# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Januar 1861_S2
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

2   Preface to the 1861 Volume.

should be made as abundant as possible. Furthermore, care will be taken, especially for the preachers here, in view of the very varied and difficult cases arising in the course of their ministry, to place in their hands excerpts from the treasury of our church's casuistic works, and to give reliable information about the best books, old and new, for building up a Lutheran pastor's library ... We must, however, still add the remark that our Synod, in publishing this "theological journal," by no means intends to set beside the learned periodicals now circulating in Germany a similar one for America. Its purpose here is by no means to pursue new discoveries in the field of scholarship, and especially of theology, but to have an organ which shall serve above all to display and make accessible again the old teaching- and other treasures of the church, and to defend them against new so-called theological or untheological, ecclesiastical or unecclesiastical highwaymen, but also to make as generally known as possible among us whatever is a true yield of new labor in the Word of God and in the records of the history of the church for that church, and especially for the church here.

This their previous character, hereby precisely defined, "Lehre und Wehre" will also preserve in the future. The newly joining co-editor subscribes to that program with his whole heart. In his conviction too, the Lutheran Reformation was the fulfillment of the divine promise, given to the church, of an eventual great victory after long, dreadful oppression: "And then shall that Wicked be revealed, whom the Lord shall consume with the spirit of his mouth." 2 Thess. 2:8, cf. Isa. 11:4. He too recognizes in the time of the Lutheran Reformation the time in which the Christian church was visited by God with great grace. And indeed he too sees in this Reformation such a divine visitation of grace, through which the church was once more led back to apostolic purity of doctrine, and recognizes in the symbols of our church, as one of the orthodox — from the ecumenical symbols down to the Formula of Concord — the voice of the true catholic church. He too therefore holds it to be the task of our time, and hence also his own task for his part, not to revise those confessions anew under the pretext of a necessary further development of doctrine, but, recognizing the time in which we have been visited, to preserve them most conscientiously as a treasure of pure, sound doctrine entrusted to him. He too has finally become convinced that, wherever the more recent so-called strictly confessional theologians have allegedly improved the doctrine of our confession, this has always proven to be, not an improvement, but an error — and indeed an error which lays bare a fundamental difference between the faith of the improver and the faith of the Lutheran church. When, for example, Münchmeyer, in the doctrine of the church, felt compelled to declare that he must depart from the Lutheran symbols for the sake of Scripture,