# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_September 1860_S280
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

280 A Scriptural Proof against the Union.

that it is therefore truth. But then we must recognize how true it is what God's Word says, namely that false doctrine permeates the whole body of the church, just as leaven leavens the whole lump, and just as a cancerous ulcer with its evil humors corrupts the whole blood. The Lutheran catechism, it is said, is still to be valid in church, school, and home — only not as what it actually is, a testimony of the truth over against false doctrine. For behold, if you truly regard it as such a testimony of the truth, one on which you wish to comfort yourself in life and in death; if you have learned the first petition and its explanation (Whoever teaches otherwise than God's Word teaches profanes among us the name of God. From this preserve us, dear heavenly Father!) not merely by rote memory, and pray it not merely with your lips, but if such a petition comes forth out of your innermost heart — then you must say: Yes, the Union is sin; it does what God's Word forbids; it promotes that against which I pray daily to be preserved; it makes "out of two confessions," one of which confesses false doctrine, a single "united church"; indeed, the Union joins light and darkness together!

From this, recognize how that general truth, "that light may have no fellowship with darkness," finds its application to the Union far more readily even than to the relation of the Corinthian Christians to the heathen there. For in Corinth the issue was only the appearance of a fellowship with darkness; here, through the Union, an actual church fellowship between light and darkness has really been brought about. And even if the fellowship of light with darkness in the Union were not real but a mere appearance, then, according to the correct interpretation of the above passage of Scripture and according to the application which Paul makes to the relation of the Corinthian Christians, the mere appearance would already be a sin! That the explanation of this word, "what fellowship hath light with darkness," as I have given it above, is the correct one, and that accordingly this general truth finds its application not only to the relation of Christians to the heathen but also to the relation of Christians to one another — this is proved, as already mentioned above, by the example of the Reformers. Let me cite a few individual examples. Take once the confessional writings of the Lutheran church in hand, and read through the appendix to the Smalcald Articles, where the power of the pope is dealt with. There it says at one point: "Since this, then, is so (namely, that the pope teaches false doctrine), all Christians should most diligently take care that they do not become partakers of such godless doctrine, blasphemy, and unjust cruelty, but should rather depart from the pope and his members or following as from the kingdom of Antichrist, and curse it, just as Christ commanded, Matthew 7:15: 'Beware of false prophets,'" and Paul, Titus 3:10, commands that false preachers be shunned and cursed as an abomination, and in 2 Corinthians 6:14 he says, "Be not unequally yoked together