# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Januar 1862_S21
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

The Lutheran and Missionary. 21

church, that their faith is false, that alongside good seed they also have a good measure of weeds, and that for this reason they cannot be let to preach from the pulpit. That would make them attentive to their false doctrines, and perhaps, with God's help, free them from them. That would be Lutheran candor, sincerity, and love. Instead, out of a desire to please men, so as not to hurt those men's feelings, one keeps silent about their false doctrines, which one nevertheless knows, and leaves them the pulpits — thereby giving them the impression that their false doctrines do not amount to much, that it is all the same whether one preaches Lutheran or Methodist or Baptist doctrine. Ah, it is not good when the salt loses its savor. —

Such unionistic preaching-practice is against the confession of our Church, and tears apart precisely the bond that is supposed to unite Lutherans among themselves. The 7th Article of the Augsburg Confession says: "It is enough for the true unity of the Christian Church that the gospel be preached there in harmony according to a pure understanding of it." Now if Lutherans let men preach in their congregations of whom they know that they do not proclaim the gospel in harmony according to a pure understanding of it, they thereby act against their own confession, unite themselves thereby with the false church, and tear themselves loose from their Lutheran brothers in the faith.

Furthermore, "American Lutheranism" wants to put no barrier around the communion table — that is, it lets everyone who wishes and comes, without examination of his life or his doctrine, without inquiring whether he belongs to the congregation or not, whether he stands elsewhere under church discipline or not, indeed without even knowing whether he has so much as been baptized, partake of the Holy Supper. — God, who loves order and discipline and does not want the sanctuary given to dogs, has set barriers around the communion table. He has said: "Let a man examine himself, and so let him eat of that bread, etc." Whoever cannot examine himself, either because he has learned nothing from the word of God and thus lacks the standard by which he is to examine himself, or because he has learned falsehood and consequently cannot examine himself properly, ought for the present, until better instruction, not to be admitted to the Holy Supper. That is one barrier. Further: "Let every man feed the flock committed to him." Now feeding with the body and blood of the Lord unquestionably belongs to the feeding of a soul. That, then, is a second barrier: God does not want sheep of different flocks to run together helter-skelter. For that produces a disorderly, chaotic state and harms souls. Further: "Whoever eats and drinks unworthily eats and drinks judgment to himself, in that he does not discern the Lord's body." God thus wills, once again, to set a barrier against the unworthy, because for them the Holy Supper would serve not for life but for death. — Lutheran preachers, who know that they are not lords but only "stewards of the mysteries of God," keep these barriers, set by God himself, in place, and for that reason "examine" — as the Augsburg Confession also expressly requires —