# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juli 1857_S215
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

On Bunsen's Idea of Freedom of Conscience, of Religion, and of the Church. 215

...at heart — so far as it still takes any interest at all in ecclesiastical matters. Whether the church be governed by bishops or by consistories is a matter of indifference to it, so long as no more comforting disclosures can be made to it about its church property, about the right of appointment to its pastoral and school offices, and so forth, than Bunsen's. Only when it had been completely set at ease on these points would it be time to tell the congregation "that the synod is to stand above all bishops, as the whole stands above the individual." But one would then also have to be prepared to answer adequately various questions of the popular understanding, questions to which the "Signs of the Times" leave room only for unedifying conjectures. For example, how are the declarations, set almost side by side, to be reconciled: "The apostolic character of the congregations consists in their independence. It consists not in this or that form of official appointment, but in freedom from all external appointment, that is, in self-decision in important matters" — and the other: "The true apostolic consecration of the bishops lies in their official independence over against the congregation and the mere pastors, and in the possession of means belonging to the congregation for carrying through this independence" (II. 253 f.) — how are these to be reconciled with one another without doing violence to the Protestant identification of "bishop" and "pastor"? Further: "the official independence of the bishops over against the secular power" is indeed assured, and also secured insofar as the bishops have nothing whatever to do with the state; their sole superior is "the synod." But how does this synod come into being, out of which the bishops are to "proceed"? Who is it? In what relation does it stand to the state? In what relation does the state stand to the church at all, since no separation of the two is to take place? Very many more such questions would arise, given the mistrustful spirit of the age; would one, in answering them, take the past history of the Union as a model or as a warning? Bunsen repeatedly advises the latter: the procedure is to be open and without ambiguity; — advice good in every respect, which at least forestalls misunderstandings and their evil consequences, often felt for generations, even if it inevitably entails the complete shipwreck of Bunsen's whole project in the minds of the "people." For with unreserved openness one would have to "tell the congregation" that above the ecclesiastical organism the political one will stand ("the great Christian congregation, the state," I. 99.); for "the state as a people governed by law, the church as an evangelically free universal congregation, together form the true body of God and are the incarnation carried through" (Bunsen, Hippol. p. XXXVI, in Besser, op. cit., p. 166.) — and "let what is ecclesiastical belong to the church and what is political to the state, yet be it well understood in such a way that in disputed individual cases concerning the line of division the state recognizes no higher judge than the law of the state." (Bunsen, Constitution of the Church of the Future, p. 158; in