# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_August 1857_S253
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Church and Contemporary History. 253

ritarian: Breslau and Bonn; 5 Roman Catholic fully staffed ones: Prague, Vienna, Freiburg, Munich, Würzburg; 4 incompletely staffed ditto: Graß, Olmütz, Innsbruck, Münster; 3 of the same kind in Hungary: Ofen, Pressburg, Fünfkirchen. Bavaria. From Franconia the Ev. K. Z. is written, in the April number of this year: "The first stage of the struggle against the well-known decrees of our Upper Consistory may be regarded as run through. The Nuremberg address and its many-voiced echo from almost all the significant cities with an evangelical population have had their effect: the church government has been abandoned by the government; the decrees have had their point broken off; the articles that gave the greatest offense are as good as abrogated; the masses are pacified and triumphant; the press, which contributed most to this success, particularly the Nuremberg Correspondent, is resting on the laurels it has won and arming itself for a new struggle. It has already thrown down the gauntlet for such a one, before the church government and all the friends of the decrees, in the article of the Correspondent which chose the composition of the General Synod for its theme.*) Those clergy and laymen who saw in the decrees only the fulfillment of long-cherished wishes have everywhere stood up manfully for them. The clergy used the pulpit to expose duly the spirit out of which the address was born, to demonstrate the genuinely evangelical spirit of the decrees, and to show the apprehensions to be groundless. Several of these testimonies have been committed to print. But what happened? The Nuremberg mob gathered after one such sermon — one moreover most considerate in tone — and, foaming with rage, tore away the iron railings of the church in which it had been delivered, with easily guessed and hideous threats. At once the clergy were given to understand by the police commissariat that they felt themselves unable to protect them (!), if they went on touching the burning question from the pulpit! Shortly afterwards there went out from the ecclesiastical higher authority itself the instruction to the servants of the Word to let the matter now rest, since it had already been sufficiently discussed. Both parties, clergy and laymen, who fought for the decrees, have also sought to work through the medium of the press. The Nuremberg Correspondent carried several articles which sought to refute the assertions of the opponent, or at least greatly to modify them. But separate pamphlets also appeared which pursued the same tendency. I mention here one of the most significant, the "'Flying Leaves for Ecclesiastical Questions of the Present'" by Dr. A. v. Scheurl, Professor of Law in Erlangen. Just now a small work has reached us: "'The Ecclesiastical Opposition in Bavaria and the Standpoint of the Upper Consistory. Nuremberg 1857.'" Here there are, first, the opponents' principles laid bare; they are a. irreligion (materialism), b. general religiosity (rationalism), c. subjectivistic Christianity (pietism); second, the standpoint of the Upper Consistory is set forth and defined thus: "'the church authority has therefore for its standpoint a theology born out of the full confession of the church, and desires nothing else than, in the evangelical spirit of the servant, and under the leading of its own believing confession, with the newly revived means that were always proper to the church, to make the congregations partakers of the full blessing of the divine Word and to draw them on to the joyful and unanimous confession of the same, warding off offenses.'" This standpoint is called self-consistent, excellent, indeed for a church government the only right one, and the reproach is rejected that it asserted itself too rapidly over against the people. Finally, the present ecclesiastical struggle is designated not a struggle over isolated matters but a struggle over principles, and there is a call for decided testimony and steadfast preservation of what has been gained. Circumstances, it is said, have now so shaped themselves that the question is "'whether the mood of the masses, wholly estranged from the church, or the need of the living members, who welcomed in the standpoint of the Upper Consistory the pledge of a new ecclesiastical life, shall receive the greater consideration.'" — It is much to be feared that the coming General Synod, for which the opposition has already through

*) It consists at present of one third laymen and two thirds clergy.