# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_October 1860_S303
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Indirect Declaration by Löhe concerning His Position within the Lutheran Church.                                                    303

Therefore I propose to you that we pray, and indeed as we have already prayed in our private circles during Epiphany week, namely

1. that the Lord would make us receptive — us and all Christians, including those in the Reformed regions — to the streams of blessing which, from the beginning of Christianity until now, have unceasingly been bound up with the right use of the divine means of grace, and will remain so bound until the end of days;

2. that the movements within the territory of the Reformed Church may also, in this way, be recognized as divine: that the multitude awakened by an extraordinary way may be guided, toward the right continuation of all that is good, to recognize, seek, and learn to use the grace of the Word and the sacrament, and, in the inn of the good Samaritan, that is, in his Church, through the quiet labor of the divine ministry, be fully healed and mature to manhood in Christ Jesus;

3. that our Church too may have a share in the extraordinary graces of the Holy Spirit, if it please the Lord to grant such, and that the Spirit, who blows where he wills, may not pass us by."

V.

"It has become, through God's mercy, ever clearer and clearer to us in our circles that there is such a thing as an un-Lutheran Lutheranism, and that many zealously contend for the work and continuance of the Reformation in an ungodly way, confusing the present state of the Lutheran Church with what the Lutheran Church can be and ought to be, and thereby mistaking the calling and character of the Lutheran Church. Whoever wants to be, must become. Whoever does not remain always in the process of becoming ceases to be. The Church is comparable to a river, to whose nature it belongs to flow and to keep moving ever forward.*) The whole of Lutheran life is, in many a region, not yet ten years old; those who should have, cherished, and carried it have come, through the movement of the times, to call themselves Lutherans in some fashion, yet are so content with what they are and have that they consider it nothing other than Luther's own Lutheranism itself — indeed, more than that, a summit of all religious movement, beyond which only enthusiasts and apostates could go. They are like wayward children whom a wind out of their wandering has blown back to their father's house, but who are too lazy and sluggish**) to take possession of the father's house itself, and instead lie down, like Lazarus before the rich man's door, before the ancestral gates, and satisfy themselves with the crumbs of the house whose

*) Löhe here, and in what immediately follows, lets certain readers suppose that he is rightly polemicizing against Lutherans who wish to be personally perfect; but he plainly means those who believe that Lutheran doctrine needs no improvement. His Church is, accordingly, not like a firmly standing fortress built upon a rock, but rather — like a river! L. u. W.
**) Here Löhe plainly falls badly out of the role he otherwise likes to play. L. u. W.