# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1849 12 11_S57
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Der Lutheraner.

"God's Word and Luther's doctrine pure shall to eternity endure."

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

Edited by C. F. W. Walther.

Volume 6.  St. Louis, Mo., December 11, 1849.  No. 8.

Terms: Der Lutheraner appears once every two weeks at the yearly subscription price of One Dollar for subscribers living out of town, who are to pay it 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 addressed to the editor; all others, however, which contain business matters, orders, cancellations, money, etc., are to be sent hither under the address: Mr. F. W. Barthel, care of C. F. W. Walther, St. Louis, Mo.

The Inaugural Address of Dr. Sprecher.

In the number of the "Lutheran Observer" of the 26th of October of this year we find an extract from an inaugural address recently delivered by Dr. S. Sprecher, President of Wittenberg College at Springfield in Ohio. Therein it says, among other things, as follows:

"Our position is this, that while as Lutherans we prefer our own symbols, we revere them as an abstract and in a certain measure as a historical record of our doctrines, and teach according to the form in which they present the truth, in order to effect a good understanding among us, who are laborers in the same part of the vineyard of the LORD; that we furthermore do not regard it as necessary to bind our consciences to more than what is now also regarded by all (other) evangelical Christians as the fundamental doctrine of the Bible. We are bound only to believe that the sublime plan of the Gospel is taught in the Augsburg Confession. This is the position which the General Synod and the American Lutheran Church in general have taken, and the same appears to have been that of the Church in the earlier and purer days of the Reformation. In Luther's lifetime the symbols of the Church then existing were regarded by their authors and others not as clothed in every respect with obligatory authority or as binding upon posterity, but as their confession of faith and as their testimony to the truth. They were therefore regarded as confessions which still admit of alterations and improvements."

We have read this passage with no small astonishment. It does indeed not surprise us that the Methodist Apologist writes of the whole address: "The same ought to be printed as a tract in the German language and given to every member of a German Lutheran congregation." For this address would indeed be a suitable means of tearing the Lutheran faith, where it still exists, out of the heart of our Lutherans and driving them to the Methodists or to some other sect. For it says plainly therein that the Lutheran teachers in this country regard themselves as so bound to the Lutheran symbols that they would have to believe nothing but what is acknowledged by all so-called evangelical Christians as their fundamental doctrines! But what shall we say to the fact that the above has flowed from the pen of the president of a college calling itself Lutheran? Apart from the fact that, to judge from the above, Dr. Sprecher at any rate calls himself a Lutheran only in a satirical manner, we did not know, in reading through the assertions cited, how a man of even moderate education could put forward the like. We thought: first, the learned man must at any rate not have considered what he here wrote down, when he asserts that our fathers regarded the symbols as their confession of faith and as their testimony to the truth, and yet held them to be capable of alteration and improvement; for thereby the Herr President plainly contradicts himself. Or should he really regard our fathers as people who had an uncertain "faith" (which is simply an absurdity, Heb. 11:1), who professed opinions and problems as their faith, who held even the "truth" to be a shimmering chameleon, and who declared themselves ready at any moment to die for such phantoms of faith and truth? — In reading through the above it also grew doubtful to us, if the whole address is not an irony, whether the Herr Doctor has ever given the first symbols of our Church an attentive perusal, but still more whether he has deemed the relevant part of church history worthy of his study; for both would have had to keep him from stepping before the public in earnest with the above.

Our Confessions by no means declare themselves to be mere "historical records and testimonies" of the faith which the so-called Lutherans just happened to have at the time of their composition, which might just as well be false as true and therefore be capable of alteration or improvement, but, although not sources and rules of faith, yet testimonies of how and that men at that time had and held fast the eternal unchangeable truth and confessed the one unchangeable faith of the One universal Christian Church. Thus it says at the close of the "Articles of Faith and Doctrine" in the Unaltered Augsburg Confession: "This is nearly the sum of the doctrine which in our churches has been preached and taught for proper Christian instruction and comfort of consciences, also for the betterment of believers; as indeed we would not willingly put our own souls and consciences in the highest and greatest danger before God by misuse of the divine name or Word, or bequeath to our children and posterity any other doctrine than such as is in accordance with the pure divine Word and Christian truth. Since then the same is clearly grounded in Holy Scripture, and moreover is not contrary or opposed to the universal Christian, yea, Roman Church, so far as can be gathered from the writings of the Fathers, we think that our adversaries also cannot be at variance with us in the articles above set forth." Had the first Lutheran confessors now meant that the Augsburg Confession was nevertheless capable of alteration and improvement, they would, according to the above declaration, have believed in a blasphemous manner that they could alter and improve the holy Word of God and the Christian truth itself. But thus it also says further, after the enumeration of the "abuses," at the close of the whole, that all these articles were so framed "in order that no new and ungodly doctrine might creep into our churches, break in, and gain the upper hand." After these words it is as clear as the sun that the authors of the Confession certainly held it authoritative and binding for all members of the true Church, and wished it to be re-