# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_October 1863_S290
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

290 Some Remarks on a New Apology of the Reformed Church.

it is indeed not to be denied that, particularly with Pietism, a thoroughly Pelagian theory and practice has flooded into our church like a deluge. Spener, the father of Pietism, already writes in his catechism sermons (Frankfurt, 1689, 4to, page 355): "It is impossible that the elect should be permanently led astray, Matth. 24:24. Election, however, is not the cause that such people remain steadfast in grace; rather, because they were going to remain steadfast, the Lord made it so that he elected them." On this evidently Pelagian foundation of the election of grace the whole pietistic doctrine of the "order of grace" then built itself up, with its legalistic, soul-ruinous self-working manipulation of souls; until finally rationalism came and at last knocked the very bottom out of the barrel, and transformed Christianity into a mere pagan doctrine of virtue. Even the newer so-called believing theology within the Lutheran church, we may not conceal it, has for the most part on this point regressed no further than to the Pietism of the previous century. When, among others, Prof. Dr. Kahnis, still in his better days, wrote: "Faith is an act of our self" (The Doctrine of the Lord's Supper, Leipzig, 1851, p. 431), he met with no serious contradiction from most of the newer "believing" theologians even within our own church; indeed, he thereby expressed only what appears to most as a matter that could not be otherwise. Still less can we absolve the so-called American Lutheran theologians of the Pelagianism laid to our church's charge. It is true that among them the doctrine of the fall, of original sin, of man's natural incapacity in spiritual things, and of the necessity of regeneration is for the most part set forth as a cardinal doctrine, concerning which unity is said to exist and to be required among them and all so-called sister churches; but if one reads their religious articles and takes heed of their practice, of their treatment of souls, one soon notices that those theses are empty titles, and that those who set them up are, if anything, nothing but Pelagians or at best Semipelagians. All this granted, however, we ask: is the doctrine of a church to be judged by the individual confession of all those who belong to it, who call themselves by its name and eat its bread? — Then, indeed, Mr. Krummacher's accusation is well founded. But then this accusation nonetheless ceases to be a reason why he should wish to be "not Lutheran, but Reformed." For as far as the doctrine of the free, or rather of the enslaved will (servum arbitrium) is concerned, the publications of those who profess the Reformed church swarm no less with crassly Pelagian propositions — and not only the productions of theologically uneducated writers, but also those of such as pass for the most learned and thoroughly trained theologians of the Reformed church of this time. Even the newspapers that have taken up Mr. Krummacher's article here, among which of late the Reformed Kirchenzeitung of