# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Februar 1860_S40
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

40 Preface to the Volume of 1860.

Spener writes concerning this in his Theological Reflections: "Prätorius
himself also recanted some things of this kind in his own time, which
ought to serve, not to his disgrace and as grounds for rejecting his
writings, but rather, as with Augustine, as testimony to his sincerity.
Nevertheless it also serves as a notice to his readers, to view everything
with caution and to examine it first." (I, 164.)
These examples, which could still be multiplied with a great many other
similar ones, may suffice to show how the Lutheran Church, "especially
in her best times, knew how to bear her various tendencies, and
understood how far one might demand agreement in order to have
unity." We think it is clear from this that our Synod, so far as doctrinal
discipline is concerned, truly walks by God's grace in the footsteps of
our Church in her best times. We do not deny, as already noted, that
later, with the unstoppable inroads of Pietism, and still later of
Moralism and Rationalism, and of the Unionism resulting from both,
into our Church, all doctrinal discipline gradually, in part, ceased, and,
in part, turned directly against pure Lutheran doctrine; but certainly no
one will call this period the best time of our Church, since it has rather
been, and to a great extent still is, the period of her deepest decline. Or
does one perhaps wish to point to certain peculiar opinions which a few
of our older theologians here and there expressed on certain points
without being challenged for it? Then we would point out that such
peculiar utterances, found here and there, betrayed on their part no
deliberate pursuit of a particular "tendency," but only an easily
forgivable, incidental weakness. Indeed, we readily grant even this, that
the greatest Lutheran theologians of the seventeenth century, on some
points, evidently without themselves noticing it, did not remain
perfectly true to the pattern of the Formula of Concord; we recall here
only the doctrine of the Sabbath. But we do not doubt for a moment that
they would have retracted, along with Augustine, had their unconscious
deviations been clearly demonstrated to them. What was lacking,
precisely in the seventeenth century, were such watchmen as could, or
would, in all humility remind even their own fathers of a possible fault.
That those theologians could, on a few points, deviate without being
called to account for it, therefore had its ground not in the fact that
people then understood, in order to have unity, how far one might
demand agreement, but rather because those who deviated were the
leading lights of their age, and the time of the Luthers and
Chemnitzes*) — who had so sharp an eye that they could themselves be
the leaders of leaders — was past.

Yet Pastor Löhe charges our Synod with demanding a measure of
agreement which not only itself goes beyond what was required in the

*) It is well known that, for example, Jacob Andreae was corrected by Chemnitz
on several points and instructed better, and that the former gladly accepted this.
Cf. V. E. Löscher's detailed Historia motuum, II, pp. 240, 245.