# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_October 1857_S318
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

318   Church and Contemporary History.

...cles of life and duties of life, etc." — So one writes to the Allgemeine Zeitung from the Grand Duchy of Oldenburg, where hitherto rationalism has ruled more than anywhere else, at the end of June. If it is really as the man writes, then they will find more than one hair in it and will nastily burn hand and mouth, and that to nobody's profit and good. That is not the way it goes, and so it has never yet gone.

Freimund.

Baptism [Baptist doctrine] in Germany. High consistorial councillor and Professor Dr. Stahl, in his much-discussed opening address to the Berlin pastoral conference of this year, uttered among others the following remarkable sentences: "We have this misgiving: if the Evangelical Alliance is to be only 'a union of evangelical Christians,' one which therefore touches only the persons present and not the church bodies themselves, that it nevertheless, in spite of every assurance and every sincere intention, by the necessity of the thing itself becomes a church — and indeed not a league among these communions, but outright a union, a new church above them all. It already has the essential attributes of a church. It has a confession of faith (a 'Convenent') in its nine articles. It has a common Lord's Supper, as such is set down in the program, which is administered not in the name of the Lutheran or of the Reformed, not in the name of the Scottish Presbyterian or of the Prussian territorial church, but in the name of the Evangelical Alliance. It has a kind of church government in its standing committees, which it is the intention to enlarge and strengthen more and more . . . . .

"We are kept from taking part in the common Lord's Supper. For this is a carrying out of union with all these so-called evangelical denominations (or sects). According to the positive church law of our territorial church the concept of the union is no other than that of communion at the Lord's Supper. This again is itself understood in different ways. I understand by it only the mutual admission to the Lord's Supper, for only that, as it seems to me, is contained in the expression of the royal cabinet order: 'not to refuse to the other confession the outward fellowship.' Another understanding is that the union includes a Supper common in the matter itself, a confessionally neutral Supper. But be that as it may, the union among us does not consist in the uniting of the confessions, but is complete with the fellowship of the Lord's Supper. If therefore a common — indeed a decidedly neutral — Lord's Supper is held here among these various denominations, then thereby, according to our conceptions and our orders, the union with them all is accomplished. We have constantly been assured, for our reassurance, that in the work of union it was only a question of union with the German Reformed, who in the doctrine of the Supper stand not upon Zwingli but upon Calvin, who have come back from the doctrine of predestination, indeed who are really more Melanchthonians than Reformed. Now we are all at once to be united not only with the predestinarians, with the Zwinglians, but also with the Baptists — indeed possibly with still others whom we do not know at all."

Likewise the pastor at the Church of the Holy Trinity in Berlin, A. F. Souchon, has had printed a good sermon "on regeneration," in which he says among other things: "The Baptists, who count infant baptism as nothing, who regard us all as unbaptized and therefore not as Christians, deny the free and unconditional grace of God; they stand on principle upon one ground with the Jewish and Roman Catholic righteousness of works, in that they make the power and effect of the Holy Spirit in baptism dependent upon a man's own doing and undertaking and inward condition. With them we, as evangelical Christians who ascribe everything to grace and say with the apostle Paul: So then it is not of him that willeth, nor of him that runneth, but of God that showeth mercy (Romans 9:16) — can have no fellowship; and if the evangelical