# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1854 06 20_S172
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

172

believing congregation is founded and in whose faith it fulfils the offices, is not a word of command and law, but a word of grace and promise, therefore the Church sets the order in which it administers that which belongs to the office, call it what one will, not as legal compulsion and command, but as an offering to the free and uncompelled faith of the congregation.

§. 17. These are the fundamental features of the doctrine of Church and Ministry as it holds in the congregation of believers and has for its presupposition a believing congregation or Church, a Christian holy people.

§. 18. After the pattern of the order of the believing congregation, "the outward Christendom," — the communion of the ecclesiastical signs, or the visible Church — rightly orders itself also; only that herein much weakness and fault, sin and shame, factions and offence may creep in (see on Thesis 8.). This grievance must not move believers to depart from a Church which still has Word and Sacrament pure, but one must the more remain, contend and strive, until the Lord gives the Church victory.

* * * * * * *

These are the Harleß theses. It may be that these theses call forth some questions that remain unanswered. We must therefore refer once more to the testimonies from Luther's writings given with them, in which the further elaboration is found, and after an attentive comparison of which hardly any question that forces itself upon the reader and bears directly upon the matter will remain unanswered.

Bright Sides and Shadow Sides of the Lutheran Church in Germany.

When we here first wish to give notice that now in the Lutheran Church of our old homeland, amid all the misery of our time, more and more bright sides are coming to the fore, we by no means proceed from the principle of certain theologians here, that peace and tolerance among theologians in regard to differences of doctrine are a bright side of a church. Rather we reckon precisely this among the more and more prominent bright sides of the Church of the fatherland, that just that peace, that tolerance, that shrinking from a conflict which disturbs the comfort and the cosiness of living together, eating and drinking, is beginning to vanish over there also almost everywhere. As the fairest bright side, however, it appears to us that in Germany one is coming more and more to the insight that, precisely on the part of those who until now were held to be the representatives of Lutheran orthodoxy, the pattern of the old Lutheran doctrine is gradually forsaken and its direction taken toward Rome, and that one now steps into the lists against this and, regardless of what high authorities of the present are thereby attacked, contends ever more resolutely for the imperilled dear heritage of the fathers.

The testimonies thereto, which come into our hands every month with the newest various German periodicals, are so many that we must content ourselves with communicating only now and then One such to our readers. This time first the testimony of a Lauenburg theologian, by name A. Brömel. He has namely in the second quarterly number of this year of the Rudelbach-Guerick periodical published an essay under the title: "The Invisible Is the True Church," from which we wish to communicate some extracts to our readers. The essay speaks indeed only of shadow sides of the Lutheran Church of Germany, but itself belongs to its bright sides, wherefore we have both nicely together with it.

In the introduction of the essay the writer at once laments and comforts himself that the theologians of Germany have fallen into discord over the question what the Church is. That one could not agree about this at the last Leipzig Conference either, for that reason he will not "cast a quite special shadow" upon this Conference, for "the men, he says quite rightly, who spoke at Leipzig, are indeed just the same as they are at home," where it always comes out "suddenly everywhere that the ground of all differences is the doctrine of the Church." Brömel therefore gives the counsel, "to suspend the Conference altogether for now," since by talking back and forth the matter is not settled anyhow, *) and proceeds as follows: "Unlutheran conceptions of the Church will always bring with them unlutheran views of the ministry in the Church, just as whoever thinks rightly of the Church will also think rightly of the ministry in the Church and its constitution.. If, however, we seek to come to an understanding about the Church, we must first remark: new thoughts, new scientific investigations with new results (outcomes) must be false here. What kind of a Church would that be, which for centuries had taught falsely about itself! And what would be to be expected today from the attempt to understand the Church better, when, bleeding from a thousand wounds, it is only gradually coming back to its senses, after having in the days of its strength vainly expressed itself on the subject! We must abide by what the Symbols teach. One need only look behind one in this matter: the two only consistent opinions about the Church have been pronounced and sufficiently set forth: Rome in its Confessions calls only the visible, the Lutheran Church calls only the invisible the proper and true Church. What today, between the old definitions, has been found out, or is yet to be found out, as new and allegedly deeper, belongs to one of the historically already pronounced conclusions. But this must be remarked at once beforehand: the Lutheran Church has never denied that the Church also has a visible form. About that there is no dispute. Only the Lutheran Church does not lay the emphasis upon its visibility — it teaches: the proper Church is the invisible."

"There is now going about among us a definition (explanation) of the Church which openly declares that it cannot be reconciled with the symbolical determinations.. How comes it now that today one arrives at such opposite views? The explanation lies near. The ancients were with the Church in statu confessionis (they were pressed by their enemies to make their confession), they were with their whole soul in it, sighing and contending, building and searching they sought not the Church in general, but the true Church. Everywhere in the Confessions, therefore, there is no talk of the Church in general, but of the true Church. Among the moderns, who are often less in statu confessionis than rather in statu professionis (that is, they wish to devise in their study, as learned professors, what the Church is), the true Church is not sought, but the Church in general. As one asks: what is the State? or as the philosophers of old asked: what is God? so one asks now: what is the Church? But thus one can dispute very much about the Church and yet does not learn what it is. What is the true Church, this question is pleasing to God and men. And of this true Church, as has just been remarked, the Confessions speak. In the 7th Article of the Augsb. Confession it is taught that there must at all times be one holy, Christian Church and abide, therefore not a Church in general, but a holy, Christian Church, and indeed this is not the great, spiritually unbound mass

*) Prof. Dr. Guericke makes the following remark: "that a Conference which, as has recently been done according to the protocol, has passed judgment on the American question, has thereby already divested itself of its ecumenical Lutheran character and taken from itself the former church-historical ecumenical Lutheran significance, under the presidency of a Rudelbach and a Harleß, as one of the "great"; its future holding or not holding is therefore — since freer (that is, everywhere and especially in the doctrine of the Church truly symbolical) Lutherans will in any case ignore it henceforth — "itself indifferentiated" (that is, made a matter of indifference) "has." — Moreover not only Prof. Dr. Guericke, who may be regarded by many as a partisan, judges thus of the Leipzig Conference. Similar voices have been raised about it, soon after its last session, in the most various parts of Germany. Thus among others the editor of the "Kirchenblatt für die ev.-luth. Gemeinde des Herzogthums Braunschweig," L. Wolff, already in this year's February number wrote as follows: "We believe we do not assert too much when we say: The Leipzig Conference has lost the ecumenical-Lutheran character which dwelt in it in the first years. Not a little tends to disturb a wholesome course of such conferences when they are to end with the assent of the members to formulated theorems (doctrinal determinations) extending to generalities. In the end the true result of the proceedings is obscured by agreement upon deliberately half-clear propositions. And what is gained with the half-unwilling pronouncement on all sides and the unsatisfied assent? Really nothing but a pressure of conscience, that one has not done what one really ought to have done."