# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juni 1856_S189
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Miscellaneous Church News. 189

...we Catholics would have no year 1517 to mourn!" And likewise in the Kirchlicher Anzeiger für Katholiken, No. 25, where someone points out that Protestantism is now again drawing nearer to Catholicism in three essential points — in the concept of the church, in the commendation of good works, and in the question of divorce — and closes with the pious wish: "God help it further! Now Protestantism is becoming positive and graspable for mutual understanding." — Incidentally, this Romanizing haunts even the Lutherans within the Union. In the "Monatsschrift für die evangelisch-lutherische Kirche Preußens," January issue 1855, it says, among other things: "In the whole church-governmental order since the Reformation, we can recognize only a provisorium. The goal we have in view lies far beyond the highest degree of that decree (of March 6, 1852). It is, to say it in one word, the re-entry into the ecumenical episcopate, to which the development of the church has to lead us ... That the church abandoned this at the Reformation is just as much our complaint as it is that we keep it in view as our goal." Dr. Stahl, in his address on Christian tolerance, even calls the cultus of the Catholic Church the precious nard which the sinful woman in the Gospel poured out upon the Lord.

Another example of Romanizing in the Lutheran Church. Thus Pastor Diedrich in Zabel writes in his "Lutherische Dorf-Kirchenzeitung," in the December number of last year: "The old Roman Empire perished in sin — God formed a new shape, and indeed it long stood to great blessing: that was the Papacy, and one ought not so slap the truth in the face as to deny this. The Papacy was for a long time the guardian of doctrine in as pure a form as one could then have it: it was for long the refuge and asylum of Christian persons, and of Christian peoples too. It has tamed peoples often more than half-heathen and filled them with the blessings of peace and of the Gospel. The kingdom of God at that time received such a form from God himself [the world says: through circumstances *)]. But however noble, lofty, and sublime the idea was, it was nevertheless shamefully disfigured in later years." It almost seems as if the reverend writer's mouth were already watering for a papacy that, alongside decent living, would also be adorned with a certain kind of Lutheran orthodoxy. The idea of procuring, through a single human will, unity, peace, and righteousness in the church, is supposed to have been a "noble, lofty, sublime idea"! — The idea by which hell deceived Christendom and brought the Antichrist into the temple of God! — May God have mercy on it!

Pastor Krause. From the "Informatorium" of May 15 we learn that the well-known Pastor (?) Krause, after our synod had not been able to grant his petition for admission, has revoked the confession of sin he had made to the Lutheran congregation at Milwaukie (now styled by him a "mob"), and, for the purpose of readmission into the Buffalo Synod, has made a new confession of sin.

Dr. Philippi and Dr. Hofmann. The former wrote in the preface to the second edition of his commentary on the Epistle to the Romans: "All the less can I agree with the subjectivist transposition of the objective, biblical-ecclesiastical doctrine of reconciliation and justification in Hofmann's Schriftbeweis. Would that this learned and acute student of Scripture, who surely also seeks, with his theology, to serve our common Church and its confession, might succeed in laying hold of this central foundational doctrine of salvation in its evangelical simplicity, depth, and purity, and thereafter, with the rich scholarly gifts and powers granted to him beyond others, might succeed in reshaping the whole structure of his original but singular system of doctrine, and making it more consonant with the biblical-ecclesiastical analogy of faith. Truly I should then wish to be one of the first among those who would sit joyfully and gratefully learning at his feet." To this

*) What a Lutheran would say, the reverend writer has not said, namely: "through the devil." 2 Thessalonians 2:7–12.