# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1850 10 01_S19
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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excite themselves more or less for a time, in order to warm themselves and the world for Christianity, so that afterward they themselves fell prey to an all the greater slackness and faintness of heart and led the world on. The Spenerian tendency vanished, after the lapse of a few decades, into the Herrnhut congregation and into the small circles of the Quiet in the Land, living in resigned hope toward a better time to come; and nothing out of it has remained more directly to the Church as a whole than that impulse toward license in churchly matters and toward the breaking of the old ordinances of the Church which she had given."

(To be continued.)

Open Declaration of a Layman against the Union of the Evangelical Lutheran Church with the Reformed. *)

*) Another Alsatian tract. Ed.

With deep pain I have read a paper which demands a united, mixed church in the French fatherland, and thus the dissolution of our Evang. Luth. Church. Even without the summons, "every single member of the congregation shall speak out and give his vote," I should have felt myself constrained to testify aloud against such a demand, inspired by the spirit of the age, which is made upon us members of the Evang. Luth. Church.

Yes, indeed, no one should keep silent who still bears a spark of love for his "spiritual mother" in him; every faithful member of our Church should let his innermost conviction become loud, over against the blindness, indifference, and confusion of those who pretend "to do a work well-pleasing to God" (John 16, 2). Yes, they think to do God a service, those who would strike out with a stroke of the pen, or through the machinery of the State, the Evangelical Lutheran Church, the Church of the Augsburg Confession, and set in its place a church of the spirit of the age and of false enlightenment! For it is truly a matter of nothing less than putting aside our old Confession, founded on the Bible, and for a long time men have been seeking an opportunity for it. Now they come with the seemingly so laudable Christian invitation to form henceforth, as has indeed already happened in several countries, only "One United Evangelical Church of France." But upon what foundation, they do not say! — They have set at the head the apostolic word: "Old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new" (2 Cor. 5, 17) (read—read—read the whole chapter!!!), and have taken the same in the sense as if the time of the old faith, with its eighteen hundred years of experience, had made way for the new time, for enlightenment and the rule of reason, or, to speak better, of unbelief! They speak of "political and social conditions "which are going toward a new shaping, and conclude from this that the Church also must follow this movement. We, however, cry with the prophet into this ungodly talk and bustle: "Stand ye in the ways, and see, and ask for the old paths, where is the good way, and walk therein, and ye shall find rest for your souls." (Jer. 6, 16.) Yes, that is what the Church of the Augsburg Confession says, and not what the apostates or the blind echoers of the fashionable religion put into her mouth! The Church rests upon eternal foundations, and whatever society forsakes them must dissolve and sink into ruins! "The ways of the LORD are unchangeable."

"But," I hear them cry out, "that is not the question at all, but the union of the Reformed and the Evangelical Lutherans, for which not merely unbelievers and indifferentists, but also magnanimous men, penetrated by the Christian spirit, have long and in vain striven.

Do you suppose, then, you men of concord, that we, who confess the Formula of Concord, wish and long for no union?! O we can assure you solemnly that we long from our whole heart for the hour when all church parties shall unite into One Flock; but we also know only too well that this can happen solely and alone upon the ground of the truth. Where men are not one in the truth (John 17, 17—23), there is no true unity possible or conceivable! — But men say, self-sufficiently, "that the difficulties which the earlier attempts at union found are today removed in the eyes of all enlightened and tolerant Protestants." So men would then be agreed on the important points of doctrine in which they formerly diverged so greatly?! So the Reformed would then really have become so Evangelical Lutheran that they, as the Lutheran Church has done, had bowed unconditionally and with childlike faith under the whole full truth!? — O by no means! Among them and among us men have only become so enlightened (but not by the Holy Ghost!) that they stride past the most important doctrines of faith and regard them as unessential; men have become so tolerant that they dare no longer say a word against the most powerful errors. They speak of love, and yet know not the love which can rejoice only in the truth (1 Cor. 13, 6); not the burning love of Paul, which pronounces, upon ungodly doctrines as well as upon ungodly life, not its own, but God's judgment. — No, such a union we do not want. Such a union cannot, after all, stand the test, and also cannot bring forth good fruits (Matt. 7, 18). We see this sufficiently in the united church in Prussia. There at the beginning great crowds were brought together, and the poor Evangelical Lutheran Church, which was robbed of all her well-acquired rights, stood there "as a cottage in a vineyard, as a lodge in a garden of cucumbers" (Isa. 1, 8). But in recent time the consciousness of that which was given up is awakening again everywhere; men repent of that from which they have fallen; hundreds of pastors and congregations unite again upon the ground of the Evangelical Lutheran Confession, and are concerned to restore the old standing of the Church in the land as it was before the Union. But such facts the new union-makers keep silent about. To return to the old truth and to forsake the lying ambiguity in Word and Sacrament, of that they themselves will hear nothing.

But on that account, dear fellow believers, be most urgently exhorted to hold fast that which ye have, and to let no one rob you of your jewel! Hold fast to the Confession of your Church, yes, learn to know this Confession again aright, for it is terribly grievous how so many among you, yes, even so many teachers of the congregations, no longer know the Confession of their Church! — Learn to know it, the Augsburg Confession! Learn to know them, the books of faith of our pious forefathers, and hold them to the touchstone of the Word of God; let yourselves not be led astray by the empty talk of those who say: we need no confession any more! Hearken rather to the ever-valid word of the Holy Ghost out of Paul's mouth, who sets up "confessing with the mouth" just as well as "believing with the heart" as the condition of salvation (Rom. 10, 9. 10.)

To confess Jesus Christ means to confess the whole full truth, for He has said: I am the Truth!!! And the holy Apostle John calls those outright deceivers who will not confess Him (2 John 7). Beware (Matt. 7, 15). — Consider especially also wherein the Evangelical Reformed Church, with which men would unite you, differs from ours. There prevails pretty generally the prejudice among the people as if between the two churches there were only a small difference, and it consisted in this, "that the Reformed have bread at the Lord's Supper, and we Lutherans have wafers; that they pray: Our Father, and we, Father Our." But it is not so: the Reformed churches rather pervert the holy Supper in that they understand and interpret the words of the Testament of our Lord Jesus Christ otherwise than they may be interpreted according to their sound and healthy sense. — They deny the omnipresence of the glorified humanity of Jesus; they rend His person in such an unseemly manner, as if His Godhead were everywhere, but His humanity only in Heav-