# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1930_S31
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

of the Ev. Luth. Synodical Conference of North America. 1930. 31

versies of the seventeenth century, the term is used in a wider and in a narrower sense. Dannhauer defines it as a mixture of different religions, whereby he seems to think especially of Protestantism and Catholicism. Calov understood by syncretism especially the attempts at a union between Reformed and Lutherans without the common basis of Scripture having first been accepted. More generally Pfaff defined: "Ecclesiastical syncretism is churchly-brotherly fellowship with those who differ from us in the foundation of faith."

Unionism differs from syncretism especially in that the closed front against a common enemy is as a rule lacking, and that the ignoring of doctrinal differences is probably not quite so strongly marked and does not come so much to expression. But no essential difference can scarcely be established. Unionism is the ignoring of doctrinal differences in an outward combination with those with whom one was not previously in union. Unionism is church fellowship without confessional fellowship, or also without agreement in the understanding of confessions that one recognizes on paper. "The Union does not wish to create a new dogma as the doctrinal basis of a new confessional church," writes Meusel, "but wishes to join two churches with each other in such a way that they, without wholly merging into one another, form a fellowship on the basis of what is common and with disregard of what separates. The Union is then to express itself in communion fellowship and in fellowship of church government, and the goal of the whole is that everything that separates be more and more recognized and treated as indifferent, and that the consensus finally make the whole into a church also inwardly one."

The two isms are accordingly near relatives; for while syncretism is the cruder form of religious mixing, unionism represents a somewhat finer form of church fellowship without real confessional fellowship. Both have come to the fore strongly at times in the history of the Church. As syncretism of the grossest kind we must designate the worship of the golden calf; for the idol that Aaron made at the demand of the people was, in the opinion of the Israelites, to represent the gods who had led them out of the land of Egypt, Ex. 32:4. Similar was the case in any event with the idol that Micah had made from the hill country of Ephraim, for which he even gained a Levite as his priest, Judg. 17. It was syncretism also that induced the Alexandrian theologians, especially Clement of Alexandria, to find Christian points of contact in the writings of various Greek philosophers and in their systems, as indeed various heresies (Gnosticism, Manichaeism) are in general to be traced back to such attempts. It was a syncretistic spirit that induced Melanchthon and his colleagues to accept the Leipzig Interim, as indeed the same spirit already lurked in Melanchthon at Augsburg, where after the presentation of the Confession he let himself be so intimidated by the threatening attitude of the Romanists that for his own person he was ready to make the most far-reaching concessions. Uhlhorn writes (*Die Anfänge der deutsch-lutherischen Kirche* [The Beginnings of the German Lutheran Church], I, 63 f.): "The Interim met with the sharpest opposition among the decided Lutherans. Though many Lutheran pastors might follow Melanchthon, deceive themselves knowingly or unknowingly about the scope of the Interim, and with half-heartedness seek to save a cause in whose power of victory they no longer had any real confidence, others were so much the more firmly de-