# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1860_S115
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

From the Wisconsin Synod. 115

As for the personal reproaches against me in the first place, I do not
see myself called upon to defend myself against them, since I
confidently leave my justification to the faithful God, in whose name
and service I also conduct this not exactly pleasant affair. But
against this I must protest with all decisiveness: that member of the
Wisconsin Synod, in his reply, in the midst of the quarrel over my
person, both loses sight of the matter at issue himself and also draws
his readers' eyes away from it. That is indeed a convenient way of
escaping admonition and reproof. One accuses him who dares to exercise
the hardest duty of Christian love upon someone of outright fleshly
zeal, and formulates his statements in quotation marks in such a way
that they look like brash, unfounded assertions; indeed, one even
seemingly props up one's reproaches with sayings of Holy Scripture, and
meanwhile the writer and the reader forget the matter over the person,
and with the reader who is not quite exactly acquainted with the point
in dispute, the impression is all too easily produced that the "enemy"
of the Wisconsin Synod has been exposed in his lovelessness and
splinter-judging and driven from the field. That is, to be sure, a
splendid and adroit polemic, but at bottom it is without true worth.

Rather, what matters above all is how things stand with the matter
itself. And there that member of the Wisconsin Synod has first
reported, concerning the Synod of Northern Illinois, that it, according
to its constitution — that is, on paper — regards the Augsburg
Confession as its confession. But do the brethren of the Wisconsin
Synod not know how matters stand in practice in the synods of Illinois?
Do they really not know that these synods exercise no doctrinal
discipline, without which standing on the confession is nothing but
empty talk and a manifest lie? Does not that resolution of the Synod of
Northern Illinois, earlier communicated from the Observer, at which the
delegates of the Wisconsin Synod are said no longer to have been
present, still stand before all the world, its wording in the Observer
(see "Lehre und Wehre," Nov. 1859, p. 338) not yet having been declared
incorrect in any point by any side? According to that same resolution,
however, this synod expressly acknowledges that under it "there is not
complete agreement in all the lesser points of doctrine and practice,"
that it "guarantees the most complete freedom of conscience and of
word as well as of deed," and that it does not hold its members "bound
to the same doctrinal views." That is plainly enough said, and I
rightly ask: how can a synod in truth hold the Augsburg Confession as
its confession, when, like the Synod of Northern Illinois, it has no
agreement in all the lesser points of doctrine — to which, as is well
known, the doctrine of Baptism, of the Lord's Supper, of the Sabbath,
and others belong in the synods belonging to the General Synod; a synod
which, instead of binding its members by the confession, guarantees the
most complete freedom of conscience and of word; which, instead of
speaking with one voice and holding fast to one another in