# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Januar 1856_S6
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

6                    Some Glosses on Bunsen's Aphorisms and His "Position and Task," etc.

erence for the learnedness and wisdom of doctors and professors still lodged in me, and it seems presumptuous even to me that I should dare, from out of the bush, to call into question the truth of learned oracular pronouncements; but I cannot help it — even in one of the most significant productions of the literature I find a good deal that is unimportant, skewed, indeed at times downright, if always cleverly presented, nonsense. Whether that now comes from the fact that one simply does not sit in the full light? —

Not everything Bunsen says has displeased me, oh no! He may well dislike the priestcraft and the hierarchical system, and fight for the rights of all the children of God. Certainly, to the true grief of the pope-loving, monarchical-Christian historian Leo, he says: "since the people ordered as a congregation constitute the church, the conclusion cannot be avoided that the whole body of believers among the people is the bearer of the supreme power of the church." True, the statement is not entirely clearly thought through, since believers who are not organized congregationally must also be regarded as members of the church and thus as bearers of the church's power; yet one notices, all the same, what he meant to say. He remarks further, very aptly: "the stagnation, and in part the defeat, of Protestantism in the present reaction, come in large measure from this crippling and paralysis of congregational church life. And the demand that a new church life be formed out of this congregational life is truly no innovation, still less anything unchristian. The people had not purchased the Reformation with their blood so that the church should remain the affair of the clergy." It is also very gratifying that he speaks out so unreservedly against the dictatorship of princes in the church: "Police rule and Caesaropapism are the basic elements of the church government hitherto in force, and police oppression and persecution its inevitable consequences. It kills church life, even when it adorns itself with the fine names of the sovereign's rights or the church's sacred guardianship." "The last evil the governments can do to religion is police protection and court favor." —

But this is the misfortune, the dangerous thing, among the Unionists: that they mix the true and the false, light and darkness, together, and then are even willing to call that "Christian liberal." Thus Schaff especially emphasizes the author's "truly universal, Christian-liberal" standpoint. What "liberal" is really supposed to mean in the case of a Christian, I do not rightly understand. If by it is meant the standpoint from which what is truly Christian is nevertheless recognized as such even under the most various forms and disguises, then the term is skewed, for when that does not happen, the result is not merely also Christian, or only illiberally Christian, but simply unchristian. — By "liberal Christian" the actual essence of the spirit of the Union is evidently meant to be brought out, which, as is well known, consists in this: that one regards