# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Januar 1862_S31
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Church and Contemporary History. 31

I recognized clearly on the last day what I had feared from the very beginning, that the commission's task was to make an even number out of the number five, without taking away or adding to it. I hear that under Ehlers's cooperation the formation of a second synod is already under way, which a third may perhaps follow later. If that in itself, under the prevailing circumstances, is no misfortune, it is nonetheless a misfortune as soon as camps of war arise out of the synods, firing off fiery balls at one another, for which the foundries are already prepared." "Every kingdom divided against itself shall be brought to desolation, and a house divided against a house falleth." "But it becomes divided when disunity arises in doctrine. All the arts of constitution-making that one has so eagerly carried on for a series of years help nothing if one is at variance in doctrine; and all attempts to create governmental or other authorities or powers prove powerless, because one may not take the last step of transferring to them, as in the Roman church, final decisions in doctrine. That I already knew before, but it has been confirmed to me anew. Professor Kahnis, who honestly labored for peace, asked and admonished indeed that the divergent views should bear with one another. Theology, he said, is no dog that fetches on command, and therefore one must give it freedom. The left had, however, already before this urged that the very reason they had separated from the Union was that they could not bear false doctrine, and that they could therefore all the less bear it now, unless they wished afterward to condemn their own withdrawal from the Union. Now even though the present dispute may not be equated with the struggle against the Union, still the Lutheran free church in Prussia has a history, and what has been planted and shaped there works on with a certain necessity and will ultimately assert itself in this dispute too. It has least of all the task of attempting advances and new formations in doctrine; every significant attempt of that kind threatens it also with the danger of a split."

Pastor Löhe's declaration concerning the union of the Fort Wayne seminary with the one in St. Louis. Such a declaration is found in the "Kirchliche Mittheilungen aus und über Nord-America" for the month of October of last year. Pastor Löhe writes: "We will waste no word on the manner in which this was announced; nor do we wish to challenge the resolution itself, not only because the Missouri Synod may dispose of the seminary entrusted to it as its own property, without regard to our objection, but also because so few relations exist between it and us that we can scarcely hope to express our honest opinion with any success." After a historical account of the origin and continued existence of the Fort Wayne seminary, Pastor Löhe then closes as follows: "Just as at first there was an intention to unite the theological seminary with the practical (Nothhelfer) seminary, so now, after the Fort Wayne seminary has stood for fourteen years, it has been resolved to unite the practical institute with the theological one, transferring it for that purpose to St. Louis. That there is now less danger of its being swallowed up than in 1846, '47, we for our part cannot persuade ourselves. However great the will to maintain the separation may be, one could still think of grounds enough on which to maintain the probability that, under the conditions prevailing in St. Louis, the separation will collapse of itself, that probably neither seminary will remain what it has been, least of all the practical seminary. It will be hard for the same teachers to teach in a twofold, differing manner; the theologizing peculiarity of the Missouri Synod will perhaps assert itself, quite unsought, but forcefully, and so forth. Against this, however, as against every alteration of the idea of the seminary founded by us, we must protest by virtue of the founding charter. We cannot prevent the Synod from exposing itself to the danger of altering our foundation; but if in that danger it arrives at a result it did not itself intend, that will be at once a wrong and a harm. It will be a wrong, because it will be against the foundation, not merely against the founders; a harm, because, given the great extent of the Synod's territory, two seminaries will in any case, especially for the future, be more useful than one. Excessive centralization in the end works against the very center it serves. Already from what