# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_November 1858_S345
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Lutheran-Theological Pastor's Library. 345

and the Augsburg Confession as its confession — very well then! let it prove this by its deeds. We hereby call upon it publicly to reject the false doctrines concerning the Lord's Supper, concerning the election of grace, concerning the Sabbath, concerning chiliasm, in accordance with the Augsburg Confession, and to declare them errors that contradict God's Word and divide the Church, which have no right in the Lutheran Church and are therefore not to be tolerated — but honestly and without qualification, not merely in the manner of, "I suppose that I am of a different opinion," but definitely and clearly, as befits a Lutheran; and when the General Synod then declares that, by virtue of his membership in it, he is entitled to do so, then I will retract and take back my statement that the General Synod is unionistic. I know well that the Herr Doctor will not do this, for several reasons. But this is nonetheless an irrefutable, actual proof of my assertion.

Finally, as regards the letter of the leading men of the General Synod of November 10, 1845, it is true that it did not go out officially from the General Synod, but it was signed by its professor of theology, by its editor, and by other influential men within it, and was never disavowed by it. The spirit that expresses itself in this letter still lives today in a part of the General Synod, as the "Definite Platform" shows, and it has not yet laid down any decided public testimony against it.

Therefore the General Synod is nevermore a "true daughter" of the German Lutheran Church, but has fallen away from the confession of our Church and denies the pure truth of God.

So it remains as I have written. Apart from the conjecture — entirely irrelevant to the matter — concerning the author, I stand by every word in my essay in the September number. This testimony, grounded on God's Word, against the unionistic abominations of the General Synod, remains standing before God and the Church.

                              Schick.

Lutheran-Theological Pastor's Library.

(Continuation.)
Although casuistry is as a rule regarded as the last part of ethics*), we nevertheless subordinate it to pastoral theology, since it is precisely

*) So Harless, in his theological encyclopedia, writes on p. 42: "Casuistry can only be conceived of as an unprincipled fragmenting of the last part of ethics (the expressions of the Christian life) into the fiction of individual cases and of the ethical reasoning attached to them."