# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juni 1861_S192
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

192 Church and Contemporary News.

places orders, if he does not want to find himself for the most part badly
deceived. Nothing reveals more plainly, in many recent works of so-called
believing theologians, that something wholly other than Christianity is being
set forth in them, than the way faith, justification and the like are treated
there. — Of the work named above Ströbel says finally: "The author's name led
us to expect much of the book before us; but instead of the hoped-for kernel
fare we found a dough kneaded together out of Reformational, Zwinglian-Calvinist,
unionist, rationalist and „„German-philosophical“““ flour."

Baden. Of the backward course the unionized territorial church is taking here
we have already reported in the April number. On this matter we now hear a
voice from Baden itself in the March number of Hengstenberg's Ev. Church
Gazette. We read there: "The principle which carries in itself the germ of
inward disintegration for any church and opens a wide door to unbelief —
namely that the church is not a fellowship of faith on an acknowledged
confessional foundation, but a fellowship of tendencies with equal rights"
(as Löhe also wants it) "with common outward orders and ceremonies — has now
at least come to be acknowledged in the church government." With regard to the
appointment of Hitzig, which has taken place, to the chair in the Heidelberg
theological faculty left vacant by Umbreit's death, the same correspondent
declares: "It almost seems that the wheel is turning round again to the period
when it counted as a glory to have a man like G. E. H. Paulus at the
university. The question of polity is everywhere only the ladder by which
unbelief means to climb up." — Whoever will not reap such fruits, let him not
sow union. — We have just read in Münkel's Neues Zeitblatt: "Lamey, Schenkel,
Zittel, Häuser and company can now, as is the custom on such occasions, hold
great banquets to the purpose and, over Hungarian wine, drink the health of the
reconquered Baden national church amid flourishes and cannon-thunder, so that
the prince of this world laughs in his heart. However small and despised the
little Lutheran companies in Baden may be, they are for the present the only
Zoar to which the more earnest souls can flee out of the rain of pitch and
brimstone of the Baden national church; and perhaps we shall soon hear that the
way thither is trodden more than hitherto."

From the Bavarian Rhenish Palatinate the Ev. Church Gazette is written under
date of May 10: "One must admit that both the ecclesiastical and the political
conditions here are now far more dangerous than in the year 1848; the
ecclesiastical and political spirit of revolution has become both more intensive
and more extensive; the democrats have learned much in twelve years and
forgotten nothing. In the ecclesiastical sphere they may now burrow and agitate
quite unhindered."

Frankfurt. For April 10 of this year a "free conference of evangelical clergy
at the Sandhof near Frankfurt am Main" had been announced, "to which all who
stand on the ground of the Reformation confessions are most kindly invited";
and eleven "theses on the doctrine of the so-called thousand-year kingdom" had
been written by Pastor Krebs of Frankfurt and published in the Darmstadt
General Church Gazette. The seventh thesis reads: "If this doctrine of
Scripture, like every other that lies beyond the present field of experience,
has difficulties in the conceptual realization of its idea, then it belongs
precisely to the sphere of Christian faith, and indeed to the plerophory
thereof; but it is no fundamental article, and therefore can also be no ground
for terminating church fellowship (as the Missouri Synod does against the
chiliast Löhe)." — It is simply not true that any doctrines of Scripture have
"difficulties in the conceptual realization of their idea"; comprehensible they
will indeed never be, but their idea, their What? is clear and plain even to
children — how else could they be objects of faith! If, then, the chiliast
gentlemen by their own admission run up against the difficulties indicated with
respect to their doctrine, they ought to conclude from this that it is at least
no doctrine of Scripture for a Christian's faith.

Typesetting errors in the April number.
The first line of p. 128 should have been the first line of p. 127.