propagated from generation to generation, which has a certain piety toward God's Word, the catechism, and the hymnal, without, however, coinciding with justifying faith so as to live in the Word of God and to actively manifest the true Christianity of the heart also in a godly walk and character. And though it is indeed true that here in this country — owing also to an excess of phlegmatic temper, a preference for material and practical interests, and a lack of intellectual alertness — rationalism has not broken into the Lutheran church and laid it waste horribly as it has done there in Germany, yet there has, instead, been given in abundance, and there is still given in great number, starch-collared, dried-out, locally fashionable name-Lutherans among both teachers and hearers, among whom one would search in vain for so much as a single drop of Lutheran blood.

3) A pitiable and regrettable playing of favorites, and a kind of church politics and expediency, whereby, against the honor of God and the clear pronouncements of his Word, against the church's confession and the churchly practice determined and guided by it, against the conscience rightly bound by God's Word and the church's confession, indeed even against true Christian love, despite every appearance to the contrary, one enters into church fellowship with false brethren who openly deny clear and certain articles of the Christian faith and of church doctrine — indeed suspect them as papistic — while setting up in their place the fanatical errors of the Reformed, long since combated and overcome by the Lutheran church, thus holding on, against all right, to the Lutheran, that is, the orthodox name.

There one looks at the great numbers, the pietistic bustle and busy-work of the pseudo-Lutheran General Synod, and, since inwardly the light of pure doctrine is lacking, allows oneself to be so misled and taken captive by this deceptive appearance that not only does one raise no decided, manly testimony from the standpoint of Scripture and the church's confession against these loose whitewashers, and must therefore rightly be counted among the dumb dogs and blind watchmen, but whole ecclesiastical bodies are not ashamed, by entering into church fellowship and organic union with these betrayers of their mother, the orthodox Lutheran church, to strike her in the face and honestly contribute their share so that the coming generation, under certain circumstances, should fall in droves as prey to the Presbyterians or Methodists; indeed, so dreadfully is the conscience, in this quarter and that, become dulled, and so greatly are