# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Februar 1858_S64
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

64 Contemporary Church History.

...fulfilling both Father and Son." Cf. L. u. W., 1st volume, January issue, p. 24. — An ancient theologian (Gregory of Nazianzus, d. 390), on the other hand, says: "Concerning God's begetting one should keep a reverent silence; count it a great thing for yourself that you have learned this much, that God's Son was born. But how he was born is beyond the understanding even of all the angels, let alone that we men should understand it. But what is the procession of the Holy Spirit? Tell me first how it stands with the Father's property by which he was not born, and then I will tell you how the Son was born, and how the Holy Spirit proceeds. In this way we would both become fools if we wished to peer into the mysteries of God." B.

Contemporary Church History.
I. America.

"The Olive Branch." A notice of this periodical is concluded by the "Missionary" of Pittsburgh in its number of January 28 with the excellent remark: "May it (the Olive Branch) prove itself a true olive branch of the church, not by ignoring the great questions it must meet and decide, but through earnest and loving labor for the purity of the same in faith and in life, and so through the securing of that peace which is pleasing to God alone."

The "Lutheran Observer" of January 29 contains words of farewell from its retiring editor, the Reverend Dr. Benjamin Kurtz, to his readers.

A new periodical. From the "Histor. Zeitblatt" we learn that recently the first number of a "Church Paper of the Evangelical Lutheran Synod of Iowa" appeared, edited by Pastors G. Grossmann and G. Fritschel.

"The German Kirchenfreund." In the December issue of last year's volume of this periodical is found the continuation of a biography of Calvin. Among other things it says there: "Already in the first edition of his Institutio .. he (Calvin) speaks, to be sure, of a real partaking of the body and blood of Christ in the Holy Supper, but just as he declares himself against Zwingli's merely symbolic view, so, and even more strongly, he declares himself against Luther's local presence. Melanchthon .. had .. set up the mediating system of synergism." Thereupon follow the old threadbare fables, according to which Luther, after he had already recognized Calvin's diverging doctrine, nevertheless regarded and declared him to be the man who "would fully deal the papacy its final blow and, with God's help, carry through to completion what he (Luther) had begun against the Antichrist"; indeed, of whom he (Luther) is said to have said that "he might well at the outset have left the whole matter of this controversy (over the Holy Supper) to his discretion" — although it has been shown documentarily, and was already shown by us twelve years ago, and is conceded even by the writer of the biography in question, that Melanchthon did not even "have the heart" to deliver to Luther the one letter Calvin ever sent him! — Yet, concerning that biography, the "Lutheran" editor of the "Kirchenfreund" nonetheless says the following: "In particular I hereby thank, in my own name and that of others, the brother who has drawn for us the picture of the Genevan Reformer in clear, austere lines, for his thorough work, which we count among the pieces from the volumes of the Kirchenfreund to which, on account of their significant subject matter and instructive character, a lasting worth belongs." We think such a judgment needs no comment.

II. Abroad.

Marriage [after divorce]. From Thuringia the H. N. brings, as a further supplement to the Eisenach church-conference resolutions, those which concern the refusal by clergy to perform marriages, and which come to this: that the conscientious scruples of clergy who refuse should be dealt with gently, but that it should be made their duty not to proceed according to their own judgment, but according to the decisions of the church authorities, who would take the examination and decision of the marriages of divorced persons into their own hands — thus essentially as has already been ordered in Prussia. Only Weimar, Gotha, Altenburg, Sondershausen, Waldeck, Reuss, and Hesse-Homburg have wished to maintain the unconditional obligation of the clergyman to marry those legally divorced under civil law.