Sometimes you need to just get something off your chest and rant. The good thing about rants is that they are utterly honest about the author's point - at least in what they are trying to defend. The bad thing is that they are hardly fair to the other side and the affirmations made can be a bit extreme and need to balanced by other concerns.
Before William Julius Mann replied to the "Synodical Platform", Rev. John N. Hoffman wrote this rant. Mann's "Plea" was more influential, but Pastor Hoffman raises many good points as well. Probably the biggest weakness of this is the tone, especially in the first chapter. I know that I was put off my the excessive exclamation points (do you really need three of them in a row?) and I am quite sympathetic to the author. I was really wondering if this was worth the time and effort to release.
But then I found very useful discussion about what we Lutherans consider "doctrinal" and "confessional" in the discussion of "Ceremonies of the Mass" and "Exorcism". Especially helpful are the extended quotes from Lutheran Orthodox theologians like Martin Chemnitz and Johann Gerhard.
As a product of the 19th century, he assumes you can follow the Latin and German He sumarizes as you go along in English so I wouldn't say it is useless if you don't have the languages, but some abilities in these languages would be a plus.
Re: Footnotes, the author admits that he isn't consistent about when he quotes things in notes and when they are in the text. You have been warned. In one place he has a footnote to a footnote. Since I know no way to do this nesting of footnotes, I have put them side to side (# 40 & 41 on pg. 76). As I release it, I realize that I probably should have included a few Large Catechism links here. Maybe in a later release.
I have added some links to the Book of Concord. However, for some reason it appears that some of the links on pg. 44 don't work - at least in my compiled version. They do work in the docx version from Word 2007 though. I really wish these would work, because they are to Latin quotes of the Smalcald Articles. He footnotes the German text, but I wanted links to the English.
I have also added a few links to Schmucker's "The American Lutheran Church". They work with the rough draft of this work I have so far, but obviously will not work for you until I release it. I am curious if it will work AFTER I release it for you , or if the PBB id's used will be different when different users compile the same docx.
Because of Language issues, it would be nice if I had links to the Chemnitz Examination of the Council of Trent so you could see it in English. Unfortunately I do not have these resources in Logos format.
The source for this is from Google Books, specifically: http://books.google.com/books?id=sKosAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=inauthor:%22John+N.+Hoffman%22&hl=en&ei=vVxyTtyJC5SlsAL6__z-CQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CDIQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false
I have corrected some of the OCR from looking at the page images, but strongly suspect that some errors remain.
SDG.
Ken McGuire
