# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_September 1863_S283
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Miscellany. 283

between Lutherans and Reformed, which once seemed the highest and moved the whole of life, now somehow still come to the forefront? Surely the enemy from without would have to bring home to the Christian confessions that, in spite of all this, they are sons and citizens of one fatherland, that they must contend together for their one Lord and King, and that, with all the honest and warranted division and opposition among themselves, every feeling of discord ought nevertheless to be resolved into a higher consciousness of fellowship and brotherhood in arms." And yet he writes further on: "To all Lutheran state churches which have hitherto preserved their unimpaired standing, as for instance in Bavaria, Saxony, Hanover, Mecklenburg, the adoption of such elements of union is to be discouraged. For on the one hand this easily involves a hindrance to the full, free unfolding of Lutheran principles in every aspect of church life; on the other hand, all the painful experiences make plain the great danger that they will lead to the complete dissolution of the Lutheran Church. Rather, it is only to be maintained that these elements of union do not in themselves conflict with the Lutheran duty of confession, and that therefore, where they already exist through providential guidance, the Lutherans may remain within them without violating that duty." (p. 522f.) What is one to make of such an explanation, which measures with two different measures? Where, Stahl says in another passage, the union "once exists under God's permission, it is indeed a duty — provided those safeguards for the confession are given to some degree (or even not at all — for the sake of greater clarity he should have added, in the spirit of legitimism) — to remain within it, and to strive for its completeness, but not to aim at its total abolition, nor to withdraw from the state church on its account. That is the position of the Lutherans in the state church. This position is required, first, by the general principle of the Christian Church against separation. It is required, second, by the relation to the great Lutheran population of the state church. It is required, finally, by regard for the Prussian state."

Pietism. In the aforementioned reflections of Ströbel on Stahl's "The Lutheran Church and the Union," the former offers the following sharp criticism of Pietism, which Stahl had called a plant from the tree of the Lutheran Church: "Whoever heard that Pietism, the most poisonous enemy of the Gospel, is ''a plant from the tree of the Lutheran Church,'' which she must acknowledge as her own? Indeed, its genealogy has long been fully known. Its father was Syncretism, its grandfather Calvinism; its son is Rationalism, its grandson Unionism; its brother is called Indifferentism, its sister Righteousness-by-works. It is a branch of the great Calvinistic stem, a Reformed ''denomination,'' and is in fact acknowledged as such by the Reformed themselves. From the