# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Mai 1858_S146
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

146 Lutheran-Theological Pastors' Library.

Synod have already received. For it is impossible for anyone to love
God and his revealed, one and pure, salvation-bringing doctrine in his
written Word with his whole heart, who does not at the same time, with
his whole heart, especially hate the more dangerous falsifications and
corruptions of this doctrine, and who forms or continues Christian and
church fellowship with those who, against better instruction and proof,
cherish and nurture these corruptions.

Secondly, it likewise contends against true, God-pleasing love for
oneself, when someone, against better knowledge and conscience,
maintains brotherhood with those proven to be heterodox, thereby
engaging in an ongoing self-wounding of the soul.

Thirdly, it is against the love owed to the confession-faithful part of
the Lutheran Church, which is thereby offended and grieved, when one
continually holds together with those contrary to the confession who do
not accept correction from God's Word but persist in their errors. Here
too it is in keeping with love to testify and not to remain silent, to
depart from the falsely believing and join oneself to the orthodox; for
"love does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices in the truth."
1 Cor. 13:6.

Fourthly and finally, it is against true love for the heterodox
themselves, whom those who perceive this help, by continuing church
fellowship with them, to blunt their conscience toward the truth still
further and to strengthen them in hatred against the truth.

But to expect honor from the heterodox General Synod — to expect, that
is, that for the sake of continued testimony to the truth against its
errors, one would finally be cast out by it, as the Roman Church, say,
would act under like circumstances — that would be to expect of it too
great an energy of perverse will and fanatical blindness for its errors,
an energy which, given its unionistic doctrinal indifference and its
customary time-serving, church politics, and local expediency, it
cannot possibly possess.

Lutheran-Theological Pastors' Library.

(Continued.)

V. As we proceed further in our Pastors' Library, we now come to the
fifth compartment, in which we find placed those works that treat of
the practical theological disciplines in the narrower sense (for a
non-practical theological discipline is, since theology is a habitus
practicus, an absurdity).

1. In a Lutheran-theological library, what belongs to the discipline of
homiletics naturally stands first here. a. Scarcely, however, are we,