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Lehre und Wehre: highlights and oddities
A curated sample of what full-text search surfaces in the archive — church history intertwined with the history of the country. Pages marked EN have a side-by-side English translation; the rest are searchable in German and awaiting translation.
Zur Lehre vom heiligen Predigtamt — the first issue opens on church and ministry (Januar 1855)
Lehre und Wehre, Jahrgang 1, Januar 1855, p. 1 EN
Lehre und Wehre began where the Missouri Synod's hardest quarrel was — "The question of church and office is unquestionably a question of the times. It moves not only the Lutheran church but also communions standing outside her." The opening article of the opening number, by Pastor O. Fürbringer, written while Missouri and the Buffalo Synod were in open conflict over exactly this.
Die Sclaverei und die Bibel — printed over the editors' own signed dissent (August 1856)
Lehre und Wehre, Jahrgang 2, August 1856, p. 225 EN
A long argument on how American slavery is to be judged by God's Word, submitted by "K. B." and printed with a footnote in which the editors record that they disagree with it: "So little did we consider ourselves entitled to reject the present article on account of the dissent in which our — as we believe, well-founded — conviction stands with its content, that we cannot forbear giving expression herewith to our dissent." They do not say where the disagreement lies. The article itself refuses both sides of the American argument: it rejects the standard defense that Southern slaves are better fed than Northern laborers, and equally rejects "zealotic denunciation of slavery" and any part in political agitation against it, holding that the Gospel opens "the way by which the slaves may at last attain to their bodily freedom." Five years before the war.
Melanchthon und Luther über Sclaverei — the Twelve Articles of 1525, set before American readers
Lehre und Wehre, Jahrgang 2, November 1856, p. 352 EN
The Twelve Articles of the peasants of Swabia — "it has hitherto been the custom that men have held us as their own property, which is a matter for pity, seeing that Christ has redeemed and purchased us all" — set before American readers in the year the Republican party first ran a presidential candidate.
Aufruf zu einer allgemeinen Conferenz — the call, and the men who signed it (1856)
Lehre und Wehre, Jahrgang 2, Juni 1856, p. 186 EN
The Aufruf zu einer allgemeinen Conferenz is reprinted across four consecutive numbers, and each printing carries a different set of names. It is not four copies of one document but a rolling subscription list for the free-conference movement, each line giving a man, his office, and the city he votes to meet in: "F. Wyneken, Pastor zu St. Louis, stimmt für Columbus, O." It opens with five St. Louis names, Walther among them, and by August has reached Sihler, Crämer, Brohm, Fick and Seyffarth.
Zu der Lehre von der Gnadenwahl, Seite 311 — where the compositor makes the scanner's mistake (1856)
Lehre und Wehre, Jahrgang 2, October 1856, p. 311 EN
Page 311 of O. Fürbringer's treatise on the election of grace, which runs S. 305-316. The passage argues from Exodus 33:19 and points to the proclaiming of the LORD's name — but the citation is set as "K. 84, 5 fgg." for chapter 34. The Fraktur 3 has a closed upper bowl and is read as an 8; the typesetter's hand made in 1856 the identical error this archive's OCR makes today, and it is preserved here exactly as printed.
Tabelle der verbotenen Verwandtschafts=Grade — the forbidden degrees, set as a wheel
Lehre und Wehre, Jahrgang 2, Mai 1856, p. 160 EN
Eight blocks of type arranged around the words "Take Not in Marriage," closing a series on prohibited marriages — a diagram built entirely out of movable type, and the one page in the volume that carries no printed page number. Best seen at full zoom.
Joh. Matthesii regulae pastorales, ins Deutsche übersetzt — pastoral rules in rhyme (1856)
Lehre und Wehre, Jahrgang 2, Februar 1856, p. 56 EN
A page of verse on how to be a pastor, translated from Johann Matthesius, Luther's early biographer: be ordained as is fitting, go where the Lord leads, feed the flock entrusted to you, and search the Old and the New for their sake. Unusual form for a journal of dogmatics, and it reads as a rule of life rather than an article.
Ob jemand die Schwester seiner verstorbenen Frau heirathen dürfe? — may a man marry his deceased wife's sister?
Lehre und Wehre, Jahrgang 2, September 1856, p. 268 EN
The question that occupied Anglo-American legislatures for a century, worked through here from Scripture and the Lutheran casuists for German pastors on the American frontier, where the state's marriage law and the church's did not agree.
