# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Februar 1862_S62
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

62 Church and Contemporary Notes.

pope or the bishops pronounced the ban over certain lands or cities. It has probably not yet happened that a political revolution has chosen public worship in this way as the vehicle and cloak of its purposes.

After we had written down the foregoing, we read just now (mid-November) in an article of the "Allgemeine Zeitung" from Rome, that a privy councillor of the Emperor of Russia has arrived there and has asked the Pope to address an admonition to the Polish bishops, so that they might set themselves against the revolution. Russia points out that the same revolutionary party which, in Italy, uses Victor Emmanuel as a cloak for its intrigues, misuses the Catholic religion for that purpose in Poland. The Pope has thereupon declared that Russia itself bears the blame for the unrest there, because it suppresses the Catholic Church in Poland and hampers the communication of its bishops with Rome. If the Polish nation unites its love for the fatherland with its love for the religion of its fathers, and confounds the two with one another, then Russia must tell itself that it has itself provoked the expression of such feelings.

Separation. Pastor Vollert in Clodre, in the Weimar territory, whom the Allg. Kirchenz. calls "strictly Old Lutheran, or hyperorthodox," is going about — after having had deposition from office for insubordination adjudged against him by his non-Old-Lutheran church authority — forming, in his former parish district and its environs, an independent church congregation of his own faith. No obstacle, under the laws there prevailing, will be placed in his way.

Pastor Harms of Hermannsburg's Judgment on Church Government. The following we read in the Hermannsburg Mission periodical for the month of October of last year: "Well a hundred letters and more have I received in this time, all with the question: what do you hold concerning church government? Does it rest on divine or on human right? I would gladly have answered these letters, but I cannot; the times will not allow it. So I will then answer them here, though it grieves me that now those, too, who have not asked, will get to read my answer. But they can simply skip over it. I believe that this question hangs together with the democratic and rebellious air in which we now live, and by which every one is infected more or less. Church government, that is, the governance of whole ecclesiastical bodies, is, like all government, not of men but of God. The Church, too, has from the beginning never been without such government. The church government of the apostles is well known, and it is a divine one, for thus do they resolve and ordain: it seemeth good to the Holy Ghost and to us. The apostles gave this church government to the bishops. One need only read the letters of the apostle Paul to Timothy and Titus to be convinced that he gave them church government — to the one over the congregations in Asia, to the other over the congregations in Crete — that they should there make ordinances, install preachers, watch over right doctrine, and see to congregational arrangements. Cf., e.g., 1 Tim. 1:3; ch. 4:11; ch. 5:9, 19; 2 Tim. 2:2; Titus 1:5, and others. Since that time the government of bishops, of archbishops, of the pope has at all times been in the Church. After the Reformation, Luther forthwith vigorously exercised church government; the consistories have exercised it, and so it has remained down to our own time. Now if from the beginning there has always been church government, then it has certainly not fallen out of the air, nor has it arisen of itself. It is of God; to be sure, it has often been misused, and is still often misused, by the men who have exercised it — but what is not misused? The holiest and best things, most of all. Yet the holy does not for that reason cease to be holy. Therefore we too are, for God's sake, bound and obliged to render obedience to church government, just as much and even more so than to civil government; and whoever sets himself against church government resists God's ordinance and will receive a judgment upon himself. Obedience toward church government ceases only at the point where it also ceases toward civil government — namely, when something is commanded us that is against God's Word and against the conscience bound in God's Word. There it is self-evident that one must rather die than that which, in God's