# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_November 1862_S331
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

A Brotherly Greeting from Germany, by Fr. Brunn. 331

your doctrinal controversies with the Synod of Buffalo, with chiliasts and others, that I would rather confess freely and publicly before you and everyone, that it is precisely your decisive and faithful contending and standing up against all false doctrine that has won and gained me as your friend. It may indeed be that among you too, here and there, in the heat of controversy, a human fault has occurred in a merely human way; I myself, for that matter, was for many long years unable to reconcile myself to the sharpness with which you confronted your opponents — I believed, as many did, that I had to see in it a lack of the needed love and brotherliness, an overly harsh judging, branding as heretics, and condemning of erring brethren. I now stand toward this in such a way that, on the one hand, I readily think that human weakness and frailty may exist among you too — which, however, does not take my heart away from you or turn it against you, but which, for my part, I am gladly content to leave committed to the Lord and to His judgment; on the other hand, however, I stand entirely with you in your struggles, as in a holy fight for the purity and truth of doctrine, to which you are, for conscience's sake, holily and dearly bound, and in which it truly also holds good to wield the sword of the Spirit with full sharpness and unrelenting severity against every lie. Since I have come to know Grabau's teaching more closely and reliably from his own little tract ("The Missourian Spirit," etc.), I must regard it as a deeply entangled path of error; indeed, in many respects I can only call it a blasphemy of the truth when Grabau not only so utterly fails to recognize dear and lofty sanctities of the faith, but decries them as "Missourian spirit." This is truly something to be firmly resisted in faith, without yielding. I can therefore, together with you, beloved brethren, regard it only as the fulfillment of a holy duty that you willingly receive all the poor souls who come to you seeking help out of the bosom of the Buffalo Synod. This is a holy duty of conscience for you for as long as Grabau and his Synod publicly make themselves guilty of false doctrine — especially in as flagrant a manner as Grabau does in his own above-mentioned tract. Would to God that all the souls still caught in Grabau's nets might become sober and seek the fountain of pure doctrine as it flows freely and openly in your Synod. — No less do I approve of your stance against Pastor Löhe and all adherents of his direction in Europe and America. However blameworthy this seemed to us in Germany at first, time has, unfortunately, proven you right, in that it has shown that Pastor Löhe struck out on an un-Lutheran course, one that has brought him into manifold errors and has led him and his disciples into a decidedly false, skewed position with regard to the Lutheran church and its symbols. But this must stand firm for us as a decided Lutheran principle: that the truth, the Christian doctrine, is not ours but God's, and that we therefore have no right to remove from it a single title or letter, or to concede one to any