# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Februar 1860_S37
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Preface to the Volume of 1860. 37

later granted only this much, that it had indeed been a deliberate sin, but
not a mortal one. He further asserted, in passing, that true Christians
might boast of their righteous walk; that faith consisted of five parts:
knowledge, assent, confidence, an ardent longing for grace, and the
pleasant rest in Christ; and the like. To be sure, Stenger appealed here,
doubtless not against his better knowledge, to the fact that he professed
all the symbolical books of our Church and rejected the errors of the
papists, the Reformed, the Socinians, the Anabaptists, and other sects;
but since he was unwilling to recant decisively, he was — although, on
account of his otherwise genuine zeal and his evidently deficient insight
into the consequences of his assertions, people would gladly have spared
him — first suspended for a time, and finally, on November 18, 1670,
removed from his office, and forbidden and prohibited from preaching
and teaching, both in the city and in the whole city district, on pain of
unavoidable, severe punishment. How unreliable Stenger's repeated
yieldings were, to a certain degree, was shown, as with Huber, soon after
his removal. For when, in the following year, the records of his trial were
published, he himself opposed to that writing, which bore the title
"Causa Stengeriana, or a True Copy of the Objections, etc.," a satirical
piece under the title: "Palinodia Stengeriana, that is, the Most Humble
Recantation of All the Terrible Heretical Doctrines in Which J. M.
Stenger Has, to His Regret, Hitherto Been Deeply Immersed, etc.," 1671.
In later years he fell into so bitter a dispute with the well-known Dr.
Joh. Friedr. Mayer that each sent the other's polemical writings to his
house by the hangman's servants. (See Walch's Introduction to the
Religious Controversies of the Ev.-Lutheran Church, IV, 919ff.)

As a third example of Evangelical-Lutheran ecclesiastical doctrinal
discipline in the period after the adoption of the Formula of Concord
may serve the minister Johann Mercker of Essen (b. 1658, d. 1728),
who identified the spiritual priesthood with the regular preaching office,
and posited a distinction only insofar as ministers also administered the
episcopal (governing) office by human right (jure humano); if a
Christian was equipped with the necessary gifts of the Holy Spirit for it,
he had, he held, the same liberty to teach as a called minister. He would
hear nothing of any special divine institution of the public teaching
office, nor of any power belonging to ministers to forgive sins in God's
stead. He therefore also consistently rejected the Church's institutions
for the training of ministers, since only those trained there were called
to office. He conceded only this much, that the liberty to teach which he
demanded could not, on account of the confusion that would arise from
it, be introduced outright; one should only work toward its
introduction. When, with him too, all admonitions and the responsa
obtained concerning his teaching proved fruitless, he too was finally
removed — this occurred in the year 1703. (Loc. cit. V, 121ff.) The same
befell, in the year 1699, Pastor M. Johann Crasselius at Sara in the
Altenburg region, when he would not abandon the assertion that dancing
in itself (and not only the