# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_December 1857_S383
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Church-Historical Notes of the Present. 383

Jews have been baptized; in the past year 7 on the part of the Berlin society, 100 by the London society.

The Evangelical Alliance. Concerning it there was discussion, among other things, in the Berlin pastoral conference on the 10th of June of this year. Pastor Orth declared: „The Evangelical Alliance is on the one hand too narrow for him and on the other hand too wide. As a fraternal union of the hearts of the children of God it is too narrow-hearted for him. There is only one mark of the children of God, manifest to God alone, and that is genuine love for Jesus. Are there not also among the rationalists (!) children of God who love Jesus? Is it not permissible to hold so venerable a man as Semler in his day to be such? How then may one set up such a fence of nine stakes and shut us off from the children of God among the rationalists? But as a Christian association, intended to work in the midst of Christendom, the Evangelical Alliance is too wide for him, inasmuch as it also includes the Baptists. Even though he holds the Baptists too, many of whom love Jesus, to be children of God, he is nevertheless not even held by them to be a Christian, because he is not baptized.“ One sees how the Union reveals itself more and more as confusion. — General Superintendent Dr. Büchsel remarked: „Fear of the Roman Catholic church will not drive him into the evangelical league. In the Reformation it was one man who stood the fight against Rome; if such a great decisive struggle comes again, one man on his knees will accomplish more than great crowds of allies.“ At the assembly of delegates of the Lutheran societies in Prussia (within the Union) held at Wittenberg on the 17th of June of this year, the conviction was unanimously expressed that it is not compatible with duty toward the church and the confession of the truth for a confessor of Lutheran truth to take part in the endeavors and assemblies of the evangelical league. „The fundamental tendency of this erotic creeping plant is surely not to foster love among all who love the Lord Jesus in every confession — that love one perhaps finds nowhere more alive than among the exclusive Lutherans — but rather to strangle all healthy confessional growth, to destroy every concrete form, to fade every fresh color of churchly individuality into a gray.“ A correspondent of the Luth. Observer reports that America was represented at the Alliance by about 33 persons. Dr. Nast's address is said to have created a great sensation. In the „Sächsisches Kirchen- und Schulblatt“ a former guest of the Alliance writes under the date of September 12: „I have thus far attended the meeting of the Evangelical Alliance fairly regularly, but now have quite enough of it as well. It appears to me as a second tower of Babel, and will, I believe, as a punishment for the uncalled builders, yield the same final result. The rifts in Christendom which it means to patch up will become still more gaping. The confessionalists will now withdraw still further from the members of the Alliance, and conversely. But even the Englishmen and the Germans in the league will scarcely draw nearer to one another. To me at least it seems that the practical Englishmen have found little pleasure in the doctrinaire German rhetoricians and will now return disillusioned to their homeland. At last, however, at least one eye will surely be opened in many members of the league; for the meeting does not work so very intoxicatingly and bewitchingly. Up to now the people have said the same thing from morning till evening, now in good form, now in bad, now with learned, now with unlearned phrases. Often three speeches on the same special theme! One can imagine how interesting that becomes when the gentlemen take no account whatever of the previous speaker and of what he has said, and will not strike a jot from their manuscript or from their head. But when I think of the subject of all these speeches, I am always reminded of the old allegorical exegesis of the Greek fathers, who wished to recognize everywhere in Scripture as its deeper sense precisely this, that Scripture must be allegorically interpreted. The Alliance, moreover, has still not got beyond self-admiration. That too becomes so tedious to the members that toward the end of the sessions the hall always grows quite empty.“