# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_October 1862_S314
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

314 Literary Intelligence.

for him who is both — an experienced Christian and a man of learning, a connoisseur of antiquity — he can go to the source itself and hear the holy men of God speak in their own tongue!

But if we are now to say briefly what we understand by Christian freedom of faith, it is for us rather a bondservice, a service that is hard and yet free, joyful and blessed; it is for us the most complete and strictest binding to Scripture, as the one and only supreme rule and standard in all things that concern our eternal salvation. It is the freedom to be able to serve the God of our pious fathers according to the way that Scripture shows. Its watchword has been from of old: According to the Law and the Testimony! If they do not speak according to this word, it is because there is no dawn in them (Isaiah 8:20). Its essence is the most childlike piety toward Scripture; the deepest and tenderest awe and reverence, indeed fear and terror before God's Word (Psalm 119:120); a letting oneself be led and guided by this high Leader; an unceasing zeal for the doctrine of Scripture in defense and attack against all the countless enemies who seek to cast us out of this fortress; a continual sorting out and casting off of whatever is not in accordance with Scripture — and all this on the basis of persistent, faithful, and earnest reading of and searching in this book of books. To surrender oneself wholly to Scripture and let oneself be bound by it — that is true freedom of faith, and in that this book of God chains us to itself, it makes us free (John 8:32).

Published recently at the author's own expense:

Be Sober and Watch! Or: What Our Confessional Writings Teach Concerning Church, Church Government, and Church Order. Presented to his congregations for instruction and warning against false doctrine by A. Zöller, superintendent and pastor of the Lutheran church in Wollin. 8vo. 46 pp. — In a review of this pamphlet, Dr. Münkel remarks: a work accessible to the common understanding, occasioned by the fact that the seed of the church controversy (among the Prussian Lutherans) has been carried into the congregation from without. In the foundational doctrine of the church he combats a chief error which, unhappily, has eaten away like a cancer in the separated church and continues to eat away, and which, even where it has been given up in words, continues in fact to work with its evil humors and to produce Pharisaic pride of church. That error is this: that the rightly and purely teaching Lutheran church alone is the church. The error is one of the worst; it must inevitably ruin the church. It leads either backward toward Rome, or forward into endless disputes and divisions. As soon as a false doctrine, real or alleged, turns up anywhere, a division must occur, because otherwise the purely-teaching church would be lost; and everyone who has set his mind on his own doctrine or his new-found notion must build his own particular Zion-fortress in Lilliputian format, from whose battlements he looks down complacently upon the poor people who must chew straw and