# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_M rz 1860_S81
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

The Present Tension among the Separated Lutherans of Prussia. 81

the readers may understand what is at issue, I will acquaint them with the points in dispute, as well as that can be done briefly.

The separated Lutherans have, like all of us, passed through the times, and have had to pay time's toll, even though they have stepped out of the contemporary Union and have again sought out the Church's old paths. For it is not the case that, merely by placing oneself under the rule of church doctrine, the leaven of the spirit of the age is thereby already swept out. Hence Pastor Diedrich says, in his newest pamphlet, "The Worth and Nature of Church Government" (published by W. Schultze in Berlin): "Our continuance and life (in the separated congregations), even where it is at its best, can by no means satisfy us for long, because even this agrees but poorly with our Symbols. Among us too the most manifold modern views and endeavors play their part." From this have come the points in dispute, which have likewise, in a quite contemporary way, fastened upon the doctrine of the Church. For the disputed doctrine of the thousand-year kingdom, too — which, incidentally, does not stand in the foreground — we must reckon in here. Over these points in dispute two parties have formed: the smaller of which goes along with Pastor Diedrich of Jabel, the larger — though also still variously composed — with Ehlers, the editor of the Kirchenblatt, and with the Supreme Church Council.

Ehlers has, in his Kirchenblatt, simply represented the doctrine of our old teachers of the Church, that the Church is present everywhere that true Christians are found, whether among Lutherans, Catholics, Reformed, or sects; only that this does not mean that all erring communions are thereby straightway declared true churches. Insofar as these have retained fundamentally essential parts of God's Word, and true Christians live among them, the true Church is present among them as well; but insofar as they have falsified God's Word, they are called, as outward communions, false churches or sects. The Church of Christ thus extends beyond the Lutheran Church. This Diedrich decisively refuses, in the Lutheran Village Church Gazette (edited by Pastor Räthjen). In rejecting the authority of the old teachers of the Church, he will allow only a decision from Scripture and the Church's confessions to stand. His starting point is Article 7 of the Augsburg Confession, that the Church is present where God's Word is taught purely and rightly. From this he draws the conclusion: therefore the Church is not present where God's Word is taught impurely and wrongly. It is not present in the Lutheran territorial churches, where and insofar as, under the signboard of the Lutheran confessions, all manner of false doctrine is allowed free rein. It is not present among the Reformed and the sects; it is present least of all within the Union. Since, then, there is no salvation outside the Church, the Lutheran Church — and indeed this Lutheran, pure and undefiled Church — is the sole church of salvation. At first glance this looks quite alarming, as though in the whole of Christendom no further Christians were to be found anywhere except in Jabel and similar places. Yet that is not Diedrich's meaning.