# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_October 1855_S312
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

312 Miscellaneous Church News.

The following we further take from the Nördlingen "Freimund":

"Pastor Haag in Ispringen is accustomed, as he himself has told us" — so writes the Union Supreme Church Council in Baden (Dr. Ullmann) — "immediately before the approach of the communicants, to speak the following exhortation: "'I now ask, as a servant of Christ and steward of God's mysteries, for the sake of the shed blood and the five holy wounds of Jesus, every person present to please stay away from this altar if he does not feel heartfelt repentance and sorrow for his sins, and does not believe from the heart that in the blessed bread he eats with his mouth the true, present body of Jesus Christ, and in the blessed wine receives with his mouth the shed blood of his Lord Jesus, or if he is not reconciled from the heart with all his enemies.'"

"This formula contains, as every knowledgeable person must at once perceive, the Lutheran doctrine of the Lord's Supper in its wholly specific form, and in definite opposition to the Reformed doctrine, including in its Calvinist type. By means of it, therefore, all those are turned away from the altar — through a direct effect on their conscience, however sincere, penitent, or eager for salvation they may otherwise be — who do not share the strictly Lutheran understanding of the doctrine of the Lord's Supper. That this, however, within the sphere of a Union church which, to say the very least, has in any case established the fullest communion at the Lord's Supper between former Lutherans and Reformed, is simply inadmissible, must be immediately obvious to every reasonable person. — It is, moreover, not merely a right but the unconditional duty of the government of a Union church to proceed earnestly against such a procedure, which manifestly undermines the Union."

Elsewhere we read: "Haag's successor S. was installed as pastor of Ispringen by a member of the Supreme Church Council and the district magistrate, together with four gendarmes."

Miscellaneous Church News.

Marriage of Divorced Persons. From the "Evangelical Church Gazette" of Dr. Hengstenberg we learn that on April 17 and 18 of this year the "Ecclesiastical Central Union in the Province of Saxony" again assembled at Gnadau. Among the other subjects discussed there was also the question of the marriage of divorced persons. On this point "it was agreed that adultery and malicious desertion should be allowed to stand as lawful grounds for divorce, and that at the same time an undertaking should be made no longer to marry divorced persons henceforth, unless they had been divorced on the two grounds mentioned above