# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Februar 1859_S48
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

48                                                    From the General Synod.

He would never have come to the cross, had he been as "tolerant" and
understood union in the way the gentlemen of the General Synod do. But
what then would have become of redemption and of the Gospel, what would
have become of the Church and of the world? Had Christ and his apostles
and all his disciples, in every age, not attacked and fought error so
sharply with the sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God, then truth
would long since have been swallowed up by error, and the devil would
hold undisputed dominion on earth; there would be no Christians left in
the world, and not a single soul could be saved. For only the truth, the
truth that is from God, can make us, poor sinners, into children of God.
The divine truth, the unadulterated Gospel, is the treasure that God has
entrusted to his Church, that she might distribute it to men and guard it.
But guarding it necessarily also includes the fight against error. Woe to
her if she fails in this twofold duty! The one is as important as the
other. For how can the Church distribute the heavenly good if she does
not guard it! How can she lead people to a living faith in the Lord Jesus
and keep them in it, if human wisdom and error take the place of the Word
of God? Where, therefore, the Church among a people neglects her duty to
guard the Word of God, there she must necessarily perish, and her
lampstand be thrust from its place. Whoever is a true Christian and a
faithful servant of the Church will therefore by no means, for the sake of
a false love, let truth and error count for the same, as the people of
the General Synod do, but will attack error wherever he finds it, in
God's name, and joyfully bear witness to God's truth, as the Lord Christ
and the apostles, as Luther and all faithful teachers in the Church have
always done. That Professor Weiser has not seen this, and has entangled
himself in so strange a contradiction with himself, comes precisely from
his blind hatred of the "Symbolists."

If it has been shown above, from God's Word and by the example of Christ
and his apostles, of Luther and of all faithful teachers of the Church,
how unfounded and how absurd — because self-contradictory — are the
assertions and attacks of Professor Weiser against the "Symbolists," that
is, the adherents and representatives of the doctrine of Christ and of
Luther as it is set forth in the symbols of the Lutheran Church,
specifically the Missouri Synod — then allow me now to put a few
questions to Professor Weiser. By what right do you consider yourself
entitled to call "Symbolism" — the theology of the Lutheran confession,
the doctrine of the Reformation as it is taught in the institute at Fort
Wayne and confessed by the Missouri Synod — an "error" (p. 389 of the
Review)? By what do you prove that the earnest preservation of pure
doctrine, the firm adherence to Luther's faith, the faithful holding to
the Lutheran confession, or, as you call it, "Symbolism," "destroys
living piety" (pp. 339, 343)? Your conscience must have smitten you when
you uttered such blas-