# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Mai 1858_S144
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

of the Church of Christ from the time of the apostles onward, against
which Satan sent a whole host of seductive spirits and destructive false
teachers into the field, down to our own feeble, latter, and troubled
age, in which the liar from the beginning and father of lies again
disguises himself as an angel of light, and seeks either, through the
deceitful illusion and loose juggling of today's church union, to weaken
and blunt the wholesome sharpness and precision of the orthodox, that is
Lutheran, confession, or, through Romanizing interpolation, to defile
it, or, through fanatical filth, as in the so-called General Synod, to
falsify it.

Now it holds for everyone who wishes to be an orthodox and
confession-faithful Christian, that is, a Lutheran, that he should not
only refrain from entering into church fellowship with this
pseudo-Lutheran body — for otherwise he would indeed also be professing
its errors and falsifications and making himself a partaker of its sins
— but should rather fight the good fight of faith and confession against
it, and in doing so let himself be confounded neither by its numbers,
nor by its standing before the world, nor by its unhealthy, pietistic,
unionistic over-busyness and work-righteousness.

3) Does joining the so-called Lutheran General Synod also go against
the conscience rightly held captive by God's Word in the confession.

For whoever recognizes that a church body, especially in important
articles of the Christian faith, propagates false, that is, unscriptural
and anti-confessional, doctrine, and stubbornly holds fast to it,
defends it, and spreads it despite every demonstration to the contrary,
and suspects the pure doctrine as popish, cannot, with a good or even an
erring conscience, join it merely out of some customary, much-practiced
church politics and expediency.

And whoever, having fallen into such a body out of ignorance or lack of
clarity and want of confessional decisiveness, afterward recognizes its
otherwise teaching and doings and raises fruitless protest against them,
cannot remain in it with a good conscience, but is rather bound in his
conscience to depart from it and to testify against it.

But how — so this or that one of these latter might perhaps say — is one
to depart at once even when, within the erring church body, in this
person or that, the better impulse is stirring and the churchly and
confessional conscience is beginning to awaken in them, though their
perception is still weak? Is one, then, in leaving the General Synod,
also to abandon these persons, and give occasion for them perhaps to be
beguiled and ensnared again through the influence of influential
spokesmen? Would that be truth in love and love in truth?

To this let the answer be given: insofar as, especially through devout
and diligent study of the symbolical books of our Church, the perception