# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juli 1858_S224
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

224 Church and Contemporary History.

Dr. Krummacher and the Nine Articles. The gentleman named now declares, as the fruit of his participation in the so-called Evangelical Alliance, that he now recognizes that the Nine Articles demand too much! Through them, he says, the Quakers would be excluded, as would many followers of Schleiermacher. Should a confession of faith for the Alliance be drawn up, he considers the following more practical than those nine articles, namely: "All those who hope to be saved through Jesus Christ and through the grace of God, and who are resolved to live and die for Christ, shall be members of the Alliance, and we will bid them welcome." The rationalists are not a little pleased at this, and Dr. Krummacher already finds, though still timidly, the Berlin Protestant Church Gazette opening its arms to him. Hengstenberg, however, writes: "We see here a warning sign, which God gives to the well-meaning who have strayed onto the path of the Alliance, so that they may yet turn back in time. 'Here lie snares for the feet'" — this the present fact cries even into such ears as are not otherwise attuned to hear it. We would hope that this hastened crisis will prove a passage toward the recovery (?) of full health, and that Dr. Krummacher — after having, on his way downward, pursued the path as far as the rejection of the Nine Articles and as far as fraternizing with the Protestant Church Gazette, or at least to the point where that paper could recognize in him a kindred spirit — will soon briskly set out again on the way upward, hurry swiftly past the plank-booth of the Nine Articles and the castle-in-the-air of the Alliance, and return (?) into the fortified stronghold of the church — though it is certainly to be wished that this be done not with a flourish of trumpets, but with a quiet Kyrie eleison and Our Father.

Jena. Of late a rumor has spread — which we pass on only as a rumor — that there is an intention to call the Professor of Theology Baumgarten at Rostock to our local university. As is known, Baumgarten was recently removed, by a legally binding decision, from his office as public teacher of theology at a Lutheran faculty, on account of teaching that departs from the confession of the Lutheran church; and, given everything that has recently occurred in the Lutheran territorial churches of Thuringia (one need only think of Schwarz and Steinacker!), it would not be at all improbable that such a plan has been formed and is ripening toward its execution. Rationalism regards our lands as the ground on which, amid the present reaction and tyranny of belief, all political and ecclesiastical freedom must take refuge — as the North Sea island (as Rückert puts it) which, surrounded by the waves of the now high-running ecclesiastical current, is either heading toward the fate of being gradually and entirely washed away, or of forming a post from which, in due time, the fight for freedom might surely be maintained. — How unclear people on this side are about church matters is shown by an article, reprinted in several newspapers, "From the Foot of the Wartburg," which supposes that this same Baumgarten will be called to Jena because the government at Altenburg is pressing for the appointment of a "strictly confessional" teacher of theology at our territorial university! This put us in mind of the remark of a man exhibiting an orrery, who recently assured the circle of onlookers gathered around him that he would undertake, by demonstrating the wondrous construction of the universe, to convince even a Pietist of the existence of God!

Coburg. Here the highest ecclesiastical post in the land has fallen vacant through the death, which occurred last year, of General Superintendent Gensler. The deceased walked in the footsteps of the well-known rationalist Bretschneider, and was not able to understand the newly awakened life of faith in the church, still less to strengthen it. Those who have a heart for the church have therefore publicly expressed (e.g., in the Weimar Sonntagsbote) their wish that a man in earnest about the confession of the Lutheran territorial church be called to this influential post. Unfortunately it seems that quite the opposite is intended. The local governor, Franke, has traveled to Gotha to obtain the advice of Consistorial Councillor Schwarz on this appointment, and that the latter — as is reported — has proposed Pastor Zittel of Heidelberg, the well-known agitator from the revolutionary period and the most "light-friendly" of the co-editors of the Protestant Church Gazette, is, however distressing this would be for our church, more than probable given Schwarz's well-known standpoint.*)

Baumgarten. Following his removal from office, Prof. Dr. v. Hofmann of Erlangen has come forward on his behalf in a small pamphlet bearing the title: "An Examination of the Consistorial Opinion Rendered Concerning Dr. Baumgarten's Doctrinal Deviations. Nördlingen: Beck, 1858." 58 pages, octavo. The former seeks to demonstrate therein that the consistory bases its points of accusation on nothing but misunderstandings! A convenient way indeed to wash every heretic clean.

*) According to more recent newspaper reports from Heidelberg, he has in fact received and accepted the call.