# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_August 1861_S231
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

What Is Reported of Us, True and False. 231

of Christ to judgment can take place any day, today or tomorrow, since
their thousand-year kingdom, which they posit as still future, has not yet
come. But Christ maintains in clear, express words — in which He at the same time locks up the parable of the ten virgins, Matthew
25:13 — that His judicial return is to be expected on every day and at every hour.

That, then, would be the true thing that has been said of our synod abroad:
that it, like Pastor Münkel and, one hopes, this and that simple
Lutheran here and there on both sides of the water, hates chiliasm from the heart and
combats it. Now follows what is erroneous and false.

Last year, namely, Prof. S. Fritschel (from the Wartburg Seminary
of the Iowa Synod) set out on a journey to Germany and other
parts of Lutheran Europe in order to collect charitable contributions for his seminary. For it seems that the father of this institution, Pastor
Löhe, either no longer has the same means, or now has a somewhat stepfatherly
disposition toward this child of his — perhaps because its guardians,
although otherwise very obedient sons of their dear father at Neudettelsau and most diligently submissive to his sayings (for how
could such a man err?), yet have a modest scruple about loading upon their congregations
his church order, drawn up for their congregations behind the writing desk and consisting of no fewer than about 90
paragraphs, from A to Z.
In sum, this much is certain: the accustomed sources of money in Bavaria
now seem to flow more sparingly; and the congregations of the Iowa Synod
are either still too few in number, or too poor, or too ungrateful,
to maintain their school. The most likely thing, however, is that
our Lord God has no particular pleasure in the separate position of the
Iowa Synod, which in fact owes its origin to the circumstance
that its members, as obedient instruments of their paternal ruler, were to realize and
put into practice Löhe's churchly ideas on American soil.

On this collecting journey, then, Prof. Fritschel has also come forward
as an author and has sent in to the Dorpat journal an essay
"on the building of the Lutheran church in the Northwest of the United States
of North America." In it the synods of
Missouri and Buffalo are presented as particular master builders at this construction;
and both first receive praise upon praise for their bravery against the
Union [the Prussian church union], for their burning zeal for the preservation of the Lutheran
confession, for their churchly faithfulness and decision and their
unbending firmness and endurance, and so forth. In this appreciative
love the son of Löhe is not to be mistaken, only that he has not yet properly learned the master's trick;
for the latter knows how, in the midst of
protestations of peace and while stroking with the one hand,
to deal out concealed side blows with the other. After this
acknowledgment (which admittedly gave Pastor Grabau and company something of a