# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_September 1856_S279
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

On the Rhenish Palatinate Church Struggle. 279

...to whom a common confession was to be given, were partly Reformed, partly Lutheran, who had been welded together by the union into one so-called Church. It was believed that one could give them neither the Reformed nor the Lutheran confession, and so the idea arose of introducing the altered Augsburg Confession, that is, that Augsburg Confession which Ph. Melanchthon altered in the year 1540, to please the Calvinists, in the article on the Holy Supper — against which Luther had already warned, and which had never and nowhere attained public validity. No sooner said than done. This altered Augsburg Confession was introduced by the Rhenish Palatinate General Synod in the year 1853, and by the same synod a new catechism, made by Consistorial Councillor Ebrard, was also brought in for general introduction, which in the doctrine of holy baptism contains Anabaptist errors, and on the doctrine of the Holy Supper expresses itself as indefinitely as possible, yet nearly Calvinistically.

Against this a vigorous resistance at once arose in periodicals and petitions — not on the part of the rationalists (for these were quite content with these latest measures of the church government, because they were blows struck against the confession), but on the part of a number of confessionally faithful clergy of the land.

Thus the church struggle there had by now taken on a quite different shape from what it had had only a few years before. The church government, which earlier had been attacked for the sake of the confession, now itself attacked the confession and those loyal to the confession. One of the latter, a pastor and school inspector in one of the most important towns of that small territory, was suspended by the consistory at Speyer; the suspension, however, was again lifted by the ministry in Munich. This vexed the consistory at Speyer not a little, and it finally declared outright that the Lutheran doctrine of the Supper must disappear entirely from the sermons and instruction of the clergy, so long as the latter were united clergy. Alongside this, the Zwinglian doctrine of the Supper was likewise forbidden. The following was literally laid down under the date of October 14, 1853, and again under January 19, 1855: "It is permitted to present, from the Lutheran doctrine of the Supper, the propositions that the Holy Supper contains not merely a memorial but also a union with Christ, and that Christ, though indeed taken up into heaven, is nevertheless truly with His own; and, from the Reformed doctrine, the propositions that the Holy Supper is also a memorial meal, and that Christ, though indeed with His own, is nevertheless truly taken up into heaven." — Thus much was accepted from the doctrinal propositions of both sides and permitted, and commanded, to be taught; "to go beyond this," and to teach the propositions, on the one hand, of a real presence of the body and blood of Jesus Christ in and under the bread and wine, and on the other hand, of an eating by the soul and a raising