# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Mai 1862_S159
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Church-Contemporary History. 159

Outside the true Lutheran Church, the Church of Christ is nowhere to be found. From this it follows: since, before the Reformation, there existed no such purely-teaching Lutheran Church, there was, before Luther, no Church at all — and the Catholics may rightly ask: Where was your Church before Luther? If it did not exist before Luther, then it is no Church at all, since the true Church is to remain always and at all times. Könnemann's doctrine draws the noose tight around our Church's neck and hands us over, lock, stock, and barrel, to the Catholic Church. But even if one tries to guard oneself, with a web of subtleties, against the consequences of this doctrine, it still suffers from a Chinese narrowness which, outside its own "heavenly kingdom," recognizes only red-bristled barbarians, and which must necessarily lead to a Chinese ossification. The doctrine is as abominable as it is fanatical. Now Pastor Diedrich is summoned to install Könnemann in his new congregation at Rogasen; and Diedrich comes, installs him, and receives him into his new synod, which thereby numbers four pastors. Diedrich — who brands the Upper Church Collegium as heretical and condemns it for its doctrine of the divine right of the governing office; Diedrich, who cannot bear to remain in a fellowship defiled by such heresy, and who has therefore brought about a rupture in the Church and formed a purified Church; Diedrich, who first demands a public recantation of heresy before he will give up his separation — this very same Diedrich receives Könnemann, with his gross, foundation-overