# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_December 1862_S370
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

370 Is Doctrine or Life More Important for the Well-Being and Salvation of the Church?

Council, obstinately refused the purification of doctrine according to
God's Word, but instead, quite as the modern view also demands,
undertook only a purification of life and of practice on the basis of a
popish doctrine leavened through with error. What success, now, has this
direction of churchly activity had? — That even now the portion of
Christendom that acknowledges the Tridentine Council, so far as it lies
under the rule of the Roman Church there prevailing, forfeits the comfort
of reconciliation through the blood of Christ and lies captive in the
idolatry of dead works. Considering this dreadful fact, should one think it
possible that, in the midst of the Lutheran Church, which stands in the
full blessing of purified doctrine, the demand should be raised that one
should put the bright, shining example of the Reformers out of sight and
imitate the Tridentine Council? God grant, in his grace, to look upon it! —
From the history of our own Church, too, we have in Pietism an example
of what consequences the exaltation of life above doctrine has. To be
sure, it had a beneficial influence on individual circles within the
Lutheran Church, in that Spener, Francke, and their associates pressed
with such decisiveness for repentance and faith among individuals, over
against those who, through a merely external esteem for pure doctrine,
had in many cases forfeited their inner life of faith; but in this they erred,
that they did not watch over pure doctrine with equal decisiveness, but
rather, as forerunners of modern Christians, declared it to be more or less
a matter of indifference and the strife over it reprehensible. This soon had
the consequence that errors which at first seemed slight, and then grew
ever grosser, broke in upon the circles they influenced, and thus the way
was broken open for Rationalism, which at last, at Halle, united with
Pietism into a single stream. So Pietism may well have had a value for
individuals, but for the Church as a whole it has, in part, remained
without any right effect, and in part has redounded to its ruin — precisely
because, against Scripture and against the example of the Reformation, it
did not, before all else, hold pure doctrine in high esteem. —

But just as Pietism, in its indifference regarding doctrine, was
increasingly influenced by the Deism that ruled in its day, and was at last
swallowed up by it, so that deistic Rationalism took its place, so too does
modern theology — the daughter of Pietism — let itself be worked upon by
Pantheism, the form of unbelief that prevails in our own time, of which
all its own peculiar views bear witness, and it will at last fall completely
into the arms of Pantheism as well, so that a horrible doctrine will arise,
as is already evident today. Pure doctrine, however — the unadulterated
Gospel of Christ — will, through the strong hand of the almighty Son of
God, outlast all human systems and tendencies and remain until the end
of days. For the Word of God abides forever.