# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_November 1862_S326
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

sense of truth is filled with a desire to see the right, pure doctrine demonstrated with fuller clarity and certainty than has happened up to now, and only then, in an honest doctrinal struggle, to let it come to events on the practical churchly field. With such resolves, which God grant may succeed, people parted from the Berlin conference, and so the state of affairs stands still today. But as gratifying, and certainly also as wholesome and fruitful, as the honest and earnestly-meant contending for the purity of doctrine is, and will increasingly prove to be, just as deeply distressing and lamentable are the confusions and divisions that, through these controversies, have unfortunately already arisen up to now in many Prussian Lutheran congregations. — Our Lutheran congregations in Nassau are, for the present, not at all entangled in these controversies over the Breslau synodal constitution, since, at our withdrawal from the Union in the year 1846, we did indeed join ourselves to the Prussian Lutheran church, but did not adopt its constitution, reserving to ourselves our churchly freedom in this respect. I see in this the finger of God, who even then kept us from false paths, in order to preserve us from immediate entanglement in the churchly conflicts that have now broken out, and to make it easier for us, too, in the questions touching upon them, to recognize the truth.

I now believe and confess together with you, beloved brethren, that in the doctrine of the church it must above all be held fast, as the foundation and cornerstone of right doctrine, that the church, by its essence, is nothing other than the body of Christ. But this is certain to me beyond all doubt, that to be "a member of the body of Christ" means nothing other than to belong to the Lord Christ, to be a child of God, to be saved — and all this we become and are solely through faith. Utterly crude and incomprehensible, therefore, as a contradiction of this, seems to me the assertion that the Lutheran church alone is exclusively "church," or even "body of Christ"; for that would truly mean nothing other than declaring the Lutheran church to be the sole church that saves, and consequently binding salvation not to faith alone, but to the visible Lutheran church. Far be it from us. So

entirely clear and childlike-simple does Luther's Small Catechism already seem to me to confess the truth on this point, in that it teaches: the Christian church is "the whole of Christendom on earth, which . . . is kept with Jesus Christ in the one true faith." By this, surely, all true Christians who exist on earth are meant, and certainly not in the sense as though there were true Christians only within the Lutheran church; rather, without doubt, the Catechism means to say that everywhere, in all confessions or kingdoms, cities, and islands — as the Apology so often puts it — there are still some who stand in the one true faith, just as the thief on the cross surely and infallibly belonged to this Christendom and stood in the one true faith, and had and heard the same true Gospel as we Lutherans, although it was not all the doctrines of the Gospel, in their whole extent, that he knew,