# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_September 1860_S283
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Scribes Should Not Write Unjust Judgments. 283

that history is not thrown back upon the past, but that the unceasing becoming within it is recognized, and it is truly religious that a limit is not set arbitrarily, by the divine guidance, at the earlier formations, as though at its unsurpassable work, but that the new, future shaping is received from it in subordinating devotion."*) Though the Lutheran Church may build herself up in strict continuity (that is, steady connection) with her historical past, — the acknowledgment of weaknesses and errors within it should not, for all that, hold her back, and hence should not hold her back either from building further on the old foundation and carrying out the God-willed progress indicated by development itself — a progress to which I certainly also reckon the recognition of the overstraining of the antithesis to the evangelical sister church."—

We should like to permit ourselves only a few modest remarks and questions concerning these words. To what purpose, and why, the frightening expressions: "repristination (restoration) of the past, hide and hair"? That the Lutheran Church goes back to her confession, and in particular also to the Formula of Concord, is necessary, and to this she has a good right. And in doing so it is her duty to become properly conscious again of her whole confession. Is that, then, also a man — or is there a likeness of a man — if one, as Jean Paul says, holds up to someone a little piece of skin, a few tufts of hair, and a few fingernails, and then says: that is a man? A man is a whole, and the Lutheran confession is something whole. In this connection one may, of course, have objections to raise against individual teachers — against Flacius, Amsdorf, Calov, and others — although they, too, knew better what the Lutheran Church was than people know today. — And what, then, is meant by this "Judaizing particularism"? To this we say: by the Law the Jewish Church was set apart from all other peoples, and the Lutheran Church is set apart by her confession. With Alliance-trifles we simply cannot have anything to do — what have they ever accomplished? Nor can we have anything to do with "new, future shapings in subordinating devotion," even should a Stahl speak of it. We should run the risk of being referred to Bunsen's airy church "of the future." For such hopes—

*) We much-maligned Lutherans recognize, on the contrary, precisely therein God's guidance — namely, that, having received grace, we are permitted, as members of the renewed Church, to repristinate the Gospel, which does not become something different from moment to moment but is eternal and unchangeable, even as he is whose word it is, over against "the philosophy and vain deceit after the tradition of men and after the rudiments of the world" — and that, instead of subordinating ourselves in surrender to the spirit of the age of the moment as to a moment of the unceasing becoming of history to be religiously revered, we are permitted rather, in accordance with God's revealed will and command, throughout our whole life to "become followers of them who through faith and patience inherit the promises" (though it were even in ancient times). That, in truth, cannot for one moment unsettle us in the grace we have received, when Tholuck gives us to understand that our endeavor cannot be held by the repristinated Heraclitean wisdom of Herr Stahl to be either truly historical or truly religious! L. u. W.