# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_September 1859_S270
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

270 Judgment of a Norwegian Lutheran on the General Synod.

For he keeps Stenkefeld's rule nicely, and does not merely put the text out of his sight but throws it away behind him, faith and all, like a hollow nut, and makes nothing else of it. — All these holy spirits together, however sharply they disagree about the text, nevertheless agree in the lofty spiritual sense that bread is bread and wine is wine. And whoever does not have this lofty understanding might well go astray and believe that bread is not bread, but wood or stone; that would be a dangerous thing."

One sees from this where it leads when one departs from the Word, mixes God's Spirit together with one's own spirit — which, as noted at the outset, is proper to the second stage — and turns the Holy Spirit himself into a faint, blurring phantom. Thereby the dam is torn away and door and gate are opened to rationalism, to the spirit of enthusiasm and sectarianism, indeed to the spirit itself which disguises itself as an angel of light. To this spirit, which from the beginning asserted itself in the Reformed Church and which now, unfortunately, also lodges in many members of the Lutheran Church, we owe the pitiful fragmentation of the evangelical church, the multitude of sects and parties that have shot up like mushrooms out of the ground, and the ruinous confusion of tongues in church and theology, out of which the voice of the Spirit can often be discerned only with difficulty.

Judgment of a Norwegian Lutheran on the General Synod.
(Translated from the Norwegian monthly Maanedstidende by G. Schick.)

A Glance into the General Synod
by Jakob Aall Ottesen.

The General Synod as a body is un-Lutheran.

Already in several earlier numbers of our "Maanedstidende" we have expressed ourselves in various ways to the effect that the General Synod is no genuine Lutheran body. Circumstances seem to demand more and more that we repeat this assertion with a closer justification. I therefore assert once again that the General Synod is un-Lutheran. And I do not base this merely on the fact that here or there within its teaching body one or more may be found who hold a doctrine deviating from the Symbols; for this can also occur, on account of human weakness, in a genuine Lutheran fellowship, except that there the fellowship takes such false teachers to task, seeks to convert and convince them, until they amend themselves or, in the opposite case, are to be excluded; — nor merely on the fact that such doctrinal discipline is not exercised sharply enough, for human weakness can show itself in that too, especially where the church is not rightly free, although