# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1861_S123
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Church and Contemporary Affairs. 123

abandon them, to which he conscientiously adheres? Certainly not, for if he is so easily driven from his position, then he is not worth the trouble of winning." — Ah, dear Saul, then you too were not worth the trouble of being won, for how quickly, without conferring with flesh and blood, did you let yourself be driven from your position when you saw that you did not stand upon the foundation of the Word of God! It is remarkable indeed that men who otherwise so zealously promote, extol, and almost alone acknowledge sudden conversions, hold it to be utterly unworthy to leave error suddenly and turn to the truth. Incidentally, we should like to know the doctrines held fast by the Missouri Synod which would be represented by no member whatever of the General Synod. Yet we by no means put this question because we were grieved to see ourselves so unmercifully excluded from the General Synod fraternity.

Iowa Synod. In the Correspondenzblatt of Pastor Stirner in Fürth for December of last year we read that Professor Sigmund Fritschel of the Iowa Synod delivered an address at a pastoral and social conference held at Neudettelsau, and in it expressed himself among other things as follows: "As regards its churchly position, the Iowa Synod is the bearer of a definite churchly tendency, by which it distinguishes itself equally from Missouri and from Buffalo. Both fundamentally want nothing else than a repristination of the Lutheran church of the 16th and 17th centuries, Missouri laying the emphasis upon doctrine — Buffalo upon church government, while Iowa on the contrary strives after progress on the ground of what has come into being historically. This shows itself also in the fact that the synod permits so-called chiliasm, or biblical realism" (surely a "splendid" word!), in the field of prophecy, in contrast to Missouri and Buffalo, who regard and treat it as heresy." That, then, is the peculiar character of the Iowa Synod: it wants no resurrection of a church such as arose, stood, believed, taught, confessed, lived, suffered and contended through God's most wonderful and most gracious visitation since the days of the apostles three hundred years ago; but rather "progress," and indeed a progress that shows itself chiefly in the adoption of chiliasm. O you poor Iowans! You shrink from conditions that were the superabundant answer to the thousand-year sighing and crying of the distressed, the wretched and the poor in dear Christendom (Psalm 12:6), and you boast of a progress at whose goal men already arrived three hundred years ago in Münster. May the merciful God preserve you from such a goal and open your eyes, and then you will yet thank the LORD if you begin — we do not say to attain — but only to come a little nearer to the state of the church in the 16th and 17th centuries.

The "Missionary" of Pittsburgh contains in its number of February 28 a conversation between a layman and a preacher, in which the latter wishes to cure the former of his doubts about the purity of the doctrine of our Symbols. In it the preacher says, among other things: "In the doctrines of divine revelation there are some things that we cannot comprehend; but this is no reason why we should reject them. In the sacrament of the Lord's Supper, as well as in some other matters of faith which God has not fully revealed to us (?), there are mysteries that we cannot explain. I believe the actual presence of Christ in the Holy Supper is one of those mysteries. I believe the doctrine because it appears to me clearly revealed in God's Word; and I can see nothing in it that would be unreasonable or incompatible with the reasonable faith of a true Christian." The layman answers to this: "May not bread and wine be regarded as mere commemorative representations, or as symbols of the body and blood of Christ?" The preacher continues: "Such an interpretation would not only alter the nature of the institution itself, but would in great measure destroy its effect. I hold that bread and wine are not mere outward signs of the death and sacrifice of Christ; but that, when they are received in faith" (this word is likewise set off in print in the English text) "and taken in connection with the Word and the promises of God, they have the effect of impart-