# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_October 1860_S302
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

302                                                    Indirect Declaration by Löhe concerning His Position within the Lutheran Church.

And let us also pray against all confessional frivolity, of which some boast, who yet thereby forsake the way of the holy middle just as much as those others who, over what divides, overlook the bonds of unity which God the Lord still grants us."

IV.

"It has not remained hidden from you, my dear ones, that in America, Ireland, and England mighty awakenings have taken place in recent years and are still in progress, and that at the beginning of this year (second week of January 1860), in response to an appeal from Christians in Ludiana in northwestern India, people in many regions, but especially in Ireland, England, France, and Upper Italy, have united in prayer for the continuance of the movement and its lasting power. So far as this movement may be called divine, it must nevertheless be described as extraordinary, not as ordinary. Such movements have always occurred, and one should never either have overlooked or overvalued them. In overlooking them, one also overlooks a call to thanksgiving and praise, gets no part in it, and sins through indifference toward the gifts of the Holy Spirit, who blows where he wills, and does not let himself be hindered in his blessed blowing by the fact that here and there a fanatically minded crowd of people fails to recognize and disparages his work. But in overvaluing them, one blinds oneself against the never-failing blessings of the ordinary means of grace, the Word and the sacrament.*) Just as the awakenings of which we have spoken occur chiefly within the territory of the Reformed Church, although they also reach beyond the borders of Reformed fellowships, so too the zeal in prayer for their continuance is found chiefly among such congregations as are either Reformed or have at least sprung from the Reformed Church and tradition. Now since the Reformed Church and tradition, compared with the Lutheran Church, has always been marked by too low an estimation of the ordinary means of grace, the Word and the sacrament, letting the movements of the Spirit run alongside the Word and sacrament instead of recognizing them as most intimately bound up with the Word and sacrament, it is easily explicable why the children of the Reformed tradition long so greatly for the extraordinary workings of the Holy Spirit, and why they are so very receptive to them. For the Church of the pure middle way it is, to be sure, not fitting simply to attach itself to the Reformed current, but just as little is it fitting for her to stand by wholly indifferent, as though such extraordinary movements were through and through ungodly and nothing but a disease and epidemic of souls or even of bodies.

*) The movement is godly only so far as it has its root in the ordinary means of grace. Overlooking this truth, Löhe only confuses the judgment concerning the phenomena in question. L. u. W.