# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_September 1859_S284
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

284 Aus der Kirche [From the Church].

...their claim, it is not innovations they are after, but progress. Their view is particularly directed at this: that the symbols could not establish more than what had passed through the struggle of their own time. Only for their own time did they bring doctrine to its conclusion. But other times bring forth other and new things, and therefore call for new determinations. If one wanted to confine the church within the formulas of old doctrinal determinations, it would have to remain standing where it stands. There could be no more thought of progress. But where there is no progress, there is death. We are quite willing to grant this, but we reserve the right to examine the progress in question. We shall look at the tree, to see whether it has put forth new shoots, or whether someone has lopped off its noble branches and grafted in scions from wild stock. Setting aside theological and scholarly progress, and considering only genuine ecclesiastical progress, such progress consists in this: that a new doctrine is gained which is of importance for the continuance and welfare of the church, as well as of the life within it. But it must be strongly doubted that our age has any genuine calling to this latter kind of progress. It already lacks the most necessary precondition of a vigorous church life, out of whose ground a healthy further development could arise. We are not even so far along as to have brought the firm and indispensable foundations of the church back into effect. Where, then, is progress supposed to come from, when we have our hands full merely appropriating to ourselves what has long since been gained, and helping the church to its old possession? We see accordingly that what has so far been put forward as progress has only succeeded in multiplying confusion and factionalism, and, far from building up the church, hinders the church in her growth in unity. Experience does not speak in favor of our living in an age of progress. God can, to be sure, raise up men who create order in the midst of confusion and carry the building further with a strong spirit. But we must nonetheless wait until they appear and prove their calling. Of those now living, none will succeed, without sign or wonder, in mastering and uniting this confused age.

One must marvel, however, that the doctrines concerning church and ministry, as well as concerning the thousand-year kingdom, as Löhe has set them forth, are supposed to belong to this kind of progress. As far as their doctrine of church and ministry is concerned, it already lacks a necessary requirement for becoming church doctrine, namely simplicity, clarity, and firmness. In this doctrine one finds oneself in a certain half-light, which points to a mixture of light and darkness. At the very least, it does not agree with the Lutheran symbols. Still more remarkable, however, is that even the doctrine of the thousand-year kingdom is being made into such a doctrine as is supposed to pass into the significant doctrinal content of the church. How is that possible? The first requirement for any church doctrine is that one have a clear, unambiguous