# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1852 12 07_S57
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Der Lutheraner.

(Rev. John, Chap. 14, v. 6.)

"God's Word and Luther's doctrine shall pass away neither now nor ever."

Published by the German Ev. Lutheran Synod of Missouri, Ohio and other States.

Edited by C. F. W. Walther.

Volume 9.  St. Louis, Mo., December 7, 1852.  No. 8.

Terms: Der Lutheraner appears once every two weeks at the yearly subscription price of One Dollar for subscribers living at a distance, who must pay in advance and bear the postage. — In St. Louis each single number is sold for 5 cents.

Only those letters which contain communications for the paper are to be sent to the editor; all others, which contain business matters, orders, cancellations, money, etc., are to be sent here under the address Mr. F. W. Barthel, care of C. F. W. Walther, St. Louis, Mo.

Does the Lutheran Church Act Rightly in Rejecting the Hand of Fellowship Which the Reformed Church Offers Her?

(Continuation and Conclusion)

But is it not unloving to exclude from communion Reformed or United people who wish to commune in our Church? Shall the unrest and the clamor of strife be allowed to press into the very Holy of Holies of the Church, the Sacrament of the Altar? It is, after all, a meal of love. It is, after all, the Lord's table, not the table of the Church.

To this we give first of all the definite historical answer: the exclusion of the Reformed from the Lord's Supper was from of old the universally accepted practice of the Church in our Lutheran Church, so far as she kept herself pure from Philippistic syncretism.*) We shall prove this in an appendix, as far as the evidence is at present accessible to us.

*) That is, Melanchthonian confusion of churches. The Editor.

It is further well known that our Church has fought a battle unto blood for centuries over the pure doctrine of the Holy Supper. The doctrine of the Lord's Supper has thereby been raised infinitely high above all matters of indifference (Adiaphora). It has become the Shibboleth of the Church, by which she recognizes who is with her and who against her. Her distinctive character, to be sure, does not exhaust itself in the doctrine of the Lord's Supper, but it is concentrated therein.†) The pure doctrine of justification over against the Roman Church and the pure doctrine of the Lord's Supper over against the Reformed Church — these are the two ventricles of the heart of the Lutheran nature.

†) That is, it has its center therein. The Editor.

How could and how can the Church, in view of this importance of the doctrine of the Lord's Supper in itself, and of this importance which it has acquired for her in the course of a history three hundred years long, drenched with sweat and blood and tears, be indifferent as to whether he who wishes to go to the Lord's Supper in her congregations has the right Scriptural knowledge of the Sacrament of the Lord or not! If she were to admit to the Lord's table Reformed with Zwinglian or Calvinistic doctrine, or United with their view that makes the distinguishing doctrines indifferent,*) she would lay aside the weapon of the fathers, conclude a false peace, favor ignorance, and sanctify lukewarmness. If her children do this, they act without commission and against the spirit of the mother.

*) That is, the United hold the view that it makes no difference what a man believes on those points in which the Lutherans and the Reformed do not agree. The Editor.

The old practice, hostile to such false communion fellowship, does indeed look very unloving, and where it has fallen into oblivion and decay, as with us in Bavaria, it appears almost like inhumanity itself. Nor do we wish to deny that this practice, exercised by those who have only an orthodox head and no living faith in love, can become very repellent and ruinous to souls. If the cure of souls in general is an unspeakably tender business, and, as Bernard of Clairvaux says somewhere, every soul is like a vessel filled to the brim with Christ's blood, which the pastor has to carry, eternally responsible for every drop spilled: then here, where it is a matter of partaking of the holy Supper, this most tender mystery of the love that was crucified for us and is now glorified, double and threefold tenderness is needful, and here it must be said in the infinitely highest sense: Destroy not him with thy meat, for whom Christ died. But where that practice is administered by a pastor who is not merely a Christian in name and a Pharisaical Lutheran, there the rough shell hides a sweet kernel, the hard mussel a precious pearl, the apparent harshness a blessed constraint.

For the holy Supper is not only a self-giving of the Lord, it is also a confession of the congregation proclaiming His death; it is the culminating point (the summit) of divine service, the chief act of the Church's common activity, the highest