# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_M rz 1860_S83
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

The Present Tension among the Separated Lutherans of Prussia. 83

heart, run after the goal set before them. Let whoever will sit in the strict judgment seat; I will not do it, lest I break my own staff. For the sake of the separation, Diedrich has overstretched the concept of the Church; but he achieves nothing by it, except to call his own church into question and pull the ground out from under its feet.

Diedrich's doctrine is, on the one side, good Lutheran doctrine. Only the truly believing belong to the Church for him, not the mass of mouth-Christians. It is only that the demand for pure doctrine is so overstretched, and the concept of the Church screwed up so high, that from there one can reach out and grasp with one's hands the pinnacles of St. Peter's in Rome. If the Church in Rome is a mass of believers (whether in mouth only or in truth) under the rule of the Pope, then the Church in Jabel is a mass of believers under the rule of pure doctrine; and in both cases the church is the sole church of salvation, which, beyond its own enclosure, knows only sects and mobs. Where pure doctrine is so excessively emphasized, and the pure preaching office alone makes the Church recognizable and visible, it cannot lie far off that the essence of the Church should draw itself together still more narrowly and crystallize out in the preaching office. Diedrich assigns church power exclusively to the preaching office, without any co-participation of the congregation; and so long as nothing contrary to God's Word is required of the congregation, the congregation is bound in conscience to obey. "God acts through the preaching office, and indeed in such a way alone that the preachers remain wholly and solely responsible to Him for what they do and leave undone in this office, let princes and the powerful, individuals or great masses, say what they will about it. No human being can relieve them of the responsibility for doctrine, church discipline, care of souls, and administration of the sacraments, be he called prince, consistory, or congregation. Therefore this — the making of church orders — is ascribed to the pastors alone." What scope Diedrich gives to this church power is not quite clear. But if he means to exclude the congregation from it and to set up a proper pastoral regime, then we do have some strong reservations to bring against it.

Let us suppose the case that the pastoral regime were set up and carried through in the separated church. How far, for instance, does Diedrich's church power then extend? Surely no further than his own congregation. And how far does the church power of his neighbors and of all his fellow ministers extend? Surely no further either. Every man, by Lutheran right, is confined to his own congregation and has only to sweep before his own door. Let us now suppose the case that Diedrich dies — to whom, incidentally, we wish a long life. Who is to fill the pastorate again? One will say: the other preachers are to do it. Oh no! that they are not to do; they have no business in a strange congregation, least of all to appoint it a pastor. Then nothing else remains but that either the congregation must do it, to which it unconditionally has the right — indeed, the right alone. But if it does so, it thereby exercises the foremost right of church power, namely to provide for the pastorates, in which, of course, the other