# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_September 1858_S277
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

From the General Synod. 277

stand to one another as lie and truth, as devil and Christ. The former is
the banner of the lie, which most magnanimously permits the truth to walk
beside it in a peace-loving union, on the sole small condition that it
cease to testify that it does not acknowledge the lie as its equal in
right; the latter, however, is the banner of the truth, which disdains to
deny its heavenly birth and to put itself on a level with the
hell-descended lie, and to enter, under any condition whatever, into a
"union" and brotherhood with it that is forbidden by God. So it stands
with the General Synod: it is thoroughly a unionistic body which, in fact,
takes a position of opposition and hostility toward the pure Lutheran
confession, toward the plain truth of Jesus Christ, and we thank the
Review for having honestly and openly declared this state of affairs
before all the world. Oh, it is only too evident that the hostility toward
what is nowadays called "strict Lutheranism" is a hostility toward the
Lord Christ and his Word itself.

But we could wish that honesty in the General Synod went a little
further still. If it is unionistic in its platform and practice — as
thoroughly unionistic as one can possibly be on earth — why does it call
itself Lutheran at all? Who gives it a right to this name? It is a
manifest fraud. But how can those who do not take the truth so very
exactly, out of "tolerance," conceal their courting of the lie at all? A
little lie does not matter, so long as the "union" is held together, so
long as a good large crowd is drawn in, including those who still cling
to the name "Lutheran." When the devil ensnares a believer, he disguises
himself as an angel of light; and when the "Union" — that blasphemous
attempt to mix truth and lie — wishes to ensnare Lutherans and draw them
into its nets, it calls itself Lutheran. At bottom the General Synod must
think little of its own platform, and have little confidence in it
itself, since it does not dare let it appear before the world in its own
true shape.

Yet the article in the Review also has a side which must gladden every
friend of the truth. One sees from it that the author breathes stormy air
and is full of anxious expectation of things to come. There is a
rumbling within the General Synod. In it too the influence of the
Lutheran movement is felt, seeking to sweep it along in its current. In
many of its best members there is a powerful pull toward "strict
Lutheranism," and if Dr. Reynolds is the author of the above article, he
himself, at least going by earlier, often-repeated public declarations,
cannot altogether resist it. He would gladly be regarded as a Lutheran
Christian who finds in the Augsburg Confession the full confession of his
faith. But why do such men not follow this pull? Their conscience must
tell them, and the Holy Spirit, given to every believer, must convince
them, that this pull toward