# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Januar 1860_S3
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Preface to the 1860 Volume.    3

"Nord-America," No. 8 of last year's volume. He writes (after having wrongly asserted that his "Nothhelfer" [helpers-in-need], at his direction, gave the impulse to found the Synod of Missouri and themselves founded it — indeed, that the relation between the work of our Synod and himself, Löhe, is "as that of the harvest to the sower, of the motion to the first impulse, of the effect to the cause") the following, among other things: "The distressing experiences which the former Stephanites had with their hierarch Stephan have made their hearts very receptive to the doctrine of Luther and of the theologians who followed him concerning the Office, which also reappears in the Symbols, especially since this doctrine not only strongly commends itself to the Christian understanding but seems quite particularly made to order for American conditions. Conversely, some among us have, through experiences of an opposite and different kind, gained an eye for another conception of Office and Church — a conception which was already present at the time of the Reformation in the Church of the Reformers, and which was recommended particularly in some parts of South Germany*) — and which, where it differs from the specifically-Lutheran and Lutheran-theological direction, seems to commend itself by a simpler adherence to Holy Scripture and antiquity and by greater truthfulness in practice. Formerly, and in her best 'sides'" (sic: times?) "the Lutheran Church for the most part knew how to bear her (?) direction, and understood how far one might demand agreement in order to have unity. But in the nineteenth century, and especially in the direction to which the leader of the Missouri Synod belongs" (she has none), "one strives after such a degree of agreement as cannot exist without the ever-continuing crumbling and dissolution of the Church. The Lutheran theology of the sixteenth, and in part of the seventeenth, century furnishes the standard for exegesis (?) and dogmatics and everything else — and where this standard refuses to apply, there peace ceases, and at least that love which gladly makes people go together ceases as well." Here Löhe points to the Synod's proceedings regarding a proclaimer of Chiliasm in its midst, and continues: "Ah, what shudders of an Inquisition come over one when one reads to what lengths the traditionally-Lutheran view drove Missouri and its pastors!**) And how has it been, in particular, for us, to observe how our very own her—

*) To establish this claim with evidence will probably prove rather difficult for the Rev. Pastor Löhe. Coinciding turns of phrase do not always prove identical views. It is chiefly where a doctrine is treated in thesis and antithesis that the decision is to be found. Duo cum dicunt idem, non est idem! [When two say the same thing, it is not the same thing.]    L. u. W.

**) So when Pastor Löhe sees church discipline practiced, he is already overcome with shudders of an Inquisition! One must forgive him this, since this kind of church discipline has not been practiced in our Church for more than a century now. To one who has respect for pure doctrine and knows the history of the Inquisition, such shudders will indeed appear as ridiculous as they are distressing. But perhaps those words belong only to a tendentious rhetoric.    L. u. W.