# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juli 1855_S213
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Prof. Dr. Hengstenberg’s Judgment on the State of the Union. 213

proceeds along such paths and advances with subjectivity against objectivity, and can only cause bitterness.

If we may regard Dr. Jul. Müller as the representative of the friends of the absorptive Union, a substantial advance can be discerned among them. As recently as the General Synod, the Union was for them the vehicle for introducing modern mediating theology in place of the church’s confession. Dr. Müller now openly admits that the General Synod’s procedure in formulating the consensus was not based purely on documentary sources, but was rather a fusion of the old church confession and modern theology.*) Now, by contrast, far narrower limits are set for the Union. “The Union,” says Dr. Müller, “is nothing else and can be nothing else than the unification of this historically defined Lutheran Church and this equally defined Reformed Church into one church fellowship.” We welcome this advance, but we believe that the enthusiasm for the Union actually applied to its earlier formulation and has merely been transferred to the present one. We find it entirely natural that quite a few people now “turn away from the Union with indifference, as from an undertaking that is basically petty and unequal to the great demands of the present.” No one can reasonably feel ardent enthusiasm for a mere minus—and that is what the absorptive Union is in its latest form. The Church can truly glory in God only in deeds that proceed from positive faith and to which the words apply: “You have wrestled with God and prevailed.” Joy over church union with the few Reformed people in the eastern provinces, with whom one would live in peaceful relations even without the Union, cannot counterbalance the sorrow over separation from the 48,000 separated Lutherans and the strained relationship with the Lutheran Churches of neighboring countries, still less the sorrow over the turmoil, alienation, indignation, and exhaustion of noble energies in this joyless struggle brought about by the pressure of the absorptive Union. Moreover, we are convinced that the limit now drawn is in itself untenable, and that it can be maintained only for the moment through favorable circumstances and through the goodwill and sense of justice of the present government. “A time may easily come,” says Dr. Müller, “when the Union will have much more difficulty defending itself against its friends than it now has against its enemies.” When that time comes, the destructive friends of the Union will storm through the breach prepared by the relatively conservative ones. The arbitrariness with which the doctrinal differences separating the confessions from one another have been treated as matters of indifference will serve as a cloak for a more far-reaching arbitrariness that differs from it not in essence, but only in degree. When this

*) Publication: The Evangelical Union, pp. 138 ff.