# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juli 1859_S193
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Lehre und Wehre.

Volume V.    July 1859.    No. 7.

(Submitted.)

Some Glosses on This Year's Sessions of the So-Called
Lutheran General Synod at Pittsburgh.

If one has listened to the proceedings of the Missouri Synod, and
then immediately afterward attends the sessions of the General Synod, the total
difference in spirit between the two synods forces itself upon one
with great power. The Missouri Synod is a genuinely Lutheran synod, in which
the Word of God holds sway, so that all principles
are traced back to it and all measures are guided by it.
In the Missouri Synod one has respect for the Word of God and bows
before it accordingly, but has little respect for human cleverness, however
piously it postures and however finely it glitters. In the G. Synod, by contrast, there reigns
"admirable Christian feeling and mutual love," but without, and against, the
Word of God — in German one would call it: sweetly-acting human delusion. One
would surely think that at the sessions of such an ecclesiastical body
the Word of God ought to come up at least once — I have heard nothing.
Until now, it was likewise held, in the battles of the Lutherans, that the chief weapon was:
it is written. In the so-called Lutheran G. Synod
this weapon is unknown. What one appeals to, what is supposed to
silence the opponent, is the authority of their notorious G.S. Constitution.
Among Lutherans one submits to the Bible; among the Roman
Catholics, to the pope; among the General Synodists, to the Constitution.

If Lutheran synods have even a spark of faithfulness
in them, then they must, especially now, in our faith-confused age,
so deeply torn by divisions of faith, where it is a matter not merely
of Pauline, Apollonian, Cephan, Christ-partisan, but of Methodist, Roman,
Zwinglian, Puritan, Chiliastic, etc., etc. — let the earnest exhortation of Paul,
given in the name of Christ, 1 Cor. 1:10, be their guiding star: "I
beseech you, brethren, by the name of our Lord Jesus
Christ, that ye all speak the same thing, and that there be no divisions
among you, but that ye be perfectly joined together in the same mind
and in the same judgment." — The Missouri Synod, obedient to this word,