# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_October 1863_S291
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Some Remarks on a New Apology of the Reformed Church. 291

Chambersburg has also joined, we find largely permeated with a Pelagian leaven. And if we further bring into account the practice of most teachers of the present Reformed church in judging its doctrine of the free will, these teachers appear not one whit less Pelagian than the crassest Pelagians or Semipelagians who have crept into the Lutheran ministry.

Be that as it may, however, on the question whether Mr. Krummacher's charge raised against the Evangelical Lutheran church — that its doctrine is "infected with a Roman Catholic Pelagianism or at least Semipelagianism" — has any ground, it does not depend at all on what many or few who call themselves Lutherans teach, but on what those who rightly wish to be called Lutherans have to teach. The doctrine of a church can by no means be determined and judged by the doctrine of those who have fallen away from it, its enemies and destroyers, even though out of self-interest or indifference they remain within its bosom. What doctrine is to be ascribed to a church can be proven only from its public confessions and from the writings of those of its theologians who are acknowledged by the whole church concerned as faithful representatives, guardians, expositors, and defenders of the doctrine laid down in its symbols; and even as regards the writings of the latter, our church declares that in the end only our symbols contain "a unanimous, certain, universal form of doctrine," "to which our evangelical churches wholly and in common subscribe, out of and according to which, because" (quia, not quatenus, insofar as) "they are taken from God's Word, all other writings, insofar (quatenus) as they are to be tested and accepted, shall be judged and regulated." If now, this granted, Mr. K. nonetheless maintains that the Lutheran church, Pelagianizing, "posits a capacity, on the part of the sinner dead in sins and trespasses, of meeting God halfway," and not that it "gives to the grace that, leaving man nothing but sin, impotence, guilt, and curse, is free of all merit and all worthiness, abstracts from all being, ability, and having, and works the faintest longing and presentiment, the sole and full honor" — then Mr. K. must have read the public confessions of our church either not at all, or through a Calvinistically darkened lens. Since Luther himself either composed or expressly approved, indeed swore to, all the symbols of our church down to the Formula of Concord, and since Mr. Kr. regards Luther as pure in the doctrine of the free will and the election of grace, it will not be necessary to point to the passages in those symbols which deny man all power in spiritual things and all merit, and ascribe everything to grace. Here it can only be a matter of our final symbol, the Formula of Concord. To ascribe to this, however, even the faintest breath of Pelagian leaven can only be within the capacity of the crassest ignorance or the blindest fanaticism.

Even one who has not read the Formula of Concord, but who knows its history,