# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_M rz 1860_S85
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

The Present Tension among the Separated Lutherans of Prussia.    85

must be. Diedrich must go forward to Rome, or he must assign the power of the church to the whole church.

Here, however, we find him in a stubborn struggle against Catholicizing developments. The occasion for this was given him by the Supreme Church Council [Oberkirchencollegium], which at the General Synod of 1856 raised the request that intercession be made for it in the church prayer. It has good reason for this request, for it bears the care of all the congregations and in fact presides at the synods. To its church leadership the separated church owes a very great deal, and Diedrich himself readily gives it high praise. It is therefore only fair that the church should remember before God those who labor so faithfully and with so much self-sacrifice, out of God's gift to the church, in blessing. Yet Diedrich is precisely on this point very displeased, and has set forth his reasons in the above-mentioned writing on church government. Intercession, he says, we owe indeed to every child, how much more to the Supreme Church Council. But intercession in the public church prayer means more than that. Such a thing gives the Supreme Church Council, in the eyes of the congregations, the appearance of being an authority ordained by God, which governs the church in God's name. Then the Supreme Church Council becomes something quite different from what it is and is permitted to be. This one must resist all the more earnestly, since the inclination to it is already very widespread. One regards the Supreme Church Council as a kind of consistory, as in the territorial churches; and indeed it is composed in much the same way, of clerical and lay councillors, except that the prince at its head is lacking. To be sure, a great deal is lacking with that, and Diedrich has demonstrated this conclusively. Our princely consistories have ground under their feet when they exercise a bishop's oversight over a mass of congregations and administer the external power of the church. For that happens by command of the Christian civil authority, which is set by God over the whole land.*) But what can the Breslau Supreme Church Council show for itself in this regard? Nothing, nothing at all. Its clergy are ordinary pastors, and its laymen are lawyers, businessmen, and the like, who are nothing more than ordinary church members and have even less right than its pastors do. How do they come to a bishop's office of oversight? Where is it written, or where do the Symbols teach, that God has instituted such authorities and made them rightful holders of the power of the church or of the episcopal office? If the Supreme Church Council sets itself up in such power, that is a way to Rome, and it is high time that a warning be issued. Diedrich therefore says: "If one wants to create a special

*) These statements of the esteemed author undoubtedly rest on a confounding of the
state with the church. The Christian prince is, in the church, not a prince
but only a Christian, and what he commands his subjects as prince, these obey
not as church but as citizens. If the prince also holds an office in the church,
he is then a servant of the church and can only, on the ground of the church's consent and in
agreement with it, "administer the external power of the church," but not on the ground
that he, as Christian civil authority, could command within the church.    D. R. p. t.