# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juli 1864_S200
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

200 Dr. K. K. Münkel's Assessment of the Work: The Right Form, etc.

war calls young men into the field, and, because of the lack of labor, other worldly callings seek and pay workers under the most favorable conditions, the harder it becomes to find the necessary number of young men for the ever-increasing need of the church. Help from Germany, by the sending of godly young men, is therefore now doubly desirable. This, however, will depend upon whether they, over there, are in agreement with our confession, our constitution, and our whole ecclesiastical position and life, or not. It has therefore heartily pleased us to hear what Dr. Münkel — whose voice carries great weight, especially in the Kingdom of Hanover — has to say about the above-named book, which sets forth our ecclesiastical constitution. First of all he speaks very approvingly of Prof. Walther's own work, which is all the more gratifying to us since we well recognize that gracious God has given the Missouri Synod its right form chiefly through Prof. Walther's faithful and untiring labor — for which reason he is also especially bitterly reviled by the enemies of the truth. Dr. Münkel says: "It must above all be acknowledged as a high merit of Walther's writings that, with a rare and admirable knowledge of the ancients, he has searched through their writings for the purpose named, and has brought before us and made effective a rich harvest of weighty pronouncements of the ancients."

Concerning the ecclesiastical constitution itself, it further says: "As for the ecclesiastical constitutional structure itself which Walther sets before our eyes, we cannot but grant him the recognition of genuinely Lutheran principles and a strict maintenance of the Lutheran confession — unless we should wish to deny the same to Luther himself and to the old fathers, from whose writings Walther everywhere adduces the proofs of his assertions. Right at the outset, the confession-empowered preaching of the Gospel and administration of the Sacraments is put forward as the all-governing criterion of an Evangelical Lutheran congregation; the strict obligation to God's Word and the symbols of the Church we find, as a matter of course, duly emphasized at the calling and ordination of ministers. Likewise we find, as a bulwark against the flooding of congregations with unlutheran, unchristian, and time-spirited tendencies and powers, the provisions that, on the one hand, none may be admitted at all as proper 'members of the congregation' who do not confess the Word of God and the confession of the Church, namely Luther's Catechisms and the Augsburg Confession, while on the other hand it is emphasized with the utmost clarity and sharpness that 'matters of doctrine and of conscience are to be settled only according to God's Word and the confession of the Church, and with unanimity,' and further, that if 'anything should be decided and established by a congregation contrary to God's Word, such a decision and establishment is null and void, and is also to be declared and revoked as such.' — Faithfully and genuinely Lutheran, further, is the establishment and maintenance of the public preaching office as the proper and most important duty of the congregation in the field