# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_October 1861_S306
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

306 The Petition of the Consistories of the Evangelical Reformed Congregations at Leipzig, etc.

hierarchicus. According to this, they say, the temporal magistracy is
indeed the proper subject of church power; but since in our church this
power has renounced church government, its share falls to the
ecclesiastical office.

Leaving aside, now, that the advocates of this view do not yet seem to
have become clear as to the manner in which government is then to be
exercised by the holders of the office — indeed, that some seem to
conceive the matter in such a way that no common church government
can come about at all, but rather the church threatens to disintegrate
into a sum of separate, independent congregations — we cannot, even
apart from that, hold the view itself, according to which the holders of
the ecclesiastical office are to be the proper subject of church power, to be
a Lutheran one either. Still more questionable to us, however, is that
they make a great show of passing off this view as the Lutheran one, in
such a way that they see in its rejection a violation of pure doctrine. Most
questionable of all to us, however, is that there are even some among
them who see a violation of pure doctrine in the fact that, as they put it,
Reformed elements (the presbyterial ones) have been taken up into the
constitution. It seems not to have come to their consciousness at all that
they thereby offend against the principle of the Lutheran Church: satis
est consentire de doctrina evangelii et administratione sacramentorum
[it is enough to agree concerning the doctrine of the Gospel and the
administration of the sacraments]; for by this they turn the question of
constitution into a question of doctrine, and can, under the pretext that
pure doctrine demands it, turn a hundred things that have hitherto been
regarded as adiaphora into questions of doctrine and life in the church."

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(From the Saxon Church and School Gazette of July 25 of this year.)

The Petition of the Consistories of the Evangelical Reformed
Congregations at Leipzig and Dresden, Concerning the
Religious Oath of Teachers.

This petition was directed against Section 2 of §6 of the draft of the
church constitution, but at the same time requested "that, in case this
draft should not come to adoption at all, the royal state government be
moved, by whatever way seems most suitable, to work toward having the
religious oath, in accordance with the principles of the constitution and of
the public school law of June 6, 1835, dropped with respect to the
teachers designated in the said section." The First Chamber, as we
reported in No. 11, rejected this petition; but since it was taken up in the
Second Chamber by Deputy Cichorius as his own, it had to come there for
special deliberation once again.

This petition has aroused justified astonishment in the land: for if,
within our fatherland, confessional peace has hitherto remained
undisturbed, the reason for this was to be sought in particular also in the
fact that the existing confessional boundaries were respected on both
sides and