Bayern, Seite 148 — Wilhelm Löhe's Gunzenhausen address, printed in full (1857)
Lehre und Wehre, Jahrgang 3, Mai 1857, p. 148 EN
Printed under the standing heading Bayern. Löhe spoke at the society conference at Gunzenhausen on 16 September 1856, and Walther's journal reprints the address at length — Löhe in his own words on congregational polity and on the independent Lutheran congregations of America. He names the Missouri, Buffalo and Iowa Synods together as factors of a Lutheran future, at a moment when his own relationship with Missouri was fraying and Missouri and Buffalo were in open conflict.
Kirchlich-Zeitgeschichtliches, Seite 219 — Ströbel answers Schenkel on freedom of conscience (1857)
Lehre und Wehre, Jahrgang 3, Juli 1857, p. 219 EN
One page of the Kirchlich-Zeitgeschichtliches department. "Professor Schenkel must really consider his fellow men more than arrant fools if he so much as attempts to sell them the juristically motivated formula of religious persecuting zeal as the standpoint of unconditional freedom of conscience." Ströbel traces that toleration back through the Herods, the Diocletians and the Innocents — who also asked only that believers wait until their religion had obtained the police placet — and lands on Stephen, James, Ignatius and Hus, who did not wait.
Kirchlich-Zeitgeschichtliches, Seite 222 — "Lutheran" declared a misprint for "liturgical" (1857)
Lehre und Wehre, Jahrgang 3, Juli 1857, p. 222 EN
A note in the Kirchlich-Zeitgeschichtliches department. A Berlin paper reported that a Lutheran service had been held in the united cathedral. "After a few days Lutheran was declared to be a misprint and liturgical was set in its place." The correction pleased the editors as an honest one — if only it were acknowledged, they add, that in all Unionist acts and reports the word Lutheran has probably always been a misprint for liturgical. The whole quarrel over the Prussian Union in one paragraph.
Wie werden wahrhaft lutherische Gemeinden gegründet und erzogen? — Sihler's congregation as a steam engine (1857)
Lehre und Wehre, Jahrgang 3, August 1857, p. 226 EN
Page 226 of Sihler's fourth article on congregational government, which runs S. 225-237. "A sort of ecclesiastical machine, in which the pastor is the engineer, the office the steam power, and the body of hearers the pistons, wheels and so forth that are moved and driven by this power, and that carry out the will of the spiritual engineer without consciousness." W. Sihler's image of what a congregation must not become — industrial machinery as a figure for church government, in 1857, aimed at Grabau's three-estates order.
Lutheranism in America, Seite 124 — the typesetter's eye slips and a line is set twice (1857)
Lehre und Wehre, Jahrgang 3, April 1857, p. 124 EN
A page of the review Lutheranism in America. "... stellt einen der wichtigsten Züge des Wortes Gottes und des Characters der Kirche dar. Die Eigenthümlichkeit der lutherischen Kirche dar. Die Eigenthümlichkeit der lutherischen Kirche besteht in ..." — the compositor returned to the wrong line and set the phrase twice. Kept exactly as printed: this archive records what the page says, not what it meant to say.
Vorwort. (Fortsetzung und Schluß.) — the editor's statement on slavery, concluded weeks after emancipation took effect (Februar 1863)
Lehre und Wehre, Jahrgang 9, Februar 1863, p. 33 EN
January's installment had promised to treat the slavery question "not, of course, insofar as it is a purely political question... but from the standpoint of Christian, religious morality." This concluding installment delivers on that promise: arguing from the Old Testament servitude laws, Paul's household codes, and Philemon that the master-slave relation is not sin in itself, and naming abolitionism "a child of unbelief," kin to rationalism, pantheism, and "modern socialism, Jacobinism, and communism." Printed weeks after the Emancipation Proclamation took effect — the journal's fullest wartime statement of its position.
Die alten lutherischen Lehrer über Sclaverei — the dogmaticians marshaled on the era's question (März–Juni 1863)
Lehre und Wehre, Jahrgang 9, März 1863, p. 79 EN
A running anthology, begun here and continued through the summer numbers: Luther on 1 Corinthians 7 and Melanchthon (März), Brenz, Cruciger and Chemnitz (April), Balduin and Reichard's 1617 Wittenberg disputation (Mai), Harleß's Ethics (Juni) — each excerpted to argue that the old Lutheran teachers had found civil servitude compatible with Scripture, not sin. Reichard traces bondage to Noah's curse and quotes Ambrose: "Today there would be no servitude, had there been no drunkenness."
