# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_M rz 1860_S82
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

82 The Present Tension among the Separated Lutherans of Prussia.

He grants that children can be born to God outside the Lutheran Church as well, even if only at the point of death. Now, what then should the dispute be about? Where there are children of God, there is also Christ, their Head; there is also a congregation of God and a church. Here Diedrich makes peculiar shifts in order to mask his threatened position. Christians may indeed be there, he says, but I do not recognize them, for I do not see the pure doctrine. The Church becomes visible only through pure doctrine and the undefiled preaching office; where that is lacking, one cannot speak of a church. We should have here, then, the peculiar case that the Church can be present somewhere, and yet, because the pure doctrine is not present along with it, the Church, too, would not be present — at least not for Diedrich. In the same way one might be permitted to say that the Fuegians and the natives of New Holland are not human beings, because pure human nature is in them greatly clouded and disfigured. But if we now grant Diedrich's view to be correct, then where does that leave the Church before Luther? The Church is present only where God's Word is taught purely and rightly according to Lutheran church doctrine. But that, in this strict sense, did not happen anywhere in the whole of Christendom before Luther, neither in the medieval Church among its most enlightened teachers, nor in the sects, whatever they may be called. All built much wood, hay, and stubble upon the one foundation, and this holds quite generally, in particular, of the public teaching and preaching office. Consequently the Church was not present before Luther, and was only fetched back down out of heaven again through Luther. But that is heresy according to Article 7 of the Augsburg Confession. If, then, the true Church was present before Luther, and in it God's Word was taught purely and rightly, it must follow that the Lutheran Church is no church at all, but an erring sect which has renounced the true Church. In that case we would be compelled, without recourse, to become Catholic. Yet Diedrich will surely have raised this objection against himself. With a single stroke he disposes of it. "Christ's Church," he says, "has, throughout the Middle Ages, been hidden beneath all these (human ordinances and errors), and has also here and there let itself be seen and heard with the pure Word, though thereafter always more or less protesting against the essence of the statutes and ceremonies." Would that Diedrich might name for us someone out of the Middle Ages who taught in a purely and undefiled Lutheran manner. I know of none, nor do I know where anyone has let himself be seen and heard doing so. In spite of this he can discover, there in the "dark Middle Ages," Christ's Church and Christians, even though that age lies several centuries behind him. Among the Reformed, by contrast, who live around him and with him and have truly not built as much wood, hay, and stubble upon the foundation as, for instance, St. Anselm and St. Bernard did, he recognizes neither church nor Christians. He thinks, to be sure, that in the Middle Ages people "still kept the goal clearly in view," which afterward fell away, at which point they became closed off. But it shall never occur to me to maintain that there are not, among the differently-believing communions, such as, with an honest mind and whole