# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_August 1857_S254
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

254 Church and Contemporary History.

the church-council elections secured its influence and its numerous representation, will really be moved to consider another mode of constituting itself, perhaps even to demand it of the church government. Then it will be time to speak a thus far and no farther! for the same, and rather to lay down the office than to expose the church to new humiliations." — On the same subject there is found in the March number of the Erlangen "Journal for Protestantism and the Church" an article from which we communicate the following fragments: "In His mildness He (the King) has promised to command a renewed examination of the decrees of the highest church authority which have not yet been confirmed by the General Synod and by His sanction. Through this wise and just decree quiet has for the present set in . . Small, accordingly, can be the number of those who with full conviction are attached to the faith of the Lutheran Church, and so much the greater is the number of those who are more or less estranged from it. Attempts are indeed made to limit this assertion by distinguishing between rural congregations and city congregations and by speaking of a core of the country people that clings faithfully to its ancestral faith and is not yet eaten away by the modern culture of the townsfolk. But of this only so much is true, that the rural congregations do not stand in so conscious a contradiction; yet that faith is not alive in them is proved also by their present attitude in this movement . . The mass so constituted felt clearly that the church government was again in earnest about the faith of the church, and hence the movement by which the overthrow of this church government was to be brought about." Further on the writer speaks against the part of the decrees which concerns private confession and examination, and wishes that, without injury to the confession, more consideration might be given to those who have become estranged from the faith, so that they, as long as they still allow any influence upon themselves, may not be driven out of the church; and he closes: "Nothing is yet lost; the star of hope which has risen for our church with the new church government still stands high on the horizon."

Norway. A certain Pastor Lammers has here withdrawn from the service of the Lutheran state church and become the head of a new church, which he calls "the free apostolic, Christian church." This newly established church, as the "Church of the Lord," a Berlin paper, reports, "acknowledges the doctrines set forth in the symbolical books of the Norwegian church, but only in so far as they now or in the future (!) shall agree with the Bible, with the express reservation that it does not hold itself bound by the 9th and 25th Articles of the Augsburg Confession; and in this it believes" (what will a man not believe, once he casts off the old faith!) "that it does not really depart from the spirit of the Confession, but rather makes the attempt to bring the Confession into agreement with itself" (very kind, to be sure!). The number of those, it goes on to say, who have joined the new church is as yet only small; should indeed more and ever more join it, then it will be large.

Pantheism. Prof. Fischer in Jena has taken it very ill that Dr. Hengstenberg declared him an atheist. To this the latter replies: "When Dr. Fischer asserts that I falsely accused him of atheism, he ignores the fact that the charge of atheism receives its closer limitation from the charge of pantheism that precedes it. In biblical (Ephesians 2:12) and ecclesiastical usage, atheists are all those who do not know and honor the one true, personal God. Whether it has been asserted rightly that Dr. Fischer esteems the cross no higher than the crescent may be shown by the citation of his own words." After Hengstenberg has given the supporting passages, he adds: "It is the curse of pantheism that it always twists and turns like a serpent, just as its own advantage requires. Without the living personal God there is no truth and no love of the truth."

The Evangelical Alliance. Of it the "Ev. K. Z." says in a second article in the March number: "The Alliance is coming to Berlin, not although, but because it finds here a strong Puseyite party (that of the Stahls and Hengstenbergs). The Ev. Alliance