# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1864_S114
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

114 Why a So-Called Old Lutheran Finally Fled into the United Church.

and you yourself call me so. So be it! My conscience tells me that I have
not fallen away from Lutheranism, but have only now become a true
Lutheran. A pretty paradox, is it not? And yet that is my most heartfelt
conviction. I have not given up Lutheranism, but only its caricature.
From the distorted image I have turned to the genuine form. That is my
"conversion." You see, I am aware of it myself! My dear friend, this
insight did not fall into my lap without effort. It is rather the fruit of a
long struggle. I can well imagine how you and our friends in the old
homeland, who have only watched our struggles from afar, cannot make
sense of the result that they brought me. Well, you say, that you turn
your back on the Separatists, that we understand. But you should have
entered a Lutheran territorial church. Well said, dear friends! But in
these struggles it was precisely the truth of the Union that dawned upon
me with a shining light. Now I held it my duty to confess it. I resisted for
a long time. After my break with the Separation I stood on my own for
nearly a year and a half — a Separatist with an ecumenical heart. I, who
had already felt a kind of horror at the very name Union, and had
consumed a decade of my life in the struggle against it, was now to join
it myself. It seemed impossible to me. But at last I did gain full joy in it.
Do you know where? A Lutheran assembly helped me to it. There it
became clear as the sun to me: I have a different spirit than they.

But it is time that I turn to my task. I am to show you how I came to
this, or rather: how I could reconcile my Lutheranism with my entry into
the Union. For that is what surprises you, that I, whom you have always
known as an over-zealous Lutheran, have now suddenly leapt to the
opposite. So the matter appears to your eyes. And when I assure you that
my entry into the Union is only the ripe fruit of my inward and outward
leadings, I am to put you in a position to be able to understand this.

Let me, to that end, first look back at our university years. How
agitated church life was then! The question of union and confession
moved the hearts of all who beat for the church. The first steps toward
union in Bavaria — in many places mixed communion fellowship, and the
participation of the few Reformed congregations in the General Synod —
threatened to split the territorial church. You know how much I took
part in these struggles. I stood on Löhe's side. "Unity and purity of
doctrine" was our shibboleth. The Lutheran doctrine counted for us as the
pure one, the divergent doctrines of the other churches as impure. The
Union seemed to us, to speak with Rudelbach, a yoking together of light
and darkness. So, after my university years had run their course, I joined
the separated Lutheran church in Prussia. From the Union I had thus
fled. But wonder of wonders! Scarcely had I, after my flight,