# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Mai 1860_S145
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

The Lutheran Church and the Union. 145

distinguishing doctrines are merely different teaching-modes (Lehrtropen), and thus not really opposed doctrines. A third way is this: that one indeed acknowledges the distinguishing doctrines to be really opposed doctrines, but denies them the importance that could justify a separation of the church. This is done either by declaring them not fundamental, or by declaring them merely theological and not religious. Finally, there is yet another way of grounding the indifference of confessional differences: that one sets the value of union so high that, over against it, the significance of these differences, however highly one may reckon them, must nevertheless stand back.

After Stahl has demonstrated the groundlessness of these argumentations, he shows, in the three following chapters, the source of the striving for Union, and this is threefold: the interest of the Reformed, of Pietism, and of the more recent "mediating theology." The interest of the Reformed. "The Union, considered even in itself, is already a victory of Reformed doctrine over the Lutheran. For the Lutheran doctrine, in the main articles of dissent, is everywhere position, the Reformed, by contrast, negation. There: we receive the body of the Lord in the Supper, the sacraments have a real, distinctive gracious effect, the office has a particular authority. Here: we do not receive the body of the Lord in the Supper, the sacraments have no distinctive effect, the office has no particular authority. If now position and negation are declared indifferent, then, in point of thought, it is not the negation but the position that is already given up. But the Union, for the same reason, also leads in its effect to the disappearance of Lutheran doctrine. For a doctrine of faith, of which the opposite is held equally admissible and equally warranted, cannot maintain itself as faith. It is therefore asserted with full right: a church in which the Union has been carried through is a Reformed church."

Secondly, the Union is an interest of Pietism. Just as it is its nature to lay the weight more on heartfelt piety than on correct doctrine, so the confessional divergences in doctrine must appear to it of lesser importance, since an immediate connection of these with heartfelt piety does not at once present itself. That the believers of a place or a land should jointly manifest their revival in a godly walk of life is, to it, a nearer-lying goal than the preservation of the full, pure truth for Christendom. In its original, unadulterated form, Pietism now goes, in this respect, no further than to the truly well-founded brotherly recognition of the Reformed and their manifestation of it in life. A union of the churches that would set aside the recognized Lutheran truth still counts, to it, as inadmissible. This is namely the position of Spener. But with the later drift of Pietism — in that it placed Christianity ever more in feeling and sensible revival, and confined itself ever more to the single point of absorption in the wounds of Christ, to the neglect of everything else — one came to