# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_October 1864_S289
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Doctrine and Defense.

Jahrgang X.    October 1864.    No. 10.

Two Documents from the Present-Day Prussian Lutheran Church.

I.

On St. Michael's Day of this year the sessions of the General Synod of the Prussian Lutheran Church standing under the Breslau Supreme Church Council [Oberkirchencollegium] began this year. To this Synod, among other things, the following document was submitted:

Petition to the reverend General Synod assembled this autumn at Breslau. From the Lutheran pastors in Nassau, Fr. Brunn and J. Hein.

Since it will fall to the reverend General Synod to reach decisive resolutions concerning the pending ecclesiastical controversies, we hold it our duty, on our part as well, to lay openly before the reverend General Synod both our theological and ecclesiastical position and the consequences arising from it, which seem to us wholly indispensable for the preservation of a peaceful and blessed continuance of our ecclesiastical fellowship.

On the decision of the reverend Synod will first of all depend the question most important to us: whether the parties that have emerged within the bosom of our Synod in the present doctrinal struggles are to be preserved in synodical and ecclesiastical fellowship, or whether the ecclesiastical breach that has already occurred is to be confirmed, carried through, and completed. That is, above all, the question that concerns us. It would indeed not be the question, if we regarded the doctrines around which our church controversy turns as matters on which our Symbols have as yet reached no decision, or as not touching at all the articles of faith so far as these are the object of ecclesiastical confession. But the matter stands otherwise for us. We see in our present church controversy the breaking forth of theological tendencies long present within our Church, which stand in deep conflict with the Lutheran confession and which have sprung from a spirit essentially other than the Lutheran — tendencies with which, therefore, the Church, with which we must necessarily part ways and come to clarity