# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Mai 1862_S141
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

A Strange Assertion of Dr. Huschke.    141

alongside and outside of, and thus also against, Christ and His Gospel, claims a divine right over them and demands their obedience — whether it be called pope, or bishop, or territorial sovereign, or consistory, or Supreme Church Council, or presbytery, or whatever else. As with every individual, truly believing Christian, so also in this way does every individual local congregation, indeed the whole body of them, insofar as it consists of believers, live before God, and is governed from without by Christ's Word, from within by the faith and love that are produced and preserved through the Gospel, with and without an earthly sign and means (sacrament).

But insofar as Christian congregations still live in the world and, moreover, in the flesh, and each individual Christian still carries the corrupted nature about his neck, it can be useful and salutary for them, also for the warding-off and disciplining of the flesh, to place themselves under this or that order and, out of Christian liberty, under the supreme government of the divine Word, to transfer certain powers and rights of their self-government to certain persons from among their number — and particularly to the bearers of the churchly teaching office — for administration in their stead. And that here we can only be speaking of a human right, and as existing within a human ordinance, needs no proof.

There is, and remains, therefore an essential difference between an "individual congregation," which, insofar as it consists of truly believing people, is in fact and truth a work of the Holy Spirit, and a fellowship of several congregations under a particular churchly constitution, which is merely a work of Christian wisdom and, depending on circumstances, is subject to alteration and improvement, or even to complete abolition. For what, under certain historically given conditions, may be salutary and beneficial for the Christian welfare and good peace of the congregations can, under altered circumstances, be obstructive and hindering, indeed harmful and ruinous.

Nevertheless, it is not to be denied that the dissolution of an already-existing bond of churchly constitution, even if it is faulty, lies "beyond the private arbitrary will" of the individual; and whoever has followed the present movements in the Lutheran Church of Prussia with an attentive and impartial eye can by no means approve of the stormy and violent character of Pastor Diederich's course of action.

To this must be added, moreover, that he stands just as little as Dr. Huschke in the true evangelical middle, lacking just as much as the latter the underlying, guiding, and pervading basic conception of the evangelical essence of the Christian church according to Article 7 of the Augsburg Confession, and (viewed in the true evangelical light) sets up, in place of his opponent's collegial papism, a pastoral papism, which in practice could easily turn out more dangerous than the other.

Concerning a General Synod, to be convened forthwith in Pastor Ehlers's opinion, for the healing of this rift and the reconciliation of the contending