# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juli 1858_S222
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

222 Church and Contemporary History.

...unless they have obtained permission for it from the synod or its president, was adopted. Resolutions, it is further stated in the "Luth. Obs.," concerning the establishment of a German Lutheran seminary at Allentown, submitted by the Rev. Pastor G. R. Probst (?), drew forth some eloquent remarks from the mover.

Abroad.

Leipzig. On March 19 of this year the celebrated pedagogue Prof. Dr. Lindner Sr. celebrated the jubilee of his fifty years of academic activity. Not to mention the other honors that fell to this highly deserving man, our ever gratefully venerated teacher, on this day, he was ceremonially presented with the decree appointing him an ordinary honorary professor of the theological faculty.

The Power of Excommunication. Last year a member of the Lutheran congregation at Quedlinburg (one not within the territorial state church) was placed under the ban. This excommunicated man thereupon first sued the church council, then, after the competent royal district court dismissed him on a procedural defect, the whole congregation. The district court thereupon declared the ban invalid; the congregation appealed, and the appellate court at Halberstadt altered the judgment and dismissed the plaintiff. In the meantime he had appealed to the highest judicial body of the land, the Royal Supreme Tribunal in Berlin, which, however, upheld the ruling of the Halberstadt appellate court and charged the plaintiff-appellant with the costs of this instance. "The exclusion," the ruling states, "was an act of church discipline, to which every member of a church society must submit. To be sure, this church discipline may never degenerate into penalties upon the body, honor, or property of the members (§ 52 l. c.). But in his exclusion there was no question of a penalty upon body or property, and for the injury to his honor that occurred in the process, the plaintiff has already received satisfaction through the criminal judgment against the preacher of Kienbusch. The plaintiff, however, disputes the lawfulness of his exclusion altogether, and a decision on any dispute arising over this lawfulness does indeed belong, under § 56 l. c., to the state — that is, to the authorities appointed by the state for the purpose. — These, however, are not the courts. For, quite apart from the provision of the following § 57, in which the word 'state' plainly cannot be understood to mean the courts, the rights belonging to the state over the church societies by law under § 113 l. c., insofar as they are not expressly reserved to the head of the state, are administered by the ecclesiastical department — now the Royal Ministry of Ecclesiastical, etc., etc., Affairs; moreover, the church societies of every religious party recognized by the state stand under the direction of their own ecclesiastical superiors (§ 114 l. o.). In particular, the rights of church discipline — which is what is at issue here — belong, among Roman Catholic fellow believers, to the bishop (§ 124 l. c.), and among Protestants, to the consistories (§ 143 l. c.). By the general concessions of July 23, 1815 (Law Gazette, p. 516), however, the Lutherans who have kept themselves separate from the fellowship of the territorial evangelical church have been permitted, by sovereign grant, to unite into separate church congregations and to form a union of these congregations under a common board not subordinate to the church government of the territorial evangelical church. This board is, for the congregations in question, the Supreme Church Collegium at Breslau. This body stands in the same legal relation to the individual congregations of the separated Lutherans as the consistory of a province does to the individual congregations belonging to the territorial evangelical church within it. — Against an exclusion resolved by such a body, the excluded party plainly has available not the legal process, but only the path of complaint to the superior authority, that is, to the relevant consistory; and against its decision there likewise lies no appeal to a court of law, but rather only the path of