# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Februar 1859_S47
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

From the General Synod.                                                    47

...but instead threatens to drive us back to the system of rigid
Symbolism." From such outbursts it is clear that Professor Weiser, in the
whole of his polemic against the "Symbolists," has the Missouri Synod
especially in view. In doing so he is guilty of the most striking
contradictions. For at the beginning of his address he praises Luther, and
also Peter Waldo, John Wycliffe, John Hus, Jerome of Prague (and even John
Žižka), as "believing and faithful followers of the Lamb." He praises
Athanasius "for his steadfastness and piety," since he "stood firm amid
all the errors of the court." He calls Augustine "the most brilliant star
in the whole firmament." Now let one ask oneself: what actually made these
men so great? Church history answers, and Professor Weiser himself admits
it: nothing but their living faith and the strength and resolve with which
they confessed it. They bore witness to the truth they had come to know
from God's Word, freely, before all the world, and defended it against
every assault of unbelief. And one chief means of this defense was, for
them, the unsparing exposure of the errors that had arisen in the Church
in their own time. Now, is it not striking that Professor Weiser praises
these men, while their successors — the "Symbolists" of the Missouri
Synod — are, for that very reason, namely their struggle for pure doctrine
and their testimony against the errors prevailing in the Church of this
land, hateful to him? It is, at any rate, a contradiction that permits one
to infer as little logic as theological clarity in the professor of the
General Synod.

But it is more striking still that this same man, although besides Luther
and the other great teachers of the Church named above he also lists
Arndt, Sebastian Schmidt, and Heinrich Müller as faithful servants of God,
nevertheless declares the "Symbolists" — who confess this very faith of
these men of God as it is laid down in the symbols of the Lutheran Church,
and who bear witness to it over against error — to be enemies of living
piety. If Luther and the other men of God held and taught the right,
saving faith, how then can it be an "error," how then can it "destroy
living piety," when one confesses and defends this same faith — and the
Lutheran symbols, after all, contain no other? Then Luther and the other
named men of God would themselves have been in "error" even in what they
held to be the chief task of their lives; indeed, they would have had to
set themselves, with all their might, to "destroy living piety." Indeed,
then the Lord Christ himself, together with his apostles, would have had
to be in "error" and to have "destroyed living piety" — they who, as
Scripture testifies, stood in that same struggle until their death. Or
does Professor Weiser suppose that the Lord Christ would have been so
hated and persecuted even unto death, had he not so mercilessly exposed,
opposed, and condemned the pharisaical error in the Israelite Church?