# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Januar 1862_S1
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Lehre und Wehre.

Volume VIII.    January 1862.    No. 1.

Preface to the 1862 Volume.

From the very beginning it has been made a reproach — from various quarters, and again quite recently by Pastor Fengler of Löwenberg in Ehlers' "Kirchliches Zeitblatt" (1861, No. 7) — against "Lehre und Wehre," and indeed against the Missouri Synod generally, that it lacks "creative activity," that it quotes too much from the ancients and does not even present the old material in new form as its own. It seems fitting, therefore, that we should for once address this reproach somewhat more closely. In setting about doing so in the present preface, however, we are moved to it by no means by any high opinion of our own concerning the worth of our journal. No one can be more vividly convinced than we ourselves how small the service is that we render the Church by means of it. But since we ought and wish to serve the Church even in our small measure, and know no better way of doing so than the one we have followed hitherto, we consider it our duty to give an account of this, especially to our friends. We ask them, then, in forming their judgment of the manner of our past — and, so long as God wills, our future — theological activity, to give their attention particularly to the following.

We Missourians hold, for our part, not at all with the Montanist, Anabaptist, and enthusiastic tendency of our age, according to which the view has become almost universal among theologians that the Church, like a man, grows in knowledge as it grows in years, until at last, in the time immediately before the Last Day, it will have ripened to full manly maturity. Nor do we in the least share the papist idea of a gradual development of dogma, an idea that has likewise gained more and more entrance in the Protestant church of our time. Taught rather by Scripture and history, we believe with our fathers that the Church resembles the moon, having its phases (changes of light), its waning and waxing, and also its eclipses (darkenings); that it stands now in full flower, now lies buried in the dust under the rubble of human doctrines and abuses. Upon the time of Moses, when all nations must cry out concerning the Church, "Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people!" (Deuteronomy 4), there always follows also the time of Eli, when "the

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