# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juli 1860_S195
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Editorial Correspondence. 195

was so moving in which our Synod in America stands. It is a jewel that elsewhere seems to have almost entirely disappeared. Here at least it is hard to find even two who stand in true unity of doctrine and faith. A certain kind of unity is indeed also found outside our Synod. But which unity, for the most part? — Here a negative one resting on indifferentism, or indifference regarding purity of doctrine, in which people are agreed only on this: that disunity in many important points is to be overlooked, and that nonetheless peace is to be kept and brotherly and ecclesiastical cooperation not to be abandoned; I mean the unity of unionism and of the so-called "open questions"; there a unity of fanaticism, of partisan zeal, and of Donatist sectarianism, which — as extremes always touch — coincides with the first in this, that it is inexorable only on those points which belong to the shibboleth of the party; here the commanded unity of a state church, which extends only so far as is needful for the outward organism to hold together; there the Roman-papist unity of the fides implicita and common submission to the final decision of a hierarch; here the unity achieved by the acceptance of ambiguous formulas, there by the recognition of so-called essential doctrines as against so-called less essential ones — which are, after all, still essential; here the unity of constitution, of ceremonies, of liturgy, there the unity of the struggle against a common enemy or of cooperation to carry out certain works. And who could name all the kinds of unity that are nothing but a phantom of the true one, and with which people nonetheless imagine they possess the latter.

How wholly different, by contrast, is that unity in which our Synod stands! As disciples of the same teachers, of a Luther and his faithful successors, we have arrived at the clear knowledge and living conviction that our dear evangelical Lutheran Church, as she has set forth her doctrine in her confessions, agrees in all points with God's Word, is the true continuation of the ancient apostolic Church — in short, is at present the only orthodox one. United among ourselves in this great principle, we are bound by a cordial, brotherly trust, so that, despite all our jealous watchfulness over our unity in doctrine and faith, we are nevertheless free from that inquisitorial spirit which so easily turns the bond of brotherhood into an oppressive iron chain; on the other hand, this mutual trust prevents us, when doctrinal differences still present among us become manifest, from being intent on concealing and glossing them over, or from declaring such points "open questions" in order to remain outwardly united and entering into mutual compromises; rather, we bring the emerging difference into the open and do not rest from seeking and searching in God's Word and in the testimonies of the Church and her teachers, from colloquy and disputation, private and public, until unity is attained even on those points where it was wanting. We are, indeed, far from making our unity dependent on a general agreement in matters that are truly