# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1862_S125
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Church News of the Day.    125

servants of the church "great ones," according to him there are "leaders," and it is not ruling itself that is forbidden in it" (certainly not!), "but rather, according to settled usage, tyrannizing — the abuse of the office bestowed by God in the interest of domineering self-seeking, which even among the 'kings of the Gentiles' is only a regrettable fact, not God's ordinance, and which in the Christian church is to cease entirely even among the civil authorities." It is utterly puzzling how a man like Hengstenberg can explain the Lord's warning so thoroughly in the manner of a Bellarmine. The only key to this is offered by the fact that Hengstenberg is caught up on the point of the distinction between state and church; otherwise he would have to see that the Lord is not warning against the sins of worldly rulers, but rather against carrying the relation of worldly rulers to their subjects over into the church. Still more puzzling, moreover, is that even several of the Prussian pastors who take so decided a stand against a power of command by the Supreme Church Council [Ober-Kirchencollegium] in the church nevertheless long back for the conditions of the state-church, or else ascribe to the pastorate what they deny to the Supreme Church Council, and abhor a collegial form of government for the church.

The Catholic press in Germany. Concerning how poorly it fares and how far it lags behind the Protestant press, a pamphlet published at Augsburg raises the following bitter complaint, which we take from the number of February 19 of the "Wahrheits-Freund": "Of the forty million Germans, more than half are Catholics. While the Protestant portion possesses about 1500 bookshops, there are, all told, scarcely 24 Catholic ones of any significance. Among the 2 to 3000 newspapers we have at most 7 or 8 larger Catholic ones and some 20 smaller papers of our tendency and color. Germany surely numbers a clergy of 60,000 men, and we do not believe we err in maintaining that all the Catholic papers of Germany together do not yet have 60,000 subscribers." — It is, to be sure, no wonder then that the Wahrheits-Freund considers this a "most sorrowful picture" of Germany's Catholic press.    C.

New theology. Recently a zealous Lutheran preacher in Germany wrote to us: "How I now regret my university years! Almost all the books I brought back with me from E. and G. I can no longer use at all. The handsome fashionable new bindings must all now give way, and the old pigskin-bound ones take their place — books that are becoming true treasures of gold to me. Only now do I realize what fools we German theologians have been; we tormented ourselves with modern tinsel and looked on calmly, with pitying smiles, as the clever Americans fetched the old treasures out of the lumber-rooms. Now we too are growing wise, but the treasures are gone. I have long been hunting after several old books, of which you in the Synod surely have hundreds, but they are nowhere to be found."

Hengstenberg writes in his preface this year to the Evangel. Kirchenz., concerning the appearance of Kahnis's dogmatics: "The second case of departure from the churchly path which the past year presents, we would very gladly pass over in silence. It has gone deeply to the editor's heart, and, coming after the heavy personal trials with which it pleased the Lord to visit him in the past year, has touched him most painfully of all. It concerns a hitherto-professed confessor of Lutheran doctrine, a friend of many years, a fellow-worker on the Ev. Kz. But the editor of such a paper has no choice. As long as he bears this heavy office, he must say to his brother, 'I know him not.'" Hengstenberg thereupon chiefly raises his testimony against the fact that Dr. Kahnis, in that work, "in a manner till then unheard of in churchly theology, has raised doubts against the genuineness, credibility, and inspiration of the holy Scriptures (namely of the fifth book of Moses, of part of Isaiah and Zechariah, of the whole prophet Daniel, and of the Gospel of Matthew)," and mentions besides only that Kahnis "has begun to shake, in particular, the article of the standing and falling church, the doctrine of the deity of Christ, for which he would like to substitute a vague divinity." For according to Kah-