# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Februar 1859_S44
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

44                                                    Preface to Volume 1859.

and emptiness . . . The devastation was a consequence of the fall of the
angels, from which we further conclude that that primeval earth was the
dwelling-place and exercise-ground of that portion of the angels who
rebelled against God and thereby lost their principality and were compelled
to abandon their dwelling.*) The restitution, by contrast,**) was a result of
the divine counsel, by virtue of which he does not allow his plan for the
world to be disturbed ... from which we further conclude that man, set in
the place of Satan and his angels, was also called to carry out the task
Satan had left undone — to restore the disturbed harmony of the universe
and to conquer and judge the Destroyer and Rebel himself. Now it becomes
clear what a close interest Satan had in mustering everything to entice man
to fall ... It was natural enmity against the newly created upstart who had
taken possession of the dwelling from which he himself had been cast out."
(p. 96.) In this way Kurtz meets the geologists halfway with their
millennia which, according to them, were needed for the formation of the
earth.

May these citations suffice to show what is now understood, on the part of
the theological spokesmen within our Church, by the further development
and further formation of Lutheran doctrine. Little as we, within the
narrow limits set for us, are able here to name all the deviations from our
Church's doctrine and to document them with citations now permitted under
the title of the further development of the Lutheran system of doctrine,
just as little will our readers here expect an inductive proof that no
doctrine contained in our Church's confessions is falsely set forth in them
and therefore in need of improvement, nor that there is no article of faith
that has not already become the property of our Church. For our present
purpose it suffices that we hereby publicly renounce any further
development of doctrine that intends something other than to display the
immeasurably rich treasure of divine thoughts that lies in the saving truth
already entrusted to our Church — a development that instead means to
rectify our good confession, and so is, in fact, no further development at
all but the dissolution of our doctrinal jewel. Living in the conviction
that our evangelical-Lutheran Church bears in herself the marks of the
Church given in Article VII of the Augustana, we recognize in every
alteration of her doctrine a falsification of the same; and convinced in
our conscience that the Lutheran Reformation was a true, real Reformation
granted by God to his Church in the last times, we regard every new
so-called truth as an old — or likewise new — error. Nothing will
therefore ever

*) Kurtz, in making this assumption, also appeals to the following as his
witnesses: Stier, G. H. v. Schubert, Kniewel, M. Baumgarten, Rudelbach,
Guericke! — not to mention others, such as Jacob Böhme's, M. Hahn's, Fr. v.
Meyer's, and Hamberger's.

**) That is, for Kurtz, the Mosaic creation.