# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Februar 1859_S46
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

46                                                    From the General Synod.

...the Lord requires of his true disciples, and therefore lets its young
theologians in its seminaries be taught anything and everything sooner
than the pure truth of Jesus Christ, the faith of the unadulterated
confession of the Church of God. And whoever reads Professor Weiser's
address will, unfortunately, not find this expectation disappointed. How,
indeed, could it be otherwise? The spirit that rules in the General Synod,
which is a different spirit from that of the Lutheran confession, can,
like a corrupt tree, bring forth nothing but corrupt fruit.

This becomes clear from what is said in Professor Weiser's address,
published at the request of the directors of the new institute, concerning
the doctrine to whose service it is to be dedicated. There it says,
literally, at the close: "The Bible and the Bible alone shall be the great
textbook in this institute;" but how that is meant is already evident from
the fact that all evangelical denominations are called upon to cooperate,
and that it is said that the students of this preparatory school for the
ministry might belong to any sect whatsoever. For there are to be trained
there no "Symbolists," no preachers who teach God's Word purely and clearly
according to the confession of the Lutheran Church and who, through this
means of grace ordained by God himself, win souls for the Lord Jesus, but
rather "revival men," as Professor Weiser puts it — that is, men who
understand how to produce revivals by all manner of human,
imagination-inflaming means and measures, after a Methodist, un-Lutheran,
and unbiblical practice.

By this it is clearly and openly stated what the men who founded the new
institute at Selinsgrove intend. They do not want the faith of our Church,
as it is set forth in her confession on the ground of the infallible Word
of the true God, taught there — no, nothing is more repugnant to them than
that! — but it is to become a school in which the errors of Calvinism, or
of whatever sect the professors or directors please, are impressed upon
future preachers as divine truth, while the faith of our Church and those
who confess it (the "Symbolists") are thoroughly taught to be despised and
hated. It is to become a school of prophets who call black white and white
black.

The worthy professor of the General Synod expresses his hatred of the
theology of the Lutheran confession without reserve; indeed, the greater
part of his address aims to show how "Symbolism" has, since the end of the
Reformation, been at war in our Church with "living piety." He regards the
schools of Buffalo and Fort Wayne as "the pure representatives of the old,
rigid system of symbolic orthodoxy, perhaps somewhat modified by the
spirit of the age." Indeed, he is not ashamed to say, in this connection:
"Great efforts have been made on various sides to destroy the system of
living piety in the Church. A newly imported, foreign element is now at
work in the Church which threatens to drive us back, not to the system of
our Halle fathers,