Bericht der sechsten ordentlichen Synodalversammlung — admission made conditional on the slavery doctrine, unevenly (October 1863)
Lehre und Wehre, Jahrgang 9, October 1863, p. 306 EN
Prof. Crämer's submitted report of the Norwegian Synod's 1863 convention records the admission — ending a year-long schism — of Pastors Rasmussen, Fjeld and Amlund, only after the synod re-read a year-old private reconciliation and heard the men confess their "previous separatistic conduct... as sin." On slavery, Rasmussen declared himself "entirely clear" and in full agreement; Fjeld, admitted anyway, would only say he "no longer dared to oppose" the doctrine, admitting he was "not yet quite clear on the matter." An earlier installment (S. 279) records the opposite outcome: two Illinois congregations driving out Pastor A. C. Preus over the same doctrine.
Bericht der sechsten ordentlichen Synodalversammlung (Fortsetzung) — the Sunday debate, and a partial retreat (November 1863)
Lehre und Wehre, Jahrgang 9, November 1863, p. 332 EN
A floor debate, transcribed at length, on whether Sunday rests on divine command or Christian liberty. Pastor C. L. Clausen argues Sunday's divine institution from Mark 2:27, Acts 20:7 and Revelation 1:9; he is answered chiefly from Romans 14 and Colossians 2:16, and by analogy to other apostolic customs no one now holds binding. At the session's close, on a poll, only Clausen still answers yes — then withdraws it, confessing he had "thought more of his own earlier grounds than of the proofs brought against him," and asks the assembly's forgiveness for his manner of arguing, though not full recantation of his view. Marked "(To be concluded.)"
Dr. Hengstenbergs Stellung zu den Fragen von Amt und Kirchenregiment — Missouri answers Hengstenberg and Stahl (Juni 1863)
Lehre und Wehre, Jahrgang 9, Juni 1863, p. 165 EN
Prof. Brauer takes on two of German Lutheranism's most formidable names — Hengstenberg and Stahl — over church government and the preaching office, marshaling Luther from 1521 to 1533 against clerical hierarchy in every form, papal, consistorial, or Oberkirchencollegial, and framing the fight as for "the honor of Christ" and "the honor of Christians." The Missouri Synod's church-and-ministry doctrine argued on the European stage, in Walther's own journal.
Ein Beispiel der von den evangel.-luth. böhmischen Exulanten in Berlin ausgeübten Kirchenzucht — a whipping before the congregation, Berlin 1734 (Juli 1863)
Lehre und Wehre, Jahrgang 9, Juli 1863, p. 218 EN
Translated from the Berlin Bohemian exile congregation's own minute-book by Lic. theol. Borbis: a servant girl convicted of theft is disciplined before the assembled congregation — struck first by her own mother, then by an appointed brother — with hymn-singing, a formal liturgy of accusation and confession, and the story of Achan invoked to justify communal punishment. An unflinching record of eighteenth-century church discipline, printed as an example for 1863 readers.
Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte, Seite 156 — the Antichrist as "Napoleon VII.," circa 1986 (Mai 1863)
Lehre und Wehre, Jahrgang 9, Mai 1863, p. 156 EN
A reviewed Berlin pamphlet — reprinted from the Sächsisches Kirchen- und Schulblatt — lays out a three-act apocalyptic timetable and predicts Satan's personal incarnation "in the form of the last Buonaparte, probably Napoleon VII (about the year 1986)." The reviewer, reprinted approvingly, is unimpressed; the modern reader, with 1986 come and gone, gets that rarest of things — a dated prophecy with a 123-year fuse.
Kirchlich-Zeitgeschichtliches, Seite 319 — Codex Sinaiticus and the ending of Mark (October 1863)
Lehre und Wehre, Jahrgang 9, October 1863, p. 319 EN
Four years after Tischendorf carried the Sinai manuscript out of St. Catherine's, the journal reprints a Saxon churchman's technical verdict on what the oldest known New Testament means for the disputed ending of Mark (16:9–20) — concluding, against the alarmists, that Sinaiticus is actually a witness for the traditional ending, not against it. New textual criticism arriving, technically and seriously, in a confessional monthly. In December the same department prints Pius IX's autograph letter congratulating Tischendorf, hoping one day to "embrace" him as "a dearest son."
