# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1859_S118
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

118 On the Difference in the Law between the Missouri Synod, etc.

...which they have so much on their lips, understand nothing of it, do
not know when this same love rebukes, is angry, curses, and condemns,
and when it is patient, mild, gentle, kind — but rather stir everything
together into a wretched mush, in which self-love forms a chief
ingredient, and then call that "practical" or "heart-piety." If the
General Synod is convinced that the Missouri Synod acts sinfully in some
respects, especially in its struggle against the "abominations" of the
General Synod — while the Missouri Synod, however, not only refuses to
acknowledge this sin, but recognizes its resolute struggle against it as
a holy duty, as a work pleasing to God because commanded by Him — then
forbearance and gentleness, or, as the "Lutheran Herald" put it: "Let us
drop the subject; further discussion of it would probably serve no
purpose" — is altogether out of place, but is rather want of
understanding and unlovingness. For if the General Synod truly has
"brotherly love" toward the Missouri Synod, it must be concerned that the
latter come to a recognition of its alleged sin; mere forbearance,
however, avails nothing with us on this point, for we are resolute
gainsayers, determined to be altogether in the right precisely here.
Therefore the General Synod, if it has understanding joined with love,
must rebuke us, and by exact and repeated demonstration of individual
facts, and by unsparing criticism of these according to the Word of God,
must set our sin before us and hold it up to our eyes — that is right,
biblical love. So this same love also demands of us that we, without
much wagging of the fox's tail, plainly expose and rebuke the sins of the
General Synod — and indeed in such a way that it is seen to be a holy
earnestness with us — so that, God willing, even if only a few are given
pause, they may come to reflection and to their senses. We by no means
fail to recognize that among individuals in the General Synod a turn for
the better is taking place; but that it is precisely those who have come
to a knowledge of the truth who are afraid to step forward with courage
and attack Satan's stronghold by rejecting and condemning the false,
blasphemous doctrines, and by putting away the perverse and harmful
parts of its practice; indeed, that they even hold back and seek to
hinder in their struggle those very ones whose conscience has grown
uneasy and who are now beginning to stir — that is the misery, the
danger, that threatens the good movement within the General Synod. Ah,
dear brethren, work, confess, fight as long as it is day; the night
comes when no one can work! But your fight consists in this: that you
not only hold the Lutheran doctrine to be the doctrine of the Bible and
true, but that you also reject, as false, unbiblical, and
ecclesiastically unwarranted, every doctrine that sets itself up
alongside Holy Scripture. The result will be that you are then reckoned
among the "exclusive," the "loveless" Old Lutherans, and heaped with
scorn and contempt. But what does that matter? Did not the LORD Jesus
Himself, with all His beloved apostles, come into conflict with the
whole world precisely for the sake of "exclusiveness," so that they were
contradicted on every side as a mere sect, and in the end, in the most
stubborn struggle, lost neck and life