American Lutheranism, page 149 by Friedrich Bente
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espectable a part of the Church of Christ [North Carolina Synod], I request the opinion of your Synod on the above points." The answer, formulated by R. J. Miller and Peter Schmucker, and approved of by the ministerium, was: "We do not say that all who are baptized with water are regenerated and converted to God, so that they are saved without the operation of the Holy Spirit, or in other words, without faith in Christ." "We do not believe and teach that the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ are bodily received with the bread and wine in the Holy Supper, but that the true believer receives and enjoys it spiritually together with all saving gifts of His suffering and death, by faith in Jesus Christ." (681.) According to the report of the Henkels, the doctrine of predestination as taught by the Presbyterians was also touched upon, for in it we read: "One of the members declared, and sought to maintain, that it was impossible for a man to fall from the grace of God after he had once been truly converted. Another denied the doctrine of Baptism as laid down in our catechism and in the Second and Ninth Articles of the Augsburg Confession. The offer was made to a third to prove to him from his own handwriting that he denied the doctrine of the Lord's Supper as set forth in the Tenth Article [of the Augsburg Confession]. They offered to have the letter read; but our opponents did not agree to this. A book was placed before him and a passage was pointed out to him, in order that he might read what Luther, of blessed memory, himself teaches on this question. He closed it angrily and pushed it away. A fourth put the question: 'Can I not be a [Presbyterian] predestinarian and also a Lutheran?' For he believed that the [Presbyterian] doctrine of predestination could be proven from the Bible. He received the answer: 'If he believed as the Predestinarians believe, then he belonged to them, and might go to them, it did not concern us.'--For these reasons we believed to be all the more certain that they were not true Evange