# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Januar 1859_S24
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

24        "American" Lutheranism.

—the faith, however, which finds its expression in our church's
confession, is thereby made out to be something that has intruded in
from Europe. This designation, moreover, that party has chosen not
without shrewdness. For by it they seek to win over the nativist
sympathies for themselves and to press them into their service. The
agitation of the native-born portion of our population against the
"foreigners," which has hitherto been nourished and used for
political party purposes, is thus also being exploited for religious
party purposes.

But this circumstance alone, that a churchly party resorts to such
means as one ought rightly to leave to demagogues, is deeply
troubling. For this mingling of politics and theology, this dragging
of worldly sympathies and antipathies into the struggle for the
truth, has always been repugnant to the Lutheran Church, which seeks
its vindication and its recommendation nowhere but in the word of
God. It is, rather, thoroughly a papist mode of warfare, and that
designation a genuine Jesuit trick.

Examined in the light, it is also a thoroughly unwarranted
presumption. Why, indeed, should that spurious Lutheranism be
preferentially American, while the confessionally faithful doctrine
is not? To this one receives the answer: "Because Mühlenberg and the
other preachers who first founded Lutheran congregations in this
country were not strict Orthodox, but rather paid homage to the
Pietism of Halle, therefore it is here only the tendency which does
not take doctrine so exactly, but instead holds life and works of
love to be the main thing, that is the one historically warranted in
the Lutheran Church. The 'strict symbolists,' however, are immigrant
theologians who, precisely because they are not yet fully permeated
by the American spirit, are so zealous for pure doctrine; yet the
more they lay aside their European prejudices under the influence of
our life here, the more they too will give up their contending for
doctrine, and become 'tolerant,' since only this is compatible with
Christian love." But contained in the foregoing is a threefold
illusion, to which the gentlemen of "American Lutheranism" abandon
themselves.

First, they can with little right appeal to the venerable men who
first founded Lutheran congregations in our land. For Mühlenberg
found the expression of his faith in the entire body of the
symbolical books of our church, and preached only the doctrine set
forth therein, and demanded the same of other teachers of the church
as well (see the historical proof, Jahrgang II, Heft 4). Such
abominations as the so-called "American-Lutheran" false doctrines of
baptism, of the Lord's Supper, of absolution, of original sin, and
others, Mühlenberg would therefore have abhorred and rejected. But
apart from that, is it not slanderous when men who were indeed
sincere children of God, but who nevertheless, on account of human
weakness, were caught up in various errors alongside a living and
great knowledge of evangelical truth, are set up precisely to confirm
and support the error, as an autho—