# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juni 1860_S167
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

From the Present State of the Church. 167

We consider it necessary to substantiate further, in detail, the judgment we expressed above in general. "One reads," so says the author of the "Rosenmonate" (p. 92), "despite the monotony, the life-course of every martyr of the first centuries and every path of renunciation of a monk or a nun of a later time, with renewed satisfaction. It goes without saying: what better thing could the Christians of the first centuries do and be obliged to do than fight and overcome the world outside the Church — and what more salutary thing could the Christians of a later time undertake, for themselves and for others, than to overcome the world within the Church, inwardly and outwardly? Thus both walk in the footsteps of the Lamb of God, who through renunciation, self-sacrifice, and succumbing Himself attained to eternal honor and won for us an eternal salvation. One may, if one wishes, call the monastery and monasticism accidental forms of life, as we have described it, but apart from these forms, the true Christians of our day too, including the Protestants in their territorial churches, have no other task." We ask, can there be a more confusing judgment about medieval asceticism than this equating of the God-ordained course of life and suffering of a martyr of the first centuries with the self-chosen, not infrequently God-tempting course of renunciation of a monk or a nun in the Middle Ages? Has the sixth article of the Augsburg Confession lost its validity, "that one must do good works, all manner of them, that God has commanded"? To be sure, for whoever considers the judgment on "monastery and monasticism" settled by calling them, "if one wishes," accidental forms of life, that equation will perhaps hold nothing strange. Meanwhile the evangelical Church, whose doctrine of the order of salvation Pastor Löhe himself reckons among the fundamental ones, will hold fast to its judgment, grounded on God's Word and on history, that monasticism, according to its historical record, to put it mildly, has been most closely intertwined with an injury to the sound evangelical doctrine of Law and Gospel, of faith and works, and that therefore an assertion such as the author's must be rejected as misleading and untenable.

To be sure, it seems, if we rightly interpret that "if one wishes" in connection with other statements, that even that assertion still has to be taken as a concession to Protestant notions. The author tells us (p. 13 ff.) the life of the Roman woman Paula. He tells it after having himself first approvingly mentioned the Protestant canon, "that it is no perfection to leave wife, child, and temporal calling and go into solitude." "Whomever God makes solitary, taking from him his own, letting him become unfit for his temporal calling, has a divine calling to exercise himself in the task of all things temporal; but whoever, by God's ordinance, has a family and a temporal calling, has another task, to serve the Lord in his family and in his earthly calling; here too it holds true what is written: let each remain in that to which he is called."