# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Februar 1864_S60
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

60 Church News of the Day.

...points touching on life. Yet there are many things among the Lutherans of the Missouri Synod which are deeply to be lamented, namely their bigotry, their exclusivity, and their extreme high-churchism. They have committed a lamentable error in that, taking their stand on a hyper-Lutheran basis, they bind their ministers and their people to belief in all the scholastic speculations of the symbolical books, instead of adopting only the Augsburg Confession and Luther's Small Catechism, as the General Synod has done. They preach the great fundamental doctrines of Christianity, as we do. They insist on experiential religion and a holy life, as we do. They stand on the great doctrine of justification by faith, as Luther did and as we do. They ask for the influence of the Holy Spirit as indispensable in the conversion and sanctification of the soul, as we do. But, unlike us, they sadly commit the offense of making human speculations about points not revealed by inspiration into a part of the church's faith. They err in trying to bind all Lutherans to those speculations. They err in refusing to sympathize with the Christianity of this land, and in particular by refusing to enter into close church fellowship with the American Lutheran Church and its General Synod. It is strange that Christian people who come to live in America cannot recognize the hand of God in the type of Christianity that characterizes the churches of this land, and that they cannot hear the voice of Providence calling them into the ranks of the sacramental hosts as they are led in this land by the great commander. Our Missouri Lutherans should keep their opinions on those non-essential points exactly as we keep our own. But they should be private opinions. They should not set out to bind us to theirs. And we should not force our private views upon them. Just as we do not make it a necessity for being a good Lutheran that one reject regeneration by baptism and the bodily presence; so our Missouri brethren should not demand that, in order to be a sound Lutheran, one must believe these speculations. Since Christ and the apostles say nothing about this matter (?!), and since the Augsburg Confession says nothing about the one point, and since, in the opinion of many of our wisest men, it itself says nothing of the bodily presence (!) except what is capable of a spiritual interpretation, and so entirely removes the one objectionable feature in it — we and the Missourians should agree to stand together on the great fundamental truths of our Lutheran system, and not trouble the church with painful disputations over matters that human reason can never bring into clear light, and that the Bible does not teach (?). It is in their power to end this disquieting strife. And if they would only do it, if they would only see their duty in this regard and act accordingly, they would give the Lutheran Church a push in the right direction such as it has not received since Luther's death. Our Church would at once arise as a united, harmonious, glorious Church, quickly taking its place beside the most influential churches of the land. Their duty, in our opinion, is simply this: to give up their efforts to force upon the Church things the majority cannot believe, as regards such points as are not fundamental, and to unite with the American Church as regards the great fundamental truths and duties of the Gospel, about which there is no dispute among the Orthodox and evangelical Lutherans. For this outcome of the matter should all good Lutherans pray.” — To this we need only briefly reply: were it really so, as the Lutheran Observer writes, that the doctrinal difference existing between the General Synod and the Missouri Synod concerned points “not revealed by divine inspiration,” which therefore indeed could not belong to the foundation of the Christian faith, then withered be the hand that would continue the strife and reject the hand of reconciliation and union held out to it. But brighter than the noonday sun shine precisely those doctrines of difference in God's holy Word. As little as we can give up the Word of God itself, so little can we —