# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juni 1860_S165
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

From the Present State of the Church. 165

The substructure, we fear, carries quite different differences from those two whose harmlessness the author set out to demonstrate. Hence we at once meet with another canon as well. "Everything depends, in our days and in our present-day questions, on distinguishing precisely and sharply which deviation and difference in doctrine is church-dividing and which is not. It will, however, be found that no doctrine can or may be church-dividing that does not conflict with the ancient symbols, with the order of salvation, and with the Lutheran doctrine of the means of grace. This is the case with the formulation of the doctrine of church and ministry and of the last things, as we teach them." One can well see that the author here considers himself excused from the burden of proof. It will be found, he says. But what if it should not be found? And certainly, it will be found all the less, the more arbitrarily the canon is cut to fit exactly the two controversial points of doctrine that are presently at issue. But they do not even fit. Or does the author suppose that the doctrine of church and ministry, as he and his friends teach it, is so harmless and inconsequential that it makes no difference to "the order of salvation and the Lutheran doctrine of the means of grace" whether one teaches about it this way or that?

But enough of this. We are now in a position to understand why Pastor Löhe wrote his "Rosenmonate heiliger Frauen" in an apologetic tone. He "did not wish to avoid it," and indeed we scarcely meet a single one among the sixty biographies of holy women, whose names are taken up in the traditional calendars, in which the polemic against Protestant exclusivity does not recur in one form or another. We have nothing in itself against the fact that the greater breadth of mind and liberality to which the Löhean direction, as we have seen, has proceeded, asserts itself also toward the Catholic Church, even though it may seem to us that it is turned toward that church with a special preference and to a higher degree than toward other confessions. Nor are we ourselves in the least minded to want a Lutheranism that, narrow-mindedly confined to itself, is incapable of understanding the churchly past and appropriating the truth-content contained in it. But this we do indeed demand, that it be truth and not error — even if brilliant error, and "faults too great for people of our day" — that is held up as a model and for emulation by the present-day church. And we protest against this: that in a book which, for the purpose of edification, aims to set before us the works of God in His saints, fables should be told, with the excusing clause that "it can be neither difficult nor even unwelcome for us to accept a few more miracles" (p. 227). That age of naive absorption in the stories of the saints, in which one poetically produced while receiving the historical, and unconsciously mingled the two together, is past for us — we may admire those legends as products of a pious poetic disposition, but where, for edification and "to awaken the sense of discipleship" (p. 96), narratives from the churchly past