# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Februar 1862_S46
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

46 The New Periodical on Us Poor Missourians.

among the Romanizing theologians? Whence this remarkable obscurity and Babylonian confusion of concepts and language in the doctrine of church and ministry, church government and church order, and so forth? Whence this strange enthusiasm for state-churchism and whatever else there may be of the sort, all of which nevertheless passes itself off as good Lutheran?

Answer: From this, that our present dear mother church in Germany, after God had given grace and broken the dominion of crude rationalism through the re-kindling of its Gospel, did not turn back to our common mother church, namely that of the Lutheran Reformation; for to that church God had, undeniably, especially in Luther's writings, granted by grace a far brighter and richer evangelical light in the knowledge of Christian doctrine than our whole present age has to show. It is therefore God's just punishment for this proud disdain and non-use of that rich evangelical light that at present so many will-o'-the-wisps flicker up in our dear German mother church and dispatch the unwary wanderers into the swamp.

Connected with this, too, is the fact that so many present-day Lutheran theologians, be they pastors or academic teachers, have no simple piety toward our symbolical books, however much display they occasionally make with them, or even abuse them as a signboard behind which to try to smuggle in their pet notions. What is lacking is simply the unfeigned assent to the very wording of their testimony, at the point where they actually confess and teach on the basis of Scripture and at the same time reject the papist and fanatical doctrine. So the manifold wavering and fickle spirits in the midst of our dear German mother church have no scruple, each according to his particular enthusiasm and preconceived opinion, in twisting, stretching, and construing by all manner of artifice the plain wording of the churchly confession, until it finally appears to the uninformed as though their pet notion were itself given churchly sanction by the confession. But if the wording of the confession is too resistant to such construing, then they resort to violent strokes and assert that it was not spoken here in a confessing manner, presenting themselves instead as further developers and expanders of the confession.

In sum, matters standing thus, we Lutherans of the Missouri Synod have accordingly judged it most advisable and salutary, not in proud conceit to despise the bright evangelical light of our true mother church, but rather to sit ourselves down at the feet of our orthodox teaching fathers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and, as their obedient sons and eager pupils, to learn from them the pure doctrine of the divine Word. And thereby, by God's grace, we obtain, the longer the more, "that precious thing," namely "the steadfast heart, which is not driven about by manifold and strange doctrines." By this means we have thus far, by grace, been kept safe — and may the merciful God further help thereto — both from the deceptive