# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Mai 1860_S144
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

144 The Lutheran Church and the Union.

manner." "Predestination is indeed not the consequence, not a postulate, of his antimystical thought. The denial of the sacraments, of the power of the keys, etc., can be maintained even without it — but it is the surest ground for it, and is therefore an interest of his antimystical thought." And only now, after Zwingli has made the doctrine of predestination his own in its whole consequence, "is he able to assign faith a place in the economy of salvation, a place he earlier, while he still held to Luther, knew not what to do with; yet it is also a very subordinate place, and from it come consequences of the most astonishing kind. Faith has for him no other meaning than that through it a man obtains a sure knowledge and awareness of the greatness of his election.. It is therefore in itself not even necessary at all. God's election is not bound to faith, for a man can indeed be saved without any knowledge of it reaching him here below."

— — Herr Stahl designates it as a particular error to want to set forth both confessions as something necessary, and therefore both as equally true, out of the very idea of the Reformation: that the Lutheran was directed against Judaism, the Reformed against the paganism of the Catholic Church; or that the one had as its consequence the comfort of redemption, the other absolute dependence on God, or, according to others, unconditional submission to God's Word, as their respective special side within the whole of the Reformation.. Such a mode of construction Stahl explains from the distortion of more recent philosophy and its pantheistic presupposition that everything that exists is of God, and therefore good, rational, necessary. "The innermost antithesis of the two confessions is none other than this: that the Lutheran Church believes in the bestowal of grace through means and instruments and draws comfort from that, while the Reformed Church denies it; and this cannot be equally necessary and equally true, but can only be — either the one is truth and the other error, or else the reverse."

— — The third book discusses the question of the Union. In the first chapter the grounds for the Union are set forth and examined. These are always derived from the assumption that the distinguishing doctrines are wholly indifferent. But the argumentation is of various kinds. One kind is this: that no real antithesis exists at all, that even in these disputed doctrines there is an essential agreement. (consensus), and the contradiction is only apparent, only a difference of formulation. The general verdict which Stahl pronounces on this is that all such presentations rest on the choice of ambiguous expressions, by which one makes the other party believe there is agreement with it, while one is in fact far. removed from the same. Into this category fall the attempts made at Marburg, those of Beza, Bucer, and Melanchthon. "All attempts to present an essential consensus between Lutherans and Reformed on the distinguishing doctrines rest either on untruthfulness or on lack of clarity." Another kind of argumentation is this: that one asserts that the