# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Januar 1860_S8
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

8    Preface to the 1860 Volume.

...declare that we hold ourselves aloof from the General Synod. If a Lutheran has fallen, through ignorance and God's dispensation, into the orbit of this body, it may be a question what he ought to do; but if a Lutheran here, or a Lutheran synod here, has by God's grace been kept from being swallowed up by it, then it is entirely out of the question whether he may enter into the slightest fellowship with it. The General Synod is a more powerful and more to be feared enemy of our Church than all the other sects that swarm through this land, just as the enemy within is always more dangerous than the enemy outside the walls of a well-fortified stronghold. However venomously, then, the Luth. Observer and its like-minded associates may pass judgment on our steadfast adherence to right-believing church fellowship and our flight from fellowship with manifestly false teachers, who would even take the grace out of the means of grace themselves, that makes no other impression on us and on all true Lutherans — who have not a mere mouth-and-head faith but a true faith of the heart — than it once made on Luther, when a month before his death he heard of the raging and raving of the Swiss against him. He writes, namely, under the date of January 17, 1546, thus to Jacob Probst, preacher at Bremen: "That you write how indignantly and impudently the Swiss are writing against me, and condemning me as an unhappy and most unhappy man of understanding — at that I rejoice greatly indeed. For that is what I desired; that is what I wanted to have, by that very writing with which I so greatly angered them, namely, that they should testify by their own public witness that they were my enemies. That I have now obtained, and as I have said, so I do indeed rejoice at it. I, most unhappy of all men, have enough of the blessedness of the Psalm: Blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the Sacramentarians, nor stand in the way of the Zwinglians, nor sit where the Zurichers sit. There you have it, what my opinion is." (XVII, 2634.)

The spokesman of a second opposition raised against our Synod is the Reverend Pastor Löhe. To be sure, he makes us the concession, with an honesty that is, alas, growing ever rarer nowadays, that our doctrine is that of Luther and of the theologians who followed him, and that it "also reappears in the Symbols"; whereas he, on the other hand, holds to an "other" view — for example, of Office and Church, and of certain eschatological questions — which "differs from the specifically-Lutheran and Lutheran-theological direction"; but at the same time he levels a double reproach at us: namely, that we demand a measure of agreement which, first, itself goes beyond what was demanded even in the best times of our Church, and, second, "cannot be required without an ever-continuing crumbling and dissolution of the Church."

That, now, in the first place, other conceptions of doctrine existed "already at the time of the Reformation, in the Church of the Reformers," than in