# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juni 1860_S164
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

164 From the Present State of the Church.

warning against "splintering" is raised, and zeal is shown against "exclusivity." For the rest, although we recognize in essence those principles of the Correspondenzblatt as our own, we cannot help but declare expressions such as that "of a unity that stands above the confessions" to be disproportionate and liable to misunderstanding.*) A Lutheran does not need, in order to attain a relationship to believing members of other confessions, first to raise himself up to a unity standing above the confessions; rather it is the mark of the truth of his confession that he is able, from it and out of it, to do justice to them as well.

Yet these are only the guiding principles: we shall have to ask how they are applied in order to preserve the church from splintering in the face of the actually existing differences. The two points, so the Correspondenzblatt thinks, which might be wrongly regarded at present as church-dividing, and which are, for example, so regarded by the Missourians, are those of church and ministry and of the last things. The author of that article is very concerned to demonstrate that these two points, "as we teach them," ought not be counted among the church-dividing ones, and he takes a wide sweep in order to establish that proof. One must, he says, become clear on "what one means by 'directions,' whether and why they have a right to exist within the church, and how directions standing opposed to one another are to relate to each other." We do not wish to follow the author here in detail, but we cannot suppress our misgivings when we see the "necessity" and the "justification" of certain conflicting "directions" grounded in the statements that "it is only out of thesis and antithesis that the full light and the full truth for human knowledge first come" — "human nature is so constituted that it cannot rest until all the possibilities of error, to the right hand and to the left, have been exhausted" — "the spirit, after the opposites have gone to the utmost extreme and exhausted themselves, turns back and settles down peacefully in the blessed middle of truth." Indeed, in the "Correspondenzblatt der Gesellschaft für innere Mission nach dem Sinne der lutherischen Kirche" we would not have looked for anything of this sort. We would not have expected that "the exhaustion of all errors to the utmost extreme," and that too "in all the great doctrines," would be traced back to "a constitution of human nature" and used to establish "the necessity of the conflicting directions." Nor can we make sense of how, on these presuppositions, one can arrive, as the author of that article does, at "investigating in which points there must be unity, in which no difference may be tolerated, and in which matters a difference is permissible without prejudice to the unity and purity of doctrine."

*) The repeated effort on the part of the author to turn the errors of the standpoint of the "direction," laid bare by his own candor, into a faulty use of language is, in our opinion, a wholly futile one. L. u. W.