# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Mai 1858_S142
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

142 Some Remarks on Joining the So-Called Lutheran General Synod, Etc.

already sufficiently clear from the above, that that Synod belongs among
the "false prophets," since it suspects as popish the clear teachings of
the divine Word which the Lutheran Church, in connection with the
orthodox Church of all centuries, confesses and teaches, and puts
fanatical false doctrines in their place; in the second place, it does
not lack the sheep's clothing in this, that it nevertheless, despite such
falsification, continually cries out "the Bible! the Bible!" as though
the confession-faithful Lutherans intended thereby to put their
ecclesiastical symbols in the place of Scripture; further, that it,
partly through sweet words and splendid speeches, partly through its
pietistic over-busyness, ensnares and misleads the unlearned, while
nowhere doing anything thorough and lasting for the benefit and good of
the Church, neither for the present nor for the future — as, for
example, through the founding of orthodox training institutions for the
formation of future preachers and schoolteachers, through the
publication of an ecclesiastically sound periodical and of translations,
into the English language, of our fathers' ecclesiastically proven,
instructive, and edifying hymn-, text-, and devotional books, through the
establishment of church discipline and registration for confession and
the private pastoral care practiced along with it, through the founding
and maintenance of orthodox parish schools, through the pursuit of inner
mission in the chaste and sober spirit of the Lutheran Church — for this
spirit is wholly lacking in it here, precisely on account of its
unfaithfulness toward the church's confession and its unchurchly
dissolution and unionistic wishy-washiness; and however great a show
this Synod makes of its missionary zeal, its practice, like its
doctrine, is likewise pestilential and destructive in this field of
church life as well; for there are manifest and well-attested facts
that its emissaries there consort promiscuously with sects of every
kind, that they invite all sorts of people to the Lord's Supper without
troubling themselves in the least whether this or that one of the
invited already stands in an orderly congregational relationship and has
a duly called pastor or not, or whether they are instead under a lawful
ban — so that they make no scruple of reaching into an office not their
own, and, under the Lutheran name but against the Lutheran confession
and practice and against the Christian and churchly conscience, of
carrying on in thoroughly fanatical fashion, damaging and ruining souls.

From this, as from what was said above, it becomes, in the third place,
sufficiently clear that they, despite their sheep's clothing, insofar as
they are indeed false prophets and practice a fanatical praxis, also show
themselves to be ravening wolves; for instead of vigorously and
courageously contending, by means of the pure Lutheran doctrine of the
Gospel and the Sacraments — these sole means of grace instituted by
Christ and ordained by the Holy Spirit for the salvation of souls — and
by means of the pure doctrine connected with it, of justifying faith
without the cooperation and contribution of works, against the
work-mongering, much-divided, confusedly tangled sectarianism found
here, they instead help