# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Februar 1864_S61
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Church News of the Day. 61

...clear doctrines of the Word of God, which belong as members to the body of Christian saving truth, be declared human speculations and our own private opinions. We must therefore hold ourselves aloof from the so-called American Lutheran Church, although we see with a bleeding heart what an unspeakable blessing would rest upon it if we, united with it inwardly and outwardly, could carry on the work of the Lord in this our dear fatherland.

The General Synod. The “Lutheran and Missionary” of December 31 of last year demonstrates strikingly that all the provisions by which a member of the General Synod is supposed to be entitled to depart from any doctrine of the Augsburg Confession have, even within the General Synod, no legal validity, so that we would indeed hardly know of anything solid to say against this. That paper takes an ever more decided stand, with every issue, for the formal, rightful standing of pure doctrine within that body, and it seems also to be gaining ever more ground there. We rejoice at this with our whole heart. In that issue the editor does not shrink from writing, among other things, the following: “No synods stand more undoubtedly on the doctrinal basis of the General Synod than those synods which are at present not within it. The Missouri Synod certainly stands on this basis, even if its enemies are the judges of it; while the Platform synods do not stand on it, even if many of their friends are the judges of it. What we mean is this: that while it is certain, on any theory, that the Missouri Synod holds fast the fundamental doctrines of the Bible as taught by our Church, it is not certain that other synods do so. The idea that certain synods, by virtue of the open rejection of doctrines taught by our Church, stand in some way or other more properly on the basis of the General Synod, is one that involves either incredible stupidity or a willful inclination to pervert facts.”

“The American Lutheran Church.” An article of the Lutheran and Missionary of December 24 of last year, under this heading, begins as follows: “Is there any such thing as an American Lutheran Church, distinct from what is known in history as the Evangelical Lutheran Church? We answer: no. There may be an apostasy of individuals to a certain extent from the faith of the Church, but this does not in itself make a new church. There is no such thing as an ‘American Lutheran Church’ in any other sense than this — that there is an Evangelical Lutheran Church in America which, in the doctrines of the Gospel and in the right administration of the sacraments, is one with the Evangelical Lutheran Church everywhere else it may be. There is only one Lutheran Church in the world, and if we do not belong to it, we do not belong to the Lutheran Church at all.” The excellent critique of the so-called American Lutheran Church that follows closes with this résumé: “The ‘American Lutheran Church’ lacks three elements needed to justify its name. It is not American — that is its first defect. Its fundamental principles were maintained by old false teachers, renewed in part by Zwingli, in other parts by Anabaptist fanatics, and carried out by Socinians and Rationalists. These principles are simply an adoption and adaptation of European error and are not American. This so-called church is not Lutheran — that is its second defect. Its whole separate existence rests on the denial of the Lutheran faith. It is not a church — that is its third defect. It has no separate organization, no name, no confession of faith, no history. Not American, not Lutheran, and not a church — where and what is ‘the American Lutheran Church’?”

The Lutherische Kirchenbote turns high-church! Hitherto the Lutheran Observer has repeatedly complained about the high-churchliness of the Lutheran and Missionary, because the latter takes an ever more decided stand for pure Lutheran doctrine. Meanwhile the Lutherische Kirchenbote, the Observer's bosom friend — what a nemesis! — comes out with evidently high-church ideas in full armor. In its