# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_August 1861_S238
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

238 Dr. Huschke against Pastor Diedrich.

church government, and against a government which defends this false doctrine
and takes its stand upon it, is represented as perverse, by
saying: what, then, will these people do who reject the Upper Church Council
and withdraw from it, where will they
end up? — and when one tries to draw from this an argument against their struggle
because they have not yet devised any other church constitution.
All this proceeds from the assumption that an outward legal constitution
of the church is a necessary condition of her existence. But precisely
this is the error under attack. And the reformers — did they
have a plan for another churchly arrangement ready when they began
to attack the papacy? No; rather they left it to the Lord
what He would do, and did what God's Word and their conscience required of
them. — That all locally neighboring congregations of the same
confession will enter into a relation with one another, and that certain forms
of their fellowship will take shape, remains undisputed and happens naturally;
but it is just as certain that no worldly-formed government is needed
to mediate a blessed fellowship of Christian congregations, as the
examples of the Lutheran congregations in America and in Australia prove.
That the wish to abolish the U.C.C. was not the starting point
of the struggle, for this I appeal to a definite statement
of Pastor Wolf in the Kirchenzeitung für Lutheraner of last year, p. 42 (at the foot),
where he testifies that it does not matter to him whether the U.C.C. be abolished,
but that he only does not want it to be placed upon the ground of a doctrinal opinion
which he recognizes as contrary to Scripture and at variance with our Lutheran
confession. And Pastor Diedrich told me orally in Breslau
that for all he cared the U.C.C. might stand another twenty years. And I say
here: if the U.C.C. rejects the doctrine of church government contrary to the confession
which we contest, then we will gladly keep it; whatever must be changed for the good
of doctrine will then soon be recognized and altered.

As for the passages from Luther's writings which the author
brings forward to confirm his opinion, some of these too admit
of a quite different interpretation; and it is easy to adduce many sayings
of Luther which are thoroughly unfavorable to the author's opinion.
But we will first see what our confessions teach;
and when we have grasped their sense, then we will
look at Luther's writings; for then we shall have the right eyes for
it.

In closing this notice I recall that the church councilor
Pastor Lasius, my dear friend, in the K.-Bl. of the year before last, p. 206 f. — sharply
as he had censured Pastor Diedrich for his attacks upon the synodical resolutions —
nevertheless acknowledges that Pastor Diedrich in his
discussions of the principles of church government and church constitution
has said "much that is correct and important." He testifies there also
that Pastor Diedrich brings nothing new, but "the clear doctrine