# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Mai 1862_S138
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

138    A Strange Assertion of Dr. Huschke.

that we hold true scholarship, even "the scholarship of our day," in high esteem, insofar as it is true, but with good conscience deny our approval to illogical assertions.    L.

——

(Submitted by Dr. Sihler.)
A Strange Assertion of Mr. Dr. Huschke.

It is a fact just as true as it is, unfortunately, sad and open, that the Lutheran Church in Prussia is at present divided and torn apart in doctrine. One part of the pastors, namely, especially under the lead of Pastor Diederich, maintains, and rightly so, that their Supreme Church Council [Oberkirchencollegium] and its church government is only a human ordinance and has no right or power to bind the consciences of church servants and their congregations to obedience through all sorts of laws and ordinances, as though by a divine authority grounded in Scripture. Nevertheless, Pastor Diederich at least overshoots the mark on the other side, in that he does not quite simply and genuinely, in evangelical and Lutheran fashion, hold fast to the sole and absolute church government of Holy Scripture, to which teacher and hearer, shepherds and flocks alike are unconditionally subject, but instead, for the sake of the divine institution of the churchly teaching office, ascribes to the bearers of that office a special governing power over their congregations which, as far as I understand, does not simply coincide with that of the divine Word.

Another part of the pastors sides with the O. K. C., and indeed chiefly with its head, Dr. Huschke, who, while not directly asserting that any human church government is of the same divine institution as the preaching of the Word of God and the administration of the holy sacraments, and thus exists by divine right, nevertheless maintains that "the government of the church over several congregations and pastors, just as much as the pastorate over a single congregation, is willed by God and given to the church forever." And therefore the O. K. C. is also to be acknowledged "as the superior churchly authority," and willing obedience, for conscience's sake, is to be rendered to its resolutions, ordinances, and laws.

From this standpoint Mr. Dr. Huschke now makes the following strange assertion: "Once a fellowship has arisen in its constitution, it lies, just as much as an individual congregation once formed, as a structure of the power of the Son of God and of the creative love of the Holy Spirit, far beyond private arbitrary will, and ought not to be dissolved again without the most urgent reasons, and especially not unilaterally — all the more so since this regularly cannot happen without a simultaneous tearing apart of definite relationships of duty which the fellowship has called into being; otherwise one makes oneself guilty of schism, of the tearing apart of the body of Christ, in which our church has always recognized a misdeed nearly akin to heresy."

Now, it is altogether legalistic, Jewish, and papistic, and therefore also