# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_November 1862_S322
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

322 A Brotherly Greeting from Germany, by Fr. Brunn.

Germany for the churchly purposes of your Synod — this same drive also now moves me to this brotherly greeting to you, in order, out of a heart joyful and certain in faith, to confess together with you the truth of God through which we are redeemed and made free, and in this confession to enter together with you into an indissoluble and eternal bond of fellowship in the Lord.

It would lead too far afield were I to relate to you all the ways by which the Lord has led me to one and the same faith and knowledge of the truth together with you; I will only confess that I too, like many — perhaps most — in the present age, was formerly caught and entangled in manifold confusion, in crooked, perverse opinions of the age, and in ignorance of the pure doctrine of the Lutheran church. Step by step the Lord helped me out of one confusion after another; he helped me out of the churchly Union, in which I formerly stood; he also helped me out of the Löhe-ian direction, to which I had given myself with my whole soul; he helped me out of all the other remnants of earlier pietistic and subjective opinions and views, such as still cling to Lutherans today, so long and so often. The means to this has been the same for me as it was for your teachers and predecessors — the means of coming out of all the false opinions of the age and into the old, pure Lutheran doctrine, namely, the faithful and childlike, simple sitting down and learning at the feet of the great teacher and reformer of Christendom, Luther, and beside him, the old witnesses and teachers of the church. But the instrument for making me more closely acquainted with the doctrine of Luther and the old Lutheran church-doctrine has been your dear Professor Walther in St. Louis, and his excellent book, "The Voice of Our Church on the Question of Church and Ministry."

It is precisely these doctrines of church and preaching office which in the present age have become the subject of churchly and theological controversy, and in connection with which, above all, the manifold different spiritual tendencies that fill the church become manifest. Rightly grasping the visibility and invisibility of the church and setting them in their correct relation to one another — that is, first of all, the ground and root-point of the whole point at issue, in which the paths divide that one walks according to the spirit that drives the soul. — In opposition to the pietistic subjectivity and rejection of all visible orders of the church, which in earlier decades was the generally prevailing view, there seems to me to have formed the tendency that overestimates the visibility of the church and is inclined to designate the visible Lutheran church directly and exclusively as "the church," and to ascribe to it alone all the predicates that Holy Scripture states of the church as the body of Christ.

At least my own experience testifies to this — for as long as I myself still went with Löhe and others in this false direction — that it was only the reaction against an earlier pietistic ignorance of the true visible church, together with a subsequent particular fondness for it, that filled me and drove me to a one-sided overestimation of its concept and worth. Quite consistently there follows