# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juli 1857_S213
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

On Bunsen's Idea of Freedom of Conscience, of Religion, and of the Church. 213

...proposition, so little to the taste of the public in our day? That "the rapacity of princes and corporations of nobles" was once enthusiastic for it is easy to explain; but how can a professional man of toleration at the present time bring himself even to assert: "upon these and similar confiscations of ecclesiastical goods there rests a blessing"? The riddle is solved quite simply thus. If a united congregation were mistress of its church property, and possessed besides the perfectly self-evident right to choose its own pastor and to determine the order of its worship according to its own judgment — all of them things that follow necessarily from the concept of "freedom of conscience" and of "the right of the Christian congregation" — then it might in the end, one fine day, hit upon the thought of returning to the faith of its fathers, of renouncing the Union, of confessing again the Augsburg Confession, and of choosing a "Lutheran" pastor of souls. To forestall such an abominable misuse of religious freedom, Bunsen neatly keeps the congregation's purse in his own hands, and is elsewhere too nicely careful that the congregation shall not be led into the temptation of putting its rights and freedoms to any other use than the one that pleases him. Besides, it has long been settled "that even on the standpoint of unconditional freedom of conscience" and of unlimited congregational right, the state must never be denied the right, nor deprived of the means of exercising it, at any time and entirely at its own discretion to unionize, Calvinize, Lutheranize, Romanize, Japhetize, paganize the whole church or individual congregations; therefore it must of course become and remain master of the church property, so that it may effectively meet any possible misguided resistance in the name of freedom of conscience and congregational right with the weighty deficiente pecu-. deficit omne-nia — with the highest respect, be it understood, for "freedom of conscience and the right of the Christian congregation," and solely for the protection of these goods. Understood? That is the key to Bunsen's declaration about church property, which at first sounds so strange. But, someone whom this solution does not please may perhaps ask, what then would be left at all of "freedom of conscience and of the right of the Christian congregation"? Well, exactly as much as is meant to be left — expressed in figures, 2 − 2 = 0. The same result is reached by considering the state church newly constructed by Bunsen. Here again he starts from the most correct principles. "The banner of full religious freedom is the sign in which the truly Christian state will conquer and the truly evangelical church will triumph. This freedom brings the Christian government into the right position toward the Christian people as toward the hierarchy. It, and it alone, makes possible the solution of all the entanglements now pending. This freedom, then, if it is to have vital force, must here too be no mere shadow-image... No bishoprics, but church congregations!... It was certainly the right thing, in con-