# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_M rz 1857_S89
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

On America's Present and Future Church Condition. 89

...in a mortal body, and of the risen and glorified — the latter dwelling upon the unrenewed earth, which is fitted to be a dwelling-place only for mortals; the risen and glorified, after the end of the thousand years, once more entangled in the distress of the earth, in the strife and conflict that belong only to this present existence, and startled out of the rest from their labors that had been promised them.

On America's Present and Future Church Condition.

In the first quarterly issue of this year of the Rudelbach-Guericke "Zeitschrift" there is found a detailed notice of Dr. Schaff's work, "America: The Political, Social, and Ecclesiastical-Religious Conditions of the United States of North America," from the pen of Ströbel. The notice contains at once a statement both of the views which Dr. Schaff has expressed in the said work concerning the present and future church condition of America, and of the reviewer's own views on the matter. However little we can wholly share the views either of the former or of the latter, we have nevertheless read the statements of both, particularly those of the sincerely Lutheran Ströbel, with no small interest; and since we may assume that our esteemed readers would hear the gentlemen named on the subject in question with like interest, we communicate to them the following from what we have read.

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Schaff asserts: "America seems to us destined to become the phoenix-tomb of all the European churches and sects, of Protestantism and Romanism." (p. 64.) He finds it "impossible to imagine that any one of the present confessions and sects — say the Roman, or the episcopal, or the congregationalist, or the presbyterian, or the Lutheran, or the methodist, or the baptist church body — will ever attain there to exclusive dominance, but rather that out of the mutual friction of all of them something wholly new will gradually take shape. In any case, the kingdom of Jesus Christ must in the end triumph, even in the New World, over all enemies old and new. For this we have the pledge of the mass of individual Christianity in America, but above all the promise of the Lord, who has assured His congregation of victory over the whole world; and His words are Yes and Amen." (p. 65.) — Our conviction is a different one. We do not, in fact, expect a final victory of the kingdom of Christ "over all enemies old and new" until the end of this present age, and we cannot make our peace with Schaff's chiliastic hopes for and concerning America. Still less, however, do we understand how, out of "mutual frictions" and out of a "mass of individual Christianity," the one, divine truth could ever emerge. That the "New World" still has a great future before it, in religious and ecclesiastical respects as well, is attested by all the signs of the times. But unless the Lord of nations and of times brings about an acceleration through extraordinary events, that future still lies very