# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_August 1861_S237
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Dr. Huschke against Pastor Diedrich. 237

—cannot judge. For how can you judge what is the doctrine of the Lutheran church
and what is not, if you do not know the doctrine of your church from its
confessions, where the church has laid it down?! — And only so shall
we also be able fairly to judge the persons who have come forward in this struggle and their
actions. In short, you Lutherans! Read your
confessions.

But the parts of the confessions that are especially to be
read in order to gain a right insight into the disputed question are the 28th
article of the Augsburg Confession; the 4th article of the second part of the
Smalcald Articles, which treats of the papacy; the appendix to the
Smalcald Articles, "Of the Power and Primacy of the Pope and of
the Power and Jurisdiction of Bishops"; and finally the 10th article of the Formula
of Concord. In the Evangelisches Concordienbuch, edited by
Detzer, Nuremberg 1847, anyone can easily find the parts indicated.
They stand there on pages 57, 332, 354, 557 and 699.

Whoever reads these sections of our confessions attentively will
convince himself that our church holds a church government to be permissible, provided
it does not declare itself necessary and as existing by force of divine right.
With this view of our confessions I fully agree; I therefore
have nothing against a church government as such, but declare myself only against
the doctrine of the necessity of a church government on the ground of a divine
command, because I can find no such command. According to my conviction,
which I have already expressed more than once, our misfortune is not
that we have a church government in the Upper Church Council, but that
this council ascribes to itself an origin which belongs to it neither according to God's Word
nor according to the confessions of our church. — Should it in future be
found that something other than this erroneous opinion moved Pastor Diedrich to his withdrawal from the U.
C.C., and that he fought for something
other than the doctrine of the confessions of the Lutheran
church, then I would cease to call him a Lutheran Christian
and would break off sacramental fellowship with him. But so long as I am not
convinced of this, neither the vehemence with which he has contended nor
the sins of which he has made himself guilty in the strife may determine me
to deny him Lutheranism. For who has ever advanced the assertion
that Lutherans do not sin? Pastor Diedrich does indeed seem to me
to set the visible side of the church unduly in the background; but his
struggle against a false laying of weight upon her outward constitution makes this
explicable, and undeniable reality will bring him back where he
has gone too far. In general, however, our struggle is not a struggle for
and about persons and their virtues or defects, but a struggle
about the cause. God forbid that anyone should succeed in dragging down the controversy
over the right Lutheran doctrine of church government into a controversy over
personalities, and so putting it out of the way. — It is also
reprehensible when the controversy raised against a false doctrine of