# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juni 1860_S176
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

176 Correspondence from Germany.

So let the reply follow in faithful transcript, and only with the omission of what might lack more general interest.

To the Evangelical-Lutheran Ministerial Conference at Fort Wayne, my dear brothers in Christ, grace and peace!

If I have again let months go by before answering your brotherly letter of August of last year, take this as a sign of the high seriousness with which I received your letter, and of the far-reaching significance it had for me, through God's grace, like your earlier one. For me it was not a matter of a superficial dispute over topical theological questions, but rather a struggle of life for me, a development touching my innermost life, of my whole ecclesiastical consciousness. I could not write to you sooner, until this struggle within myself had come to its full conclusion. And, thank God, it has! I may now confess this to the glory and praise of the divine mercy which, in part by so wondrous a path from distant America, has brought me to clarity in the doctrinal points that today are the source of such unspeakable ecclesiastical confusion. Just as in the doctrines of church and ministry, so now also on the closely related question of church government, the right understanding has dawned on me. You were indeed right, my dear brothers, when in my earlier complaints against your church constitution you saw the sole cause in my still-mistaken conception of church government. I now confess myself that, through the habituation to state-church forms that clings to us from childhood, I was afflicted with a transferring of the concepts of worldly authority onto ecclesiastical ground — though, admittedly, almost unconsciously, since I had never examined the matter more closely from a dogmatic standpoint. For me the hour that God had appointed for this had simply first to come, as has now happened. Already some time before your letter arrived last summer, I received the first impulse through Pastor Dietrich's little tract on the worth and nature of church government, which — despite Dietrich's other shortcomings in the doctrine of church and ministry — nevertheless did me the chief service of thoroughly rubbing my nose in my "blind, mad, and foolish" ideas of an "authority that has the right to rule in the ecclesiastical realm with divine authority." Then came your letter, and then the whole question began to come into contention among us closely bound pastors here, and by God's grace I, for my part, am now clear and firm also on this doctrinal point, even though I cannot yet say this of all in the nearest circle of my fellow ministers. — With thanks to God and with inward bowing and being moved before you, whom I formerly accused of error, I now make the confession that I was wholly and utterly mistaken; I withdraw all my accusations and misgivings that I expressed against you; I now confess with all my heart to the doctrine maintained by you, both concerning church and ministry, and concerning church government,