# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Januar 1858_S28
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

28                                    Church Contemporary-History Notes.

...all ministerial acts, while the deacon alone may preach, catechize, and baptize — and indeed all this on the basis of Scripture, that is, jure divino — agrees, on this point, neither with the doctrine and practice of the apostolic and original Lutheran church, nor with the written Word of God. It is a joy to see that, in a synod such as the Tennesseans', where sound doctrine lives, everything unsound that has crept in over time cannot maintain itself for long, but is expelled like a splinter from a living body. God strengthen those dear men to whom God gives the grace to perceive the foreign matter that has attached itself, that they may seek to remove it with a resolve as unyielding as it is wise and loving.

A new synod was organized on December 1 of last year in Middletown, Md., under the name "Melanchthon Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church." It rejoices greatly that it was brought together not by geographical division, which it regards as unnatural and incompatible with the general laws of the material and moral world, but by "elective affinity." The confession of the new synod is that of the notorious Platform, except that the latter is not expressly named, and of the alleged "errors" censured in it in the Augsburg Confession it is said that "people say of them that they are contained therein." The visible head of this new church appears to be Dr. Aug. Kurz.

The Olive Branch, a paper published by Dr. Harkey in Springfield, Illinois, in association with the professors there, has appeared in the new year in enlarged form. As for its spirit, however, it is said to remain as before. Dr. Harkey writes: "The 'Olive Branch' cannot take part in the so-called Platform and symbolic controversy... Is there any object that lies closer to our heart than any other, it is the union of all parts of the Lutheran church in this country... The foundation for this union, we believe, was laid in our General Synod, and here we have always stood and will always stand. We have no time to dispute, and to waste our strength in useless controversy. We have too great a work in our hands. Tens of thousands of our own children are being lost for lack of the bread of life (to say nothing of the heathen world), while some fight uselessly over inessential points. This is, for us, both shame and sin, and we are resolved to do what we can to guard the church against it." — This is, indeed, sad language from a doctor of theology. The points, then, around which the controversy touching the Platform revolves, are to him "inessential." He wants an outward union of the Lutheran church; the inward union does not concern him. A hypocritical common bearing of the Lutheran name while rejecting Lutheran doctrine, and a cooperation founded on that basis — that is what he strives for, and it is for that that he wishes to spend his strength. Whether God's Word is preached purely or falsified is a matter of indifference to him; indeed, to contend that the bread of life not be poisoned is to him "sin and shame"! Instead, he devotes his powers rather to the great work — that the bread of life be broken for languishing souls, no matter whether with or without poison. Of this, to be sure, he says nothing: that no one has labored more, and more self-sacrificingly, for the neglected "own children" than precisely those who are in earnest about also fighting for the faith once delivered to the saints.

II. Abroad.

Rhenish Prussia, Baden, and Nassau. Of these three lands, the Freimund writes that in them, as yet, only seven pastors have publicly renounced the Union and confessed themselves to the Lutheran church.

Dr. Irmischer, who saw through the press almost the whole of the Erlangen edition of Luther's German works, as well as the greater part of the Latin ones, has recently died. He has, as the Sächsisches Kirchen- und Schulblatt rightly remarks, by that work erected for Luther a worthier monument than any that might have been projected in advance.