# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Mai 1859_S135
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Excerpted Communications from This Year's Preface, etc. 135

we could never find ourselves at home. When a conference of pastors, held in Berlin on the occasion of the dedication of the separated Lutheran church, arrived at the same result as was likewise reached at an Erfurt conference in the year '54 and at a conference at Rothenmoor in the same year — namely, that the Lutheran Church, which in Prussia is to be found only among the little band of the separated, is the Church absolutely, and that all other so-called churches are false churches (the very churches whose baptism the Lutheran Church has always recognized!) — then there sounds forth from the depths of our heart in reply: "oh no, oh no, oh no, my fatherland must be greater than that," and we feel that our spirit, in its striving after true catholicity, in its holding fast to a finer, more spiritual concept of the Church, whose domain is to us as wide as that of Christ our Lord, is nevertheless, on this important point, of quite another kind — so that we could not find ourselves at home in such a narrow house. — . . . . .

On other points, however, we cannot agree with Pastor Rink. When he says: "Those who hold fast to the great truth that in the Holy Supper they receive the body and blood of Christ and are fed in their souls by the Lord, as the Calvinists likewise believe — should not these also be able to go together to the table of the Lord?" — we recommend to him for his consideration the relevant discussion in our preface of last year. Pastor Rink has too favorable a notion of the Calvinistic doctrine of the Supper, one that may have been current a few decades ago but does not agree with the present state of historical research, and he moreover falsely assumes that this doctrine of the Supper is the only one holding good in the Reformed Church, whereas in fact it has taken very little root there. When Pastor Rink further holds: "We live in a time of apostasy, when the mystery of iniquity becomes ever more openly manifest, when the ungodly world becomes ever riper for judgment. — — Is this, then, a time for the people of God to divide over questions of church polity, to make external questions of church law into matters of chief and vital importance?" — we do indeed agree with him in his reading of the signs of the times, but hold that it is precisely under such circumstances that the admonition "hold fast what thou hast" applies with special force; we further hold that the "powerful errors" are not the crude ones but the subtle ones — not those that lie openly exposed, but those that disguise themselves and put on an innocent air; that what is at stake here is not merely "external questions of church law," but that in truth it is a matter of preserving the most holy sacrament for the Church; and finally, we hold that it is unjust to lay the blame for the "division" upon those who defend the possessions of the Church, when in truth it belongs to those who assail them. Oh, how gladly would our own be rid of all such wearisome strife; how we sigh to God against those who, by their untimely and willful attacks and encroachments, force us to it, while the tasks that God has set for the Church of the present are of an altogether different kind. — . . . . .