# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1864_S115
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Why a So-Called Old Lutheran Finally Fled into the United Church. 115

before the Union, built up on my stronghold of pure doctrine, when it
began to totter under me. For now there began in the Lutheran church a
series of doctrinal struggles that seem unable to end. Löhe was among
the foremost combatants. There the fact that there was strife about
doctrine at all first convinced me of the incorrectness of one of my
axioms: that the church is perfected in doctrine. Moreover, in the
struggle over the doctrine of the [ministerial] office, Löhe expressly
demanded a correction — even if only a slight one — of the Lutheran
confessional writings by Scripture, just as he also found fault with the
Smalcald Articles on this question. There my stronghold was shattered:
that Lutheran doctrine is pure doctrine. Now I had advanced to the
insight that Lutheran doctrine and pure doctrine do not coincide, and the
Missourians, who against Löhe — who spoke of a progress in this
doctrine — tenaciously held fast to the absolute congruence of Lutheran
doctrine and pure doctrine, appeared narrow-minded to me. In the matter
itself I stood at that time firmly by Löhe's concept of the office. Today,
however, I stand differently. I have lived my way into the genuinely
Lutheran [gnesio-Lutheran] principles and must now say: the royal
priesthood of all believers is not compatible with "the office." I was
forced still deeper in by the controversies that followed concerning the
church and its governance. This dispute revealed a deep confusion. The
Leipzig Lutheran conferences had to be discontinued after 1853, because
on this question especially the Lutherans no longer understood one
another. What was not all passed off as Lutheran doctrine! And how
these, so to speak, inner-Lutheran struggles revealed the disarray of the
Lutheran party as it had existed until then! Although at first I was
inclined, with Kliefoth, to regard the differences that showed themselves
as mere "differences of formation within the party," I was soon of a
different opinion. When the strife was then carried into our own house,
when the Separation burst apart over these questions, then, for all the
deep sorrow that grew upon me personally, the joy in me was
overpowering at having become free of statutes and of statute-mongering.
You yourself, my dear friend, drew my attention to how everything in the
church that possessed authority, or pined after it, hastened to take sides
against Diedrich. Huschke and the Breslau Supreme Church Council, with
their jus divinum of the church authorities, enjoyed powerful allies.
Kliefoth, and — alas! — Harless too, sprang hastily to their aid, to
strengthen the [ecclesiastical] government. And yet it was in Diedrich's
camp that the genuine, free Lutheranism was to be found, and Döllinger
has every reason to be astonished at how thoroughly Roman — that is, how
avid for authority and how enamored of authority — modern Lutheranism
has become. I did not go with Diedrich. His path meant to me separation
without end, and I had become, the longer the more, ecumenical. But it
was not my ten years in the Prussian Separation alone that made me so,
but rather still more the observation of how thoroughly Lutheranism was
disintegrating everywhere. Indeed the Missourians could rightly complain
that there was no longer a university in Germany at which "pure
doctrine" held unbroken sway.