# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_October 1859_S316
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

316 Does the Iowa Synod Really Strive, etc.

...for this, to be sure, one need only overlook that we know of a coming of Christ for the destruction of the Antichrist," p. 28, and in the same place: "Christ will come for the destruction of the Antichrist, and he will appear for the Last Judgment." These statements stand in the Synodical Report just as unproven as they stand here. Now there is a well-known rule: affirmanti incumbit probatio [the burden of proof rests on the one who affirms]; I will therefore, for the time being, simply deny such assertions outright, until they are actually proven.

But where, then, have these dear people gotten all these doctrines? Not from God's Word, as we have seen. Perhaps, then, they have found them by developing further along the way of the Symbols. — That is not the case either, for one will search the whole Book of Concord in vain for even a single signpost pointing a finger toward those monstrous regions into which the Iowa Synod has strayed; what one does find there, rather, are sturdy barricades meant to hold back those who would go there. The confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church say, Smalcald Articles, Part II, Art. 4: "...This article shows forcefully that he is the true Endchrist or Antichrist, who has set himself up and exalted himself over and against Christ, because he will not allow Christians to be saved without his power, which nevertheless is nothing, not ordained or commanded by God. This is properly to set oneself up over God and against God, as St. Paul says, 2 Thess. 2:4." And in the appendix to the Smalcald Articles the Evangelical Lutheran Church confesses: "Now it is indeed plain that the popes, together with their following, want to maintain and uphold godless doctrine and false worship. So, too, all the vices that are prophesied of the Antichrist in Holy Scripture agree with the pope's kingdom and its members. For Paul, when he portrays the Antichrist, 2 Thess. 2:4, calls him an adversary of Christ, who exalts himself above everything that is called God or worship, so that he sits in the temple of God as a god and pretends to be a god, etc.... Since this is so, all Christians should most diligently guard against becoming partakers of such godless doctrine, blasphemy, and unjust tyranny, but should rather depart from the pope and his following or adherents, as from the kingdom of the Antichrist, and curse it...." "Therefore, even though the pope had the primacy or supremacy by divine right, one should nevertheless render him no obedience, because he wishes to maintain false worship and a doctrine at variance with the Gospel. Indeed, one ought, out of necessity, to set oneself against him as the true Antichrist." That is the way of the Symbols, and we Lutherans walk it gladly, because we know that on it we walk in the truth. What, by contrast, does the Iowa Synod do? It shrugs its shoulders and says: "We distinguish between what is essential and what is inessential in these writings" — that is, Luther and the other fathers with him, and the whole church down to our own light-bathed age, may have meant quite well with their view of the