# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1849 12 21_S1001
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Theological Supplement
to the Sixth Volume of the "Lutheraner."
"God's Word and Luther's doctrine shall pass away nevermore."
Published by the German Evangelical Lutheran Synod of Missouri, Ohio and Other States.
Edited by C. F. W. Walther.
St. Louis, Mo., December 21, 1849.

(Submitted.)

Some Remarks on a Correspondence Article in the Deutscher Kirchenfreund, Entitled: "The German Evangelical Church Union of the West." October Number, 1849.

If peace is to come, if we all are at last to walk one and the same way, then the first requirement is surely that we be truthful and sincere toward one another. We Reformed, Unionists and Lutherans do indeed wish for the present to be members of one church (we Lutherans also wish and desire this, if only people would at last believe us in it), but we are not yet so; if therefore we have something to say to one another, or wish to set something out between us, then, I should think, it would be well if we also called one another handsomely by name, for then one knows at once whom it concerns. Indirect speaking and quibbling, veiled attack, is on the whole more a French manner than a German way. Why then does the Herr Correspondent not say right out: that synod "which with its views, as the only true ones, leapt boldly and brashly upon the scene, and asserted so long that it was absolutely necessary, until it brought it about that here and there a need for it declared itself," that synod is the Missouri-Ohio Synod, since from his standpoint he could understand no other by those words; although the sentence itself, which is meant to be such a thrust at us, utters at once something absurd and something untrue? For it is a strange synod indeed that keeps on asserting that it is absolutely necessary, and by this assertion has at last actually brought it about that here and there a need for it has arisen. The assertion of something absolutely necessary may well arouse curiosity, but is still far from arousing the need for this non plus ultra; that arises only when the necessary is recognized and felt as such. Now the Missouri-Ohio Synod, moreover, has never asserted that it is absolutely necessary; and one might therefore again be in doubt whether it is really meant, if one did not know that even those who speak much in favor of the so-called "peace," like the Herr Correspondent, when it concerns the Lutherans, can fall into a zeal which is apt to reach out too far, but, alas, "keeps the heavy artillery of proofs for the justification of the attack waiting a long time." —

To that indirect manner of speech belongs also what is said on page 387, among other things: "But whoever knows the history of the united church, especially that in Prussia, where movements chiefly arose, not merely from the outcry of fanaticized parties, etc.," for by the "fanaticized parties" Herr F. B. can again understand only the one, the Lutheran; for the Unionist and Reformed have not cried out, only the Lutheran would not deny its LORD by silence and yielding, when they sought in that shameful and treacherous manner to defraud it of its jewel of faith. —

Perhaps the Herr Author had in view, at the following passage also, the Missouri-Ohio Synod at least among others, when he says: "The Lutheran church as such has never denied the existence of a unity (namely between Reformed and Lutherans); but all the more zealously has this been done by individual parties in the Lutheran church." If the Missouri-Ohio Synod is meant and attacked among the individual "parties," which according to the whole context is very probable, then this would indeed be once more only one of those Don Quixote-like rides against windmills, undertaken in false zeal; for the Missouri-Ohio Synod has never, for all the "difference of principle" that prevails, denied a certain unity, a certain common ground; but that both, a radical difference of principle, naturally in certain doctrines, and at the same time again something in common in other doctrines of two confessions, cannot be conceived together, as the Correspondent asserts, is only an empty assertion, refuted by history itself. — We would here, however, still ask who those "individual parties" are supposed to be at all? We know only of one, issued from the Lutheran church, which in a fanatical spirit, falsely exclusive toward every other ecclesiastical tendency, came forward, namely those enthusiastic bands of the sixteenth century, in many respects Reformed in disposition, especially those at Münster. For what the Herr F. B. says about the Wittenberg Faculty under Calov shows plainly that he does not comprehend what the Lutheran church means by it when she acknowledges a unity among all Christian sects. We Lutherans believe that among all sects of Christendom there are true disciples of Christ, namely all those "who here and there in the world, from the rising of the sun to the going down thereof, truly believe in Christ" (Concb. N. Y. Ausgabe S. 140). Nevertheless, when false-believing "teachers" defend their "abominable errors against the evangelical teachers," and so remain in error and approve of it, then the Lutheran church "as such," in entire agreement with the consensus repetitus of that Faculty, has always decidedly denied the existence of unity with such teachers, but has for that very reason been all the more zealously assailed by those apostate, lax, so-called Lutheran parties. It can also be explained only by a strange, momentary mental embarrassment how the Correspondent can adduce as something unheard of that in that consensus "it is expressly said that no fellowship in Christ (fraternitas in Ch.) can be entered into between the confessors of the Augsburg Confession and the Reformed," for the Lutheran church has always and at all times asserted precisely the same thing, and the opposite only the church-mingling spirits, especially of the present time.*) Yes, if the Lu-

*) Even Spener, whom the Union people always like to celebrate as the one who led the Lutheran church out again from its loveless polemic against those of other faiths, writes in his theological Bedenken: "It remains a settled matter that no heterodoxus qua talis can be saved. But I will readily allow that where one speaks with people who have not studied Theologiam, they will not understand such phrasin, therefore no