# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_September 1856_S285
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Miscellaneous Church News. 285

...his position toward the union has not remained the same. Against this, however, it must above all be recalled that retractions have never counted as a disgrace in the Church. To remain pliable and capable of learning even in one's more advanced years is a gift of God. "The Achilles' heel of the Evangelische Kirchen-Zeitung is its position on the union," one of its most keen-sighted contributors at the time, President v. G., remarked already many years ago. It is a joy to us, and we count it to our honor, that we have overcome this weakness... In the first place, a more deeply penetrating inquiry has placed the Calvinistic doctrine of the Supper in a different, less favorable light. Closely connected with this stands the second point: that we have given up our former view, according to which the disputed doctrines were to be left open within the Church — in the hope we then held that the Lutheran doctrine would in due course make its own way — and have arrived instead at the conviction that an outwardly separate territory must remain to the Lutheran Church. A number of external circumstances combined to promote this better insight. The General Synod, which left not even the Apostles' Creed unchallenged, grounded its claimed right to propose changes in doctrine upon the precedent of the union, which, it held, could not be left standing halfway. The Schleiermacherian party, to which everything attaches itself that in the Church is rotten below at the root and withered above at the crown, sought to press into the Church through the breach made by the all-absorbing union, and thereby made its own weaknesses fully manifest, cutting off the hope that the arbitrary will of the church government would stop at the first concession made to it. The word: "Some men's sins are open beforehand," has also proven true with regard to the union, and serves as our excuse if we did not at once fully recognize its true nature."

Divorce and the Marrying of Divorced Persons. A great controversy has presently broken out over this in Germany, especially in the Prussian United Church. Conscientious preachers no longer wish to marry those who are indeed legally divorced by the state, but without valid biblical grounds for divorce being present. Dr. Rudolph Stier, however, Superintendent at Schkeuditz, has published twenty-five theses on this question, which contain a lax, unbiblical theory of divorce, of which the 22nd reads thus: "The Church, since it is joined to the state — not without God's counsel and guidance, to be sure — for chastisement, but also for blessing, in a marriage that is not to be broken (?!)" (Dr. Sander rightly remarks on these words: The Church is, according to the testimony of Scripture, the Bride of the Lord — not of the state) "may at present content itself with the testimony and right accorded to it in the attempt at reconciliation, and may indeed again ask for a spiritual, advisory, and preventive voice in the matrimonial court, although it does not, of course, itself grant the divorce in God's name; but every fact of a divorce pronounced under state church law must for the time being be accepted with patience. — For, in general at least, it is quite in order, and correct in principle, that the state, on the side where marriage belongs to it too, pronounces divorce, while the Church, for its part, offers its blessing toward the contracting of marriage — and indeed more than once." In the 2nd thesis it says: "The matter does not stand merely thus, that in the time of the Old Testament divorce was permitted, but that this must now cease since Christ; rather, just as in the Old Testament the highest right of the divine order (Mal. 2:14–16) is held up, so too the same God can and will, on the other hand, take the same consideration of still-present hardness of heart in New Testament times, which the otherwise so strict Mosaic Law contained." — It seems incredible that a doctor of theology, and so celebrated an exegete of our day, could write in such a way. He seems not to have known, or at least not to have considered, that Moses gave his laws not only for the Church but also for the state. The state, to be sure, retains the freedom, as before, to take account in its laws, after Moses' example, of the hardness of men's hearts; for if it did not wish to do so, if it wished to govern the world according to the Gospel and punish everyone who will not be godly, how could it endure? But what has that to do with the Church? The Church may well let the state have its way within its own sphere, but she can never bless the one who avails himself of the state's permission to sin against God's commandment. How dreadfully lax Dr. Stier's unionism of faith has made him even in the sphere of morals is evident, among other things, from the instance he gives in his 14th thesis: "We should at last become equally strict on all points where the Church now gives way and descends from the ideal of a true Christendom: in baptism, sponsorship, confession, communion, and so forth." Dr. Sander adds again, very truly: "Yes, yes — quite right — that is what we ought to do, and we ought rather to begin with it today than tomorrow."

Saxe-Weimar. Concerning the union carried out in the various territorial churches of Germany, many false reports are in circulation. Saxe-Weimar too has hitherto always been described as a land in which the union has been introduced, and where the Evangelical Lutheran Church therefore no longer rightfully exists. The contrary is affirmed by a native of Weimar in the May issue of the Berlin Evangelische Kirchen-Zeitung of this year. There it says: