# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1864_S118
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

118 New Literature.

been given up and United practice is in vogue. I name first communion
fellowship as the most significant expression of United practice. With
few exceptions, the matter seems to me to stand thus in the Lutheran
territorial churches, that the admission of the Reformed and the United to
communion counts as the rule. The clergy who make a matter of
conscience of this are tolerated, but are found troublesome. It avails
nothing for my argument if you were to object that what happens among
you in a charitable way is, among us, a must. I am not saying, after all,
that you are United, but only that you have United practice. As further
confirmation of what has just been said I name the Eisenach conferences
and the Gustav Adolf Society. It is true that, in discussing the liturgical
question, people in Eisenach did recall a difference among the
Lutherans, the Reformed, and the United, and excluded joint deliberation.
Yet this was only a faint stirring of the confessional conscience. For the
question of how to deal with the sects was after all debated in plenary
session. Who will doubt that this was a United act? It could not have
happened at all without an awareness and acknowledgment of a common
evangelical standpoint. And that is precisely the correctly United position.
— I come to the Gustav Adolf Society. It has now also gained entry into
Bavaria. I use this expression deliberately. For it cost the Supreme
Consistory some effort to win its clergy over to it. I do not know how far
the resistance to it has been broken. But this I do know: that the
confessional conscience is opposed to the society, and with reason. For it
is United with emphasis. Does it not exclude precisely those who are so
confessionally Lutheran that they do not maintain communion fellowship
with the other churches? So its spread in Bavaria, and especially the
energetic activity of the Supreme Consistory on its behalf, is to me
eloquent proof that the Bavarian territorial church too has given up the
exclusive Lutheran consciousness and is steering onto United paths. Do I
not now, after all this, have a clear right to my assertion, that the
confessionally Lutheran consciousness appears broken in practice as well?
My dear friend, even if I had entered a Lutheran territorial church, I
would not have remained free of inner and outer conflicts with the Union,
unless I had come with a Union-minded disposition. For this Union one
can nowhere escape. The current of the church is, in this sense, United in
all lands. Exclusive Lutheranism, disintegrated in almost every doctrinal
point, its consciousness broken in practice — will it be able to withstand
it? It cannot and should not! But more of this shortly!

New Literature.

"Theological Opinion on the Corpus of the Synodal
Resolutions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Prussia. At the request
of a Right Reverend