# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juni 1858_S190
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

190 Church and Contemporary History.

called forth. Pastor Seiler entered the lists with 95 theses against it, and
the old warrior Guericke with the heavy artillery of facts, to recall that
the Union had been introduced by command, with deceit and force, and
that it was the Union which had disturbed the peace of the Church.
General Superintendent Möller of Magdeburg, however, on retiring
from his position, gave testimony to the Lutheran clergy of the Province
of Saxony that he had found among their circles the greatest personal,
scholarly, and practical competence. That will hardly serve to bring the
sun-chariot of the Lutheran confession downward. This is also attested
by the most recent fact of the conversion of Pastor Zöller, the chief
leader of the Naugard party, from the United to the Lutheran Church of
Prussia. May this, as well as the dedication of their house of God in
Berlin, be for this poor, hard-pressed Church — which under the most
difficult circumstances (and we do not wish to conceal or forget this, in
order thereby to call forth all the more urgent intercession for it)
upholds under great dangers the banner of the Lutheran confession — a
hopeful sign of richer victories and harvests in the future!

The Separation of Church and State. On this Dr. Luthardt may be
heard as follows in the preface already mentioned:

Not yet fifteen years ago the view that the ecclesiastical and civil domains
must be separated, and the Church emancipated from the State, was the conviction
of only a few. Among us Rudelbach has at all times most steadfastly maintained it.
Only a few theologians spoke out publicly in the same sense, as for instance v.
Hofmann at the close of his work on Prophecy and Fulfillment, or somewhat later
Thiersch in his lectures on Protestantism and Catholicism, prompted to this perhaps
by the thoughts and views of the philosopher Schaden. When, for instance, Heinrich
Merz in his "Signs of the Times" calls the separation of Church and State adultery,
that could count on more approval among us than when, for instance, Vinet called
the union of the two a spiritual adultery. How greatly the view, or rather the
understanding, has changed in this regard! Few will now be found who would see a
marriage in that union. And can the Church indeed say to the State: you are flesh of
my flesh and bone of my bone? Is not the State rather the organism of the life of
natural birth, while the Church is the organism of the life of rebirth? So each of the
two domains will also have its own ordinances, as they correspond to its nature and
its inner relations; each of the two domains will likewise require its corresponding
treatment, as determined and regulated by the spirit which indwells both domains as
their ground of life and as the common spirit which it has become. There it is the
Spirit of God the Creator and the natural view of things; here it is the Spirit of God
the Redeemer and the salvation-oriented view of things. The Church therefore
wishes to be treated and administered otherwise than as an earthly, natural legal
institution. Here everything wishes to be judged spiritually.

A feeling of this is spreading widely through the Lutheran Church. To be sure,
in Sweden the royal propositions, which called for a greater measure of religious
freedom, were rejected last year on October 31 by the nobility, the clergy, and the
peasant estate, in order to preserve the religious unity which is the first condition of
a nation's happiness — in a mixture of two spheres which we cannot approve and
which also will not be able to hold in the long run. In Denmark, on the other hand,
religious freedom — that is, the right to join any religious community one chooses —
has been granted in the fullest measure, and the separation of civil relations from
ecclesiastical ones has been decreed through the introduction of civil marriage and
the abolition of compulsory baptism. But such far-reaching resolutions must shake a
church to its very foundation for as long as its independence over against the State is
not secured through a closed and purely ecclesiastical constitution. Clausen wanted a
general synod of the Danish Church. The bishops and the clerical diocesan
assemblies rejected it. The clergy content themselves with these