# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Mai 1858_S143
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Some Remarks on Joining the So-Called Lutheran General Synod, Etc. 143

still more, through their denial of the pure Lutheran doctrine of the
sacraments and through confessing the fanatical false doctrine, strengthen
this church-destroying malady; for they too honestly do their part in
this, that the poor souls, dearly bought by Christ's blood, are driven
away from the firm and unchangeable promises and pledges of God, given
solely for the sake of Christ and his merit — from the forgiveness of
sins, life, and salvation which he offers in his Gospel to adults and in
Baptism to little children, and which, through the faith kindled by both
means of grace, he imparts, applies, and seals to great and small alike,
and which he also blessedly preserves through the Gospel and the holy
Supper by the power of faith — I say, these false Lutherans honestly do
their part in this, driving Christ's sheep away from those treasures of
grace in these means of grace, which are to be obtained and kept solely
through the faith kindled by the Gospel, and driving them instead into a
legalistic, vain, self-satisfied, restless, over-busy, unionistic
work-righteousness and into a kind of pietistic sanctification which is
by no means the outflow of evangelical godliness from the spring of
justifying faith that wells up in the heart out of the Gospel and pours
forth streams of living water both from the pulpit and otherwise, in
church and state, house and school, filling all manner of jugs and little
jugs.

Hence it follows, consistently, that through the falsification of the
doctrine of the means of grace and the clouding of the evangelical
doctrine of justifying faith, the so-called Lutheran General Synod is
able, on the whole, neither to produce and raise sound, sober,
Bible-grounded, confession-faithful, orthodox and orthodox and truly
active-in-love Christians, nor to comfort, evangelically and lastingly,
any conscience terrified and assailed by anguish of conscience, by the
curse of the Law, and by the accusation of the devil.

Hence it further follows, no less consistently, that this Synod
necessarily helps to undermine the Lutheran Church of the future,
particularly in the English language, in that it strengthens the
doctrinal indifferentism and, accordingly, the unionism of our day that
is contrary to Scripture and confession — and, foreseeably, unless the
dear Last Day, which God in his grace grant, comes sooner, it later
prepares a rich meal for the Roman Antichrist in their children or
children's children.—

2) But is joining the pseudo-Lutheran so-called General Synod against
the church's confession and the churchly practice thereby determined and
guided.

For it lies in the very nature of the orthodox, that is, Lutheran
confession grounded on God's Word as it reads, that it — just as the eye
can suffer no speck of dust and the skin no splinter — can suffer nothing
foreign, that is, nothing contrary to Scripture, within itself, but must
rather expel it; and from this arose the great and constant confessional
struggle in