# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Januar 1858_S15
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

The Evangelical Church Convention.                                    15

...nor deny the confession of our church. It enables us, rather, to rightly dispense the Word as the need of the heathen world requires at every turn. It is downright nonsense when General Superintendent Hoffmann demands that an apostolic church be planted out there — as if the Church of Christ on earth were not one, and its history did not form a continuous line, but could begin anew wherever and however it pleased. And how is it even possible, in a territory where the various missionizing communities converge, to force upon the heathen the sight and the recognition of their disagreement? It was to the credit of Hengstenberg and Stahl that no vote was taken on this question — just as such an assembly is neither qualified nor authorized to render decisions on questions of principle, but can only have the calling, in matters not in dispute, on which it is unanimous, to express wishes regarding public grievances, say, or to issue declarations which might then, indeed, come to have some significance.

On the following day (Wednesday, the 23rd of September) the debate turned to evangelical catholicity. Von Bethmann-Hollweg gave the introductory address on the subject. He depicted the period in the first decades of this century, when Christians sought one another out across the various churches, when young theologians travelled to England, Scotland, and Switzerland and took delight in the revivals within the Roman church of southern Germany, when the distinction between ecclesia and ecclesiolae was the watchword of believers. Now, he said, one had returned to the ecclesia, and transferred the love for the invisible congregation of the elect onto the visible church to which we belong — because we cannot grasp the former, and can only put our love for it into practice here. We have no need to leave it and become Independents, since it has been cleansed by the Reformation of soul-destroying errors, and possesses God's holy Word, the pure exposition of the same, and the divinely instituted use of the sacraments. There exists, however, an essential unity of the evangelical church — not in constitution, government, church discipline, or form of worship, but in the essence of doctrine. Thus there exists a sufficient agreement in doctrine between the Lutheran and the Reformed church to permit fellowship at the Lord's Table. Further, a confederation of the church governments. In this, evangelical catholicity asserts itself. But all this, he said, is only a beginning, and stands in need of, and is capable of, further development in various respects. "Two things lie especially close to my heart: 1. the practical exercise of ecclesiastical catholicity, particularly with regard to fellowship at the Lord's Table, and the furthering of confederation; and, with regard to the Roman church, 2. the personal fellowship of the saints." — This then gave ample occasion for outpourings on evangelical and Württemberg large-heartedness, on the blessing of the Evangelical Alliance and of mixed fellowship at the Lord's Table, and, by contrast, on confessional narrowness, high-churchliness, Pharisaism, Romanizing, and so forth, on the part of the strict Lu-