# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1857_S99
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

The uproar over the most recent Superior Consistory generalia in Bavaria. 99

Worldliness, however, must first of all be decidedly and boldly resisted as a witness, its designs and doings openly and fearlessly rebuked, and for the honor of the divine institution of marriage one must fight with all the weapons that God's Word and church order put into one's hand." Thereupon the clergy are instructed that, "through faithful attention to their pastoral duties, they" should "seek to regain the influence that is their due over family life," "so that they, as is already the case in many places, may be called upon with their counsel already at the betrothal of future spouses," etc. "But if the pastors have succeeded, through their spiritual activity, in securing for themselves a definite influence over the families of their congregations, then there is no longer need of any compulsory ordinance requiring that betrothed couples present themselves personally at the relevant parish office before the proclamation of banns; suitable instruction and admonition will of themselves bring it about that the personal presentation — already widely practiced and entirely in accordance with church order — is gradually raised into a general custom." — Finally there follows a brief set of directions concerning the instruction and counsel of young brides and bridegrooms toward a God-pleasing beginning and continuance of their household.

The third Superior Consistory generale addresses itself to "the restoration of church discipline," and under point 1 expresses itself thus: "The question, in what manner a fitting church discipline is to be restored, is not to be understood as though it were a matter of renewing a formally abolished or wholly lost institution. The right and the substance of church discipline rest on the foundation of the doctrine of Scripture and of the church, and as every moral community, so also the church possesses the right to exercise a discipline corresponding to its nature and its task, as an inalienable possession. What has been lost from church discipline, according to the provisions of older church orders, are the police-like measures, and these may remain lost; but what, in a truly ecclesiastical sense, has fallen into oblivion within church discipline has been forgotten through unfaithfulness, and from this side the matter is not so much the restoration of church discipline as the recovery of the right form and manner of exercising it." Thereupon the individual remnants of ecclesiastical discipline and order, as the Superior Consistory gathered them from the parish reports that had come in on the subject, are listed one after another, and finally the parish offices are charged, "with due regard to the remnants of church discipline still present in their congregations, as well as to the church orders formerly or still now in force, and with careful weighing of all the relevant circumstances, with a statement of the manner of implementation, to compile those provisions in the form of an instruction which they, after prior consultation with the church councils, judge necessary and salutary for the exercise of discipline."