# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juni 1860_S162
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

162 From the Present State of the Church.

and to rejoice in them: we do so in recognition of the significant influence which Neuendettelsau exerts on the present state of the church, when we take note of that statement of Pastor Löhe and briefly assure ourselves of its meaning and consequences.

An essay in the "Correspondenzblatt der Gesellschaft für innere Mission nach dem Sinne der lutherischen Kirche" (1859, Nos. 6–10), on "the dangers presently threatening the Lutheran Church from its own midst and from its most faithful friends," is suited to give us further information first of all about Löhe's changed position. It is not uncommon experience that pupils draw the theoretical and practical consequences from the master's teaching more quickly and more surely than the master himself. And if one recalls that some time ago a formal letter of renunciation was sent to him from Lutheran circles in North America — which had formerly been most closely bound to Löhe — on account of the doctrine of the first resurrection which he had preached, one will understand how the fact of the "threefold-shaped and threefold-split Lutheran Church of North America," with its Missouri, Buffalo, and Iowa Synods, was an essential occasion for that change of mind. The "Correspondenzblatt" believes it should point out all the more to the danger of a possible splintering and church division, since that tendency toward exclusivity is asserting itself more and more not only in America but also in Germany, and, occasioned and favored by various circumstances, threatens to become the dominant current in the Lutheran Church in Prussia and in the free formations connected with it in other countries.

One might, to be sure, become uneasy about that change of mind in the Löhean camp on seeing the mentioned article of the Correspondenzblatt begin with the statement that the great jewel and treasure which the Lord has entrusted to the Lutheran Church, as the rightful visible one before other Christian communions, is "the pure doctrine according to Scripture, the relatively purest confession of the divine, saving truth." For one might get the idea that here the first expression is being explained by the second, and that in place of the joyful certainty that the Lutheran Church confesses, in every point that it confesses, "the pure doctrine according to Scripture," a faint-hearted resignation is being substituted — that one finds in the Lutheran Church at least "the relatively purest confession of the saving truth." However, since we are assured further below that "the tendency represented by the Correspondenzblatt," with its complete assent to all the articles of faith of the Lutheran Church, does not mean to give up, or in the least impair, even the smallest truth that the Reformation brought to light, let alone the true treasures of Lutheran doctrine, the doctrine of the order of salvation and the means of grace — and this for the sake of the conviction that all these points contain eternal, irrefutable, divine truth and sure scriptural doctrine — we have no right to regard that questionable statement