# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1930_S32
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

32 Proceedings of the thirty-second convention

termined to sacrifice everything for the pure Gospel. In their circles Melanchthon's reputation received a hard blow; even many of his former friends renounced him. Brenz wrote to him that it was a chimera to fuse evangelical doctrine, popery and Interim into one. Corvinus, who had always been anxious about Melanchthon's faintheartedness, whom he nevertheless revered in the highest degree, broke out, deeply moved, in the words: 'Melanchthon's yielding is the ruin of the Church.' He too, with a number of clergymen, especially those in Hanover and Göttingen, addressed an admonishing letter to Melanchthon, to return to the former truth. In wide circles of the Lutherans in North and South Germany the confidence in Luther's co-worker had fallen away. His letter to Carlowitz, which was spread everywhere in copies by the Roman side, and his cool reply to the Hamburgers, aroused downright bitterness against him."

A syncretistic spirit is it also, however, which reveals itself especially in more recent times in every field of church work. The unhappy theory of evolution makes itself apparent also in the field of the philosophy of religion and of comparative religion. Because one believes in a development of religion from the first signs of awe in the presence of the incomprehensible to monotheism and to Christianity, one wishes also to put all religions on one level. The thought that Christianity is an absolute religion of revelation is incomprehensible to the modern historians of religion. The most outspoken among them take Lao-tse, Confucius, Gautama Buddha, Zoroaster, Aakhnaton [as printed], Mohammed, Socrates, Isaiah, Paul together with Jesus Christ into their pantheon as "Saviors of Mankind." (Cf. Van Buskirk, *Saviors of Mankind*.) Even with men who let themselves be called Lutheran theologians we find that they build their dogmatic lectures on the psychology of religion and on comparative religious science instead of wholly alone on the revealed and infallible Word of God. Quite generally false gods and founders of false religions are recognized as having a right to exist, indeed even as having equal rights with the one true God of Scripture and our one Savior Jesus Christ. A sign of our syncretistic age are so-called Good-will Sundays, such as the Baptists of St. Louis set for the 16th of March, on which a peaceful discussion was to take place between them and the Jews. An equally disquieting sign of the times are the interchurch conferences or "seminars" between Jews, Catholics and Protestants, such as was arranged in May in St. Louis. One is in many cases no longer at all aware of the differences between the various religions, if these still existed up to now, or one simply sets them aside in a lazy and false love of peace, without considering that one thereby undermines the foundation of Christianity.

The same charge, however, we must also bring against unionism, as it shows itself especially in the efforts at union between Reformed and Lutherans, between the individual Reformed bodies, and between Lutherans of different confession and different doctrine. Such efforts we find already under the Hohenzollern John Sigismund (1572-1619) and then especially under the Great Elector, by whom Paul Gerhardt was displaced through the decree of 1662 (made sharper in 1664). Especially prominent, however, were the attempts at union under Frederick Wil-