# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1862_S126
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

126    Church News of the Day.

-nis, Jesus is "not Jehovah," but only "of divine nature, a divine being." Hengstenberg therefore calls Kahnis's presentations "Socinianizing seductions."

Thuringia. In the Ev. Kz. of the month of December of last year we read, among other things, the following: "In the Reuss lands, particularly in Greiz, much has been done on the part of the church government to lead the church of Christ back, in accordance with the confessions of the Lutheran Reformation, to sound conditions. Yet all these efforts were not able to prevent a separation in the sense of the Lutheran confession. In the Advent season of the year 1860 about twenty members of the congregation, led by the tax-receiver Merz, withdrew from the territorial church and formed a separated Lutheran congregation. Since the church of the principality of Reuss-Greiz has never been entangled with unionistic endeavors, since the church government also knew, with great faithfulness and caution, how to remove everything that might arouse any suspicion that a union was being quietly prepared, the cause of this separation must be sought in other matters. In a little tract which the tax-receiver Merz recently published, he gives the following as the reasons for his withdrawal. The former pastor in Greiz, whose confessional child he had been before his separation, had introduced a catechism in which, at Question 350, it is said that the sensual impulses of man are in themselves pure and sinless. I do not know that catechism myself, but from all that I have heard from very strict Lutherans about its author and his book, I have no doubt that by this nothing more was meant to be said than what the Apology of the Augsburg Confession, Chapter XI, De conjugio sacerdotum, teaches about the storge physice, as distinguished, presumably, from the appetitus of concupiscentia. The second heresy which that catechism is said to contain consists in this, that at Question 559 it is taught that the Holy Spirit is the person in whom the Father together with the Son knows and seeks Himself, as the all-embracing love. From this Merz draws the consequence that, accordingly, the Father and the Son had lost themselves, since he must first seek himself again; but a lost Father and Son cannot redeem lost mankind. Besides these heresies, Merz further accuses his former pastor of not being able to call by name the sheep entrusted to him. Finally, he did not go before his flock, but ceded this place to the secular authority, and did not believe he could occupy it without sin against the fourth commandment. What this is supposed to mean I do not understand. It cannot refer to a worldly, unchristian life. For Merz says shortly afterward of this shepherd, judged so harshly: that he was otherwise an amiable personality, animated by the best of intentions. This is presumably meant to refer to the fact that the pastor does not place under the ban and excommunicate all those whom Mr. Merz considers ripe and fit for this procedure. The bizarre character that has taken hold among these Greiz separatists turns serious matters into little short of a farce. Or is it not grotesque that in this circle the ordinary courtesy title on the address of letters — 'To His Well-Born' — has been changed into 'To His Born-Again,' as though rebirth were fit to serve as a courtesy title? This bigotry appears in its most repellent form in a little tract in which the tax-receiver Merz informs the world how he placed the Lutheran pastor Wermelskirch under the ban, because the latter, in a confidential conversation with the pastor's wife, Mrs. Vollert, had called him, Merz, an enthusiast [Schwarmgeist]. On the basis of the passage, Matt. 18:15-18, torn wholly out of context with the rest of the teaching of Scripture and, moreover, wrongly interpreted, a theory and practice has been developed in those circles that every Christian may, on account of any supposed or actual offense, after a preceding threefold admonition, place his fellow Christian under the ban and hand him over to Satan. In this tract Mr. Merz further instructs Christendom that St. Paul's imprisonment was a punishment of God for his having undertaken the vow of Acts 21:23ff.; that Dr. Luther died an untimely, evil death as punishment for the sin of having acted as arbiter of the inheritance between the Counts of Mansfeld. Other eccentricities prevailing in these circles — how, from the dreams of individuals, the eternal damnation of certain persons hostile to the separation