Kirchendienst und Kriegsdienst — may a pastor be drafted? (Februar 1864)
Lehre und Wehre, Jahrgang 10, Februar 1864, p. 46 EN
Written "especially now in our sorely afflicted fatherland, where they are thinking of calling even church servants to war service," this survey asks what the church has held about clergy under arms, and finds "through all the centuries in the church only one voice" against a minister volunteering as a soldier. It walks from the 83rd Apostolic Canon ("what is Caesar's is Caesar's, and what is God's is God's") through Origen's answer to Celsus — "no one fights more for the emperor than we do," by prayer — to the Council of Toledo and Luther. The page never names the country or the war; a St. Louis reader in February 1864 would not have needed it to.
Der Bund der Schwesterkirchen — Rome, Wittenberg, Geneva and Constantinople as sisters (Mai 1864)
Lehre und Wehre, Jahrgang 10, Mai 1864, p. 134 EN
Hengstenberg's Berlin church newspaper had concluded that "the Roman Catholic church is a sister of the Wittenberg-Catholic church; the papal church cannot do without the Lutheran," with the Greek and the Reformed churches as sisters behind them. Prof. Fleischmann takes the proposal apart under a mocking motto — "a thaler is equal to thirty silver groschen. So the Roman church is equal to the Lutheran" — and turns on the reader directly: "you, hidebound Lutheran, you Missouri Lutheran" are to learn from your sisters what you lack. His answer: "The Lutheran church exists by the grace of God, and not by the grace of his papal holiness."
Dr. K. K. Münkel's Beurtheilung der Schrift „Die rechte Gestalt…“ — Walther reports a Hanoverian verdict on his own book (Juli 1864)
Lehre und Wehre, Jahrgang 10, Juli 1864, p. 199 EN
Signed "By C. F. W. Walther in St. Louis," the editor lays before his readers what a leading Hanoverian churchman made of his book on the state-free congregation, and says why it matters: "the more this dreadful civil war calls young men into the field … the harder it becomes to find the necessary number of young men for the ever-increasing need of the church," so help from Germany depends on Germany approving Missouri's constitution. Münkel obliges — "a rare and admirable knowledge of the ancients," "genuinely Lutheran principles" — and Walther quotes him at length. One of the volume's few articles carrying the editor's own name.
Das Leben Jesu von Ernst Renan — the sensation of 1863 reviewed, and reviled (August 1864)
Lehre und Wehre, Jahrgang 10, August 1864, p. 237 EN
Submitted by Pastor Fick and translated by H. Otto, the review grants Renan's "Life of Jesus" "not a single new thought" and explains its success instead: Renan "sketches such an ideal that everyone — even the most ordinary worldling — recognizes himself again in it." It quotes Renan at length on the evangelists and on his "fifth gospel," the landscape of Galilee, and catches him contradicting himself. The review is also a document of its own prejudices: on page 240 it damns the Talmud in Luther's words and calls Renan's Jewish collaborator Neubauer "a deranged Jew." Both the argument and the language are on the page as printed.
Kirchlich-Zeitgeschichtliches, Seite 309 — a Union general orders a bishop's prayers (October 1864)
Lehre und Wehre, Jahrgang 10, October 1864, p. 309 EN
Printed while Price's Confederate army was in Missouri, the October news column's whole war is a Catholic bishop in Mississippi. Brigadier General Tuttle hands Bishop Elder of Natchez a prayer book: "I request you to read this prayer … I hate a traitor. There are many traitors in this city, and I believe you are one." The bishop: "I thank you, sir, for your compliment." Two Catholic paymasters point out that the prayer blesses a rebel governor; the general orders it read "exactly as it stands in the book." Elder appeals "directly to Major General Sherman and to President Lincoln," is banished to Vidalia by Special Order No. 11 and released by No. 31, and the editors, who have not one word about the raid on their own state, give him the last word: render unto Caesar.
Die Lehre der lutherischen Kirche vom Sonntag — against the Anglo-American Sunday (November 1864)
Lehre und Wehre, Jahrgang 10, November 1864, p. 321 EN
A tract by Dr. Philip Schaff, "The Anglo-American Sunday," delivered to the National Sunday Convention at Saratoga in August 1863, gives the journal its occasion "to lay before our honored readers, for once, the doctrine of the Lutheran Church concerning Sunday." The case is built from Article 28 of the Augsburg Confession — the bishops may make ordinances "so that things proceed in an orderly manner in the church," not to bind consciences — and from Luther, Brenz and Chemnitz, with an admission along the way that seventeenth-century Lutherans had already let the doctrine slip. Twenty-four pages, translated for the journal by Prof. Crämer.
Trost eines Dieners Christi in dieser traurigen Kriegszeit — Bishop Simpson's silver rifles (November 1864)
Lehre und Wehre, Jahrgang 10, November 1864, p. 350 EN
Under the heading "Comfort of a Servant of Christ in this Sad Time of War," the editors reprint the Methodist Bishop Simpson's Cincinnati speech on the national crisis: the gold mines of California, Idaho and Montana "are the basis of our wealth … Our ships could be armored with silver and our soldiers equipped with silver rifles," and if peace does not come by Christmas, "the petals of the June roses will bring it to us." The comment: "Such are the prophets the world wants to have" — and of repentance, the one thing a preacher owed a nation at war, "this false prophet said not a word." On the same page, McKendree Chapel in Nashville is returned to its Southern minister "by an order of President Lincoln."
Vorschlag und Probe zur Ausarbeitung eines Bibelcommentars aus den Schriften Dr. Luthers — Keyl's proposal (December 1864)
Lehre und Wehre, Jahrgang 10, December 1864, p. 353 EN
"Submitted by Pastor Keyl, Sr.," the last volume of the decade opens on a plan three centuries old: a commentary on the whole Bible assembled from Luther's own writings. Keyl traces it from Luther's wish for "a short commentary … for preachers" like Nicholas of Lyra's, through Conrad Porta's Pastorale Lutheri of 1582, Calov's folio Bible of 1682, Spener's unfinished attempt, and Förtsch's promised parva Biblia of 1726 that "never appeared" — to conclude that there is "as yet no Bible from the writings of Dr. Luther," and to offer a specimen. The compiler of the journal's own registers, proposing one more index.
Der über die Generalsynode hereinbrechende theologische Conflict — the General Council's prehistory, from the other side (December 1864)
Lehre und Wehre, Jahrgang 10, December 1864, p. 372 EN
A Lutheran Observer editorial, translated by Prof. Crämer, explains the split opening in the General Synod as the Observer's party sees it: a "party school" founded in Philadelphia, its organ the Lutheran and Missionary, and "Dr. C. P. Krauth Jr.," who "since his conversion to Ultra-Confessionalism … has at times displayed a very poor spirit, calling his former friends pirates and traitors." The St. Louis editors let it run with only their "(sic!)" and "(?)" in the margins — as when the Observer calls itself "entirely loyal to the Lutheran Church (?)." Two years before the General Council, the quarrel in the enemy's own words.
Ein gelehrter Neger über Sclaverei — Jacobus Capitein's 1742 dissertation, put to use (December 1864)
Lehre und Wehre, Jahrgang 10, December 1864, p. 380 EN
The volume's last word on slavery is the story of Jacobus Elisa Johannes Capitein, sold on the African coast "as a child of 7 or 8 years," raised and educated at The Hague, trained at Leiden, and sent back to Elmina as a missionary — who in 1742 defended a Latin dissertation "that slavery is not contrary to Christian liberty." The editors reprint it "to the shame of the abolitionist pseudo-theology, twisting of Scripture, and falsification of history now spreading so widely," a former slave's argument turned against the abolitionists in the last month of 1864. The item, and the use it is put to, are printed as they stand.
Die Freie Conferenz in Detroit — Missouri and Ohio argue the analogy of faith (April 1904)
Lehre und Wehre, Jahrgang 50, April 1904, p. 174 EN
Stöckhardt's report on the third intersynodical free conference, Detroit, 6–8 April 1904. Ohio and Iowa made the "organic whole" of doctrine the highest norm of interpretation and drew election "in view of faith" from justification; one speaker held that even John 3:16 gets its full light only from other passages. The Synodical Conference answered that the analogy of faith is simply the scriptura clara, each article drawn from its own sedes doctrinae, and quoted Luther against Carlstadt. A motion to open with prayer was dropped because common prayer is "a sign and a part of church fellowship"; 305 pastors and professors signed the roll.