# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Dezember 1856_S382
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

382
Miscellaneous Church News.

efforts with our own toward the building up of the one undivided, holy, catholic, apostolic church."

The Synod of Maryland, assembled on October 17, has declared that it gives everyone freedom to think as he pleases about the alleged errors of the Augsburg Confession listed in the Platform, and that it will not call into question the orthodoxy of any of its members, whether he accepts or rejects those alleged errors, provided that thereby neither the divine institution of the Sabbath is rejected nor the doctrinal basis of the General Synod overthrown. Nor has it considered it "expedient" to change anything in the licensing system.

The Moravians. A very common maxim of the sects in our time is that, instead of confessing and recanting the errors and abuses that have been demonstrated to them clearly, in a manner cutting off all further contradiction, as being what they are, they idealize them. This is done, among others, not only by the Catholics but also by the Moravians. As is well known, the whole body of the Moravians was originally governed, both in what concerned the inward and the outward, by a so-called chief and general elder. Of such a one the "Brüderblatt" (published by Reichel in Salem, North Carolina) says in this year's November issue: "Upon him lay the burden of the whole congregation. He carried upon his heart the course of every individual congregation, of every single member, of every institution, of every mission. New institutions, and especially important occurrences, were laid before him as the man of the conferences, whose feeling decided the most important matters." — Such an emotional papacy vested in a single individual could naturally not endure. What happened? The Büdingen Collections state: "When the general elder laid down his office, it then pleased the Savior to ordain no one again, and it was understood therefrom (from the lot!) that He Himself would take upon Himself all that He had hitherto done through the general elder in His congregation." From then on it was believed that the Lord governs the Moravian congregation directly; that she is, quite properly, the Lord's own bride, His dove, His fair one, His beloved and chosen one (Song of Songs 6:8). This sectarian presumption now weighs heavily on the conscience of many a Moravian. The "Brüderblatt" writes on this as follows: "Only in more recent times have serious objections been raised against this doctrine of the government of the Savior, or the eldership-office of Jesus, in the Unity of the Brethren — and these come, not as of old, from without, from the declared enemies of the Brethren, but are urged ever more strongly by those who have in part already served the Unity of the Brethren faithfully and earnestly for a long series of years. The whole idea is rejected as unbiblical; it is termed presumption; indeed, it is said, history teaches most incontrovertibly that from the time this doctrine was set up, the decline of the (Moravian) church dates — from which it is then concluded that the doctrine of the eldership-office of the Savior is in itself the chief cause of the decline of the Brethren's Church." — We believe that these accusers of their own fellowship, arising from among the Moravians themselves, are not so far wrong. It cannot be denied that the Moravian fellowship gathered together at a time when the Lutheran Church had already largely fallen into decay and had many unfaithful watchmen who left the sheep without proper pasture. It was thus easily possible that many honest souls, too, sought asylum in an ecclesiola such as the Moravian one. But when the Moravians began to set themselves up, before all others, as Christ's chosen congregation, which has the Savior in a special sense as its Chief Elder, then the sectarian spirit pervaded the whole. The "Brüderblatt," on the other hand, says in the same place: "The expression 'the eldership-office of Jesus' was meant, in its original idea, to say nothing other than this: we will acknowledge in the Brethren's Church no man — neither pope, nor bishop, nor territorial lord — as the head of the church, but Jesus Christ alone as our Savior." The "Brüderblatt" does indeed admit that later a false understanding of the matter crept in among the Moravians, but even this admission does not suffice; for it was precisely