# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_October 1855_S307
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Kingdom of Saxony. 307

severity rebuked, where one called himself of Paul, another of Cephas, a third of Apollos, a fourth of Christ." Dr. Großmann, however, had badly miscalculated if he thought he could weaken, by phrases of that kind, the impression that the preceding confessions of faith had produced. The reporter, v. Erdmannsdorf, replied: "Presumptuous as it may perhaps sound for me, as a layman, to contradict the reverend last speaker, one of the oldest and most highly placed clergymen of the land, I nevertheless cannot help saying once more, in the sense of Mayor Starke and against the last speaker, that I too know no middle ground; and when the reverend gentleman cites apostolic sayings, I must answer with another word of Scripture: from one spring there cannot flow both sweet and bitter. Gentlemen, there is only one truth, only one Lutheran Church, *) only one Lutheran confession; if a layman feels driven in his conscience to adopt another confession that better answers his subjective point of view, let him do so — we will not condemn him; but let him likewise not condemn us for holding faithfully to our own. I must therefore decidedly oppose the honored last speaker when he speaks of a middle way. When he said that the Ministry of Worship stands above all confessions, I must grant him that; it does indeed, by virtue of the jus circa sacra, have to oversee all confessions; but it also has, precisely, the double position of being, by virtue of the jus episcopale, likewise the supreme church authority of the Lutheran Church, and in that position it has only one direction, prescribed by Holy Scripture, by the unaltered Augsburg Confession, and by our symbolical books. In that respect, then, I do not understand the gentleman speaker when he speaks of a middle ground." But the deserved chastisement of a churchman who had expressed himself so disgracefully in a circle of faithfully churchly laymen was not yet at an end with this. Mayor Starke rose once more and spoke, among other things, as follows: "I have only a very brief rejoinder to permit myself with regard to the remark of the Superintendent, Dr. Großmann. I gratefully accept that he too has acknowledged that there can be no talk of an objective perfectibility of Christian doctrine. As for anyone's subjective conviction, I am not minded, for my part, to restrict it in any way. But as regards the clergy and teachers employed by the Church itself, these indeed, in the exercise of their office, are not to follow their subjective conviction, but are to teach only according to the doctrine of the Church. For it cannot be subject to any doubt that the clergyman exists for the sake of the congregation, and not the congregation for the sake of the clergyman; it can therefore not be permitted to a clergyman, following his own divergent subjective view, to teach the doctrines of Chri-

*) This gentleman was probably not acquainted with the "American Lutheran" Church, which, as is well known, insists on being a different one, without, to be sure, stating when and where its Luther was born. L. u. W.