# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Februar 1860_S33
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Lehre und Wehre. [Doctrine and Defense.]

Volume VI.    February 1860.    No. 1.

Preface to the Volume of 1860.

(Continuation and Conclusion.)

Or would Pastor Löhe perhaps be speaking of the time after the adoption of
the Formula of Concord when he writes: "Formerly, and especially in her
best times, the Lutheran Church knew how to bear her various tendencies
and understood how far one might demand agreement in order to have
unity"? — This can hardly be assumed. For it was precisely from that time
onward that, in our Church, the oath to the symbolical books required of
all officeholders became ever more distinct, and the doctrinal discipline
founded upon it ever stricter.*) As for that oath, we refer to a report on
this subject which our Synod of the Western District adopted in the year
1858 and made public both in its proceedings, in the "Lutheraner," and by
means of a special pamphlet. As for the doctrinal discipline exercised in
our Church after the adoption of the Formula of Concord, we will in what
follows call to mind only a few examples out of many.

When Samuel Huber, the learned and gifted Swiss theologian who had
gone over from the Reformed to the Lutheran Church (chiefly on account
of the Calvinistic doctrine of predestination), became professor of
theology at Wittenberg in the year 1592, he came forward ever more
plainly with the teaching — already voiced while he was still in Tübingen
— of a universal election of all men, as well as of a universal
regeneration of all the baptized and a universal justification of all the
redeemed; and indeed with the pretension that all these doctrines could
well be reconciled with the symbols of our Church, even with the Formula
of Concord. His colleagues, Polycarp Leyser, Aegidius Hunnius, and
Salomon Gesner, admonished him, but could move him only to abandon
the assertion of the latter two doctrines. It was granted to him that, if by
a universal election he meant only the universal love of God, that opinion
was not to be rejected; but that the

*) The brief reprieve which the Crypto-Calvinists in the Electorate of Saxony
again obtained after the death of the beloved Elector Augustus, under Christian I,
from 1586 to 1591, we need hardly take into account here.