# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Februar 1860_S62
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

62 Church and Contemporary Notices.

authority of Holy Scripture in matters of faith (see the Formula of Concord, Summary, Comprehensive Introduction) hears or reads utterances, whenever it is a question of establishing disputed questions from Scripture, such as these: ""You must understand Scripture in the light of the fathers;"" — ""the church principle stands above the scriptural principle;"" — ""one must credit Luther and the fathers with a better understanding of Scripture than one's own;"" — ""one can consider the scripturalness of a doctrine assured only when it has been shown that the same is found in Luther and the fathers — one believes and holds something to be the true Word of God only because one finds it in Luther and the ancients."" (!) Such and similar utterances, which are perhaps "not meant as badly" (very kind of them!) "as they sound," rest on an obvious confusion of the material scriptural principle (the analogy of faith) with theology, or with the measure of scriptural understanding of a particular age, and are explicable only in that way. It is in truth appalling that people in Germany can dare to impute such principles to our synod, and indeed not even as consequences drawn by our opponents, but as doctrines literally spoken by our synod itself — which is evidently what the quotation marks used are meant to indicate! But thank God that we cannot be attacked otherwise than by shamefully distorting our teaching and imputing to us principles which we ourselves abhor. We therefore do not consider it worth the trouble to demonstrate the injustice of those brazen imputations. Indeed, the false teachers in our church have always treated the orthodox this way, and have always claimed a position whose excellence even a blind man would have had to see.

The Episcopal Church. A short while ago a petition from 460 clergy of the Anglican church was presented to the Queen of England in her council of ministers, in which a revision and abridgement of the liturgy is requested — namely, the dropping of the Athanasian Creed; further, that at visitations of the sick the absolution be clear and exclusively declarative in wording (declarative, not collative), so that it cannot be understood as proceeding from a priestly power; further, that the baptismal formula be so altered that every notion of a regeneration through baptism be banished from it, etc.

The Prussian United Church. From Hengstenberg's Evangelical Church Gazette we learn that the ten Reformed congregations of the Province of Saxony have, by "constitutionally regular" process, through the Most High's approval and confirmation, been fully released from the (united) Agenda of 1829 and have returned to their old Reformed order. The report goes on to say: "If all this applies for the present only to the Reformed congregations, we Lutherans may nevertheless draw from it some hope for ourselves as well. What is right for the one is fair for the other."

Köthen. Here the Lutheran and Reformed churches have stood separate until now. Recently, the Pilger writes, there is talk of giving the two churches a common catechism through a commission. It is scarcely credible that the people of Köthen would dare, after the example Prussia has given them — so frightening an example — to attempt an outward union. Such an attempt could easily awaken the now-slumbering spirit of Lutheran confessional fidelity. And we say: God grant it!

The First Rays of the Sun of Tolerance Newly Risen in Prussia. As is known, 5 church patrons of the Duchy of Magdeburg publicly bore witness against the all-too-tolerant declarations and ordinances of the new Minister of Public Worship, Bethmann-Hollweg, concerning free congregations and civil marriage. For this they have been condemned — not only in the first instance, for insulting the minister, but also in the second, and indeed still more severely — because, while no distortion of the truth was found in their bluntly German manner of speaking, an insult to the Prince Regent was found in it nonetheless. The Pilger a. S. remarks on this: "Gamaliel's justice, which must concede the disciples are right, yet calmly looks on while they are scourged, is growing young again. — The regrettable story teaches that popish principles of infallibility are being claimed by a side which, at its first appearance, unfurled the banner of free-church principles."