# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Mai 1864_S152
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Church-Contemporary Affairs. 152

Missouri, etc., has communicated, in which it is attested that a congregation
or larger church body must nevertheless, under certain circumstances, be
recognized as good Lutheran, even if it has not formally acknowledged the
whole body of the Lutheran confessional writings, the first-named adds:
"According to the above declaration, the doctrinal basis of the old Synod of
Pennsylvania is just as good Lutheran as that of many state churches and
synods that are recognized the world over as old-Lutheran, for our new
congregational, synodical, and ministerial order states: '''The synod
confesses itself bound to all the canonical books of the Old and New
Testaments, according to the understanding of them given in the confessional
writings of our Evangelical Lutheran Church, namely in the unaltered Augsburg
Confession and Luther's Small Catechism. In accordance with this confession,
teaching and worship shall always be conducted, and all questions of
doctrine shall be decided according to it.''' We ask, then, that the old
'''mother synod''' in America and Germany be done justice." Immediately
following this, under the heading "Question," it further says: "Could not a
brotherly union of all the German Lutheran synods (and later also of all the
English ones of any significance) even now be brought about on the
doctrinal basis of the Synod of Pennsylvania?" — We take the liberty of the
following remark. What we have to fault the Pennsylvania Synod for is not
the lack of an explicit, formal confession to every symbol of the Lutheran
Church, but specifically two things: 1. that this synod some years ago
joined itself to a church body that is in fact unionistic, namely to the
so-called General Synod, and 2. that although the Book of Concord, and in
particular the unaltered Augsburg Confession and Luther's Small Catechism,
is indeed declared on paper to be its doctrinal basis, it is notorious how
many of its preachers and professors depart from this confession in
doctrine and practice without the synod taking any action against it. It is,
to be sure, already something to rejoice over from the heart when a church
body is so constituted that only right doctrine and practice are formally
authorized in it; it then has the nearest preconditions for a reformation,
should one be necessary. But the mere legal, public standing of the church's
confession does not yet make a church a genuinely Lutheran one. Rather,
Luther, in his treatise "On Councils and Churches," answers the question,
"By what sign the Christian Church is to be recognized," first of all thus:
"First, this Christian holy people is to be recognized by this, that it has
the holy Word of God. .... But we speak of the outward Word, preached orally
by men, as by you and me. .... We also speak of such a spoken word when it
is earnestly believed and publicly confessed before the world, as He says,
Matt. 10:32–33: 'Whoever confesses Me before men, him will I also confess
before My Father.'" (Walch XVI, 2785.) Further, Luther writes: "Whoever
holds his doctrine, faith, and confession to be true, right, and certain
cannot stand in one stall with others who hold or are attached to false
doctrine. .... A teacher who is silent about errors and nevertheless wishes
to be a true teacher is worse than an open fanatic, and does greater harm
with his hypocrisy than a heretic, and is not to be trusted; he is a wolf
and a fox, a hireling and a belly-servant, etc., and abandons and betrays
doctrine, Word, faith, sacrament, churches, and schools to contempt; he
either lies secretly under one cover with the enemies, or is a doubter and
a weathercock, wanting to see which way it will turn out, whether Christ or
the devil will prevail; or is altogether uncertain within himself, ... wants
to anger no one, nor speak Christ's word for Him, nor do the devil and the
world any harm." (Ib. XVII, 1477.) Although we therefore acknowledge
ourselves brotherly bound to individual members of the Synod of
Pennsylvania who testify and protest against their synod's unfaithfulness
to its rightly established doctrinal basis, we cannot, however, recognize
the synod itself, as a whole, as a genuinely Lutheran body, until it purges
itself of its syncretism and of its notoriously false teachers. To be sure,
we expect from this our candid declaration nothing but a flood of new
slanders