# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1862_S118
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

118 How Matters Stand with the Lutheran Church of Germany in Respect to Doctrine.

rubbish. I, at least, would not have the heart to call myself a Lutheran, and would openly confess: We have all of us fallen away.

"But gently now! The case does not stand so unhappily. No one has scattered himself piecemeal into all these deviations at once; one man pays homage to this deviation, another to that one; sometimes it is several, sometimes only one. So no small number has remained, in the main, with the Lutheran doctrine, and the deviations do not occupy the broad field. But have we really thereby come one step further? All these, with their many or few deviations, wish to be Lutheran; they wish, therefore, also to have room in one and the same Lutheran church. And there we have it. All these deviations, heaped together, along with those which the progress of the theologians will later find fitting and know how to justify scientifically, lay claim to toleration within one and the same church, and wish to be asserted, each time, by their respective champions in their own place — while from several sides at once a lively contradiction is invariably raised, and one advance is fought or killed off by the next. In our present decayed territorial churches this goes on to some extent. But does one really believe that this will also go on in the future in the free churches, or that they will put up with being turned into theological schools and disputation halls? One would have to have gone quite blind from the dust of books to think so. It is no more certain that the sun will come down from heaven than that this is a thing impossible. If one is willing to tolerate such a jumble and indifference of doctrine, why then does one fight against a Union, an Alliance, and national churches? One will live to see the day when these advances, like wedges, split the tree of the church into halves, or thirds, or quarters, and when, further, the splits over church polity are added to that, there will be such a confusion as if America had been transplanted to Germany. Should one not also, for once, give thought to these considerations before expecting great things of the future? Salvation cannot come without acknowledgment of the grave harm and a turning back from the wrong path. But if I do not deceive myself, we are still very far removed from that. For the arbitrariness and confusion in doctrine is not decreasing, but increasing.

"It can, indeed, be predicted with fair certainty that scientific theology will, before very long, lose its credit. While the other sciences, the natural sciences for instance, in their steady advance deliver solid results, and win the world's respect by their true and undeniable advances, theology exhibits the most boundless confusion; and as it advances, no one rightly knows wherein the advance consists, since one man calls another's advances retreats, and the church has, from all these advances, not only no gain to show, but only strife and bruises and wounds. So it has come about that the other sciences have thrown a common bond around all educated