# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_October 1864_S294
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

294    Two Documents from the Prussian Lutheran Church.

the wholesale rejection, as it has hitherto proceeded from individual members of the Diedrich opposition, of a churchly power of order and of a church government; on the contrary, we are, as hitherto so also henceforth, heartily ready for a joining together with a larger church body and the subordination under a higher ecclesiastical superintendence and supreme direction that would arise for us from it.

Our opposition to the existing Breslau church government rests purely in the realm of doctrine. We can therefore also by no means agree with the view that, if only in the practical realm the necessary obedience toward the existing church government were guaranteed, then the doctrine — that is, the question of the grounding, of the divine or human right of church government — might be left to free brotherly and theological discussion, without on that account declaring one another false teachers or refusing one another church fellowship. We see in this view an indifferentism toward doctrine which has always been foreign to the Lutheran Church, and which we hold doubly impossible in our Lutheran free church, since this our free church rests, with its whole existence, only on the confession of pure doctrine, and by its very nature can rest on nothing else. Therefore, so truly may God help us, we cannot do otherwise here; we must maintain that the doctrinal questions here under discussion are, in the fundamental concepts designated above, symbolically decided for us, and therefore willful and persistent defenders of false doctrine on these points are for us genuine false teachers, standing outside the bounds of the Lutheran confession and of the Lutheran Church. Only from this standpoint does the question hold for us: how far is ecclesiastical connection and fellowship with the Breslau Synod and its church government possible for us henceforth?

That we would have to demand, by the simple right of the Lutheran confession, that the Breslau Synod unite with us unanimously and decisively in the confession of churchly truth and, on that basis, simply reject all opposing false doctrines and thereby put an end to all further controversy — of this we can be in no doubt for a moment. But we believe we must indeed also urge another consideration, namely the consideration that we live in a time in which our Lutheran Church finds itself on a path of return from a deep falling-away from the Lutheran confession, from a deep straying into rationalistic, pietistic, and subjectivistic tendencies, out of which the individual must first work himself free, ever more, only through hard struggles, and press through to the full and pure grasp of the Lutheran confession. Such a course of development from subjective Christianity to churchly Lutheran Christianity, from a thousandfold confusion of doctrine to ever greater clarity — that is the course, indeed the life history, of almost every individual among us, and one's own experience proves that the purification described, from falsely subjective elements, and the return to sound Lutheranism, does not