# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_October 1860_S307
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Indirect Declaration by Löhe concerning His Position within the Lutheran Church.                                                    307

...nothing was symbolically established from an earlier time.*) The result is that instead of unity, all the greater disunity arises, and that the church falls apart into parties, because it confused symbol and theology, and did not recognize how much for unity depends on giving due weight to manifoldness, to freedom, indeed to weakness. Let us pray, dear brethren, that the children of God may bear with one another, go before one another in peace and wait for one another in peace, not demand too much of one another, learn from one another peaceably, grow wise toward one another mutually and purify themselves, and that thus, through the unavoidable tendencies, the gathering of the waters may be kept from putrefaction, that the church may go the way of perfection without mutual slander, and that out of the imperfection which the tendencies bring forth, advancement toward true unity may be gained."

X.

"We too pursue a tendency: our whole intent is directed toward making conformity to Scripture, in all questions of doctrine and of life, our supreme principle, and toward exercising, against every phenomenon in church life, the justice that flows from that supreme principle. One may well say to us that the whole church has this supreme principle; and what could we object to such an assertion? A tendency within the church would cease to be a mere tendency if its supreme principles did not agree with the church. The difference between us and others therefore consists only in the different application which we make of the common principle. Whereas our brethren are so often satisfied with everything the Reformation has brought, and dissatisfied with everything found among other confessions, we venture, in applying our supreme principle, to examine the Reformation and its church as well, to confess weaknesses and defects still present and, if it must be, to attack them;**) and equally to confess without evasion when something is found among other confessions in which one must grant them to be right, if our supreme principle is to be practiced without prejudice. On the path of our own inquiry we have, thank God, come to recognize all the symbolical decisions of the Lutheran Church as conformable to Scripture, and therefore we cling to them. Likewise we also recognize that the distinguishing doctrines of other confessions from the sym—

*) Such people are unknown to us, for the questions now burning, which one is pleased to call open, have long since been answered in the symbols. Moreover, it would be perfectly in order if one also endeavored to establish unity in that concerning which "nothing was symbolically established from an earlier time." Otherwise the symbols would already have to contain all divine truths, and one would never be permitted, through ever-new symbols, to have sought to preserve the sorely tried unity of faith and confession. L. u. W.
**) Löhe at least deserves our thanks for this much, that he confesses without concealment the rift into which he has fallen with our church. L. u. W.