# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juni 1860_S163
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

From the Present State of the Church. 163

concerning the "relatively purest confession" as anything other than an infelicitous expression.*) If one asks, then, wherein the difference between the present Löhean "direction" and that of his exclusivist friends consists, the answer one receives is that it does not want the traditional Lutheranism, as those do for whom the whole development of doctrine counts as concluded and as fixed and laid down in the symbols of the Lutheran Church, but rather a Lutheranism "which, alongside the stable, has a movable element; which corrects itself through a better, deeper, and fuller knowledge that it gains from Holy Scripture; a Lutheranism which builds further, on the ground of the achievement of the Reformation, in doctrine and life, and strives in every point toward the perfection promised to us; a Lutheranism which is ready to demonstrate its genuineness and its pure origin by showing how the differing, seemingly new results of its view of faith are more biblical and more in keeping with the spirit and character of the Lutheran Reformation than the opposite view; a Lutheranism which sets itself the task, and does not shirk the effort, of examining and testing, in light of the findings of modern theology and the changed manner of thinking and expressing one's thoughts proper to every age, what in these is objectionable and what serves the building of the Kingdom of God; a Lutheranism which, sitting in the center of Holy Scripture, unmixed and untangled with all foreign elements, strict and exclusive as one thing, nevertheless acknowledges the truth wherever it finds it, and exercises justice and mildness in judgment upon other confessions; which, alongside the palpable differences, is also conscious of the existing unity that stands above the confessions and rejoices in it with all its heart, just as, conversely, it opposes and combats the narrow, small-hearted party standpoint even of its own confession."

So runs the characterization of the "standpoint" and the "direction" which the Correspondenzblatt attributes to itself and its friends. What is new in that exposition, in the first place, is only this: that this time a warning against

*) On the contrary, we believe, one has no right to regard that questionable statement as an infelicitous expression. For if the "direction" sets up the principle that Lutheranism has, alongside the stable, a movable element which corrects itself through a better, deeper, and fuller knowledge, then the assurance that the "direction" does not intend to let even the smallest truth that the Reformation brought to light be impaired can only be understood to mean that only those truths are to be left unimpaired which the "direction" itself regards as truths, but not all those which the church of the Reformation held to be such; and the confession of the Reformation church is then not the pure one, but only the "relatively purest" among the various confessions, all of which without exception are not free of false doctrine. — Since, moreover, the "correcting element" can only die out together with Lutheranism itself, and not already with the completion of the purifying work of the Löhean "direction," things also look precarious for the truths still held fast by the latter, and the task of the man of God is then no longer to preserve what has been entrusted to him, but to correct it. L. u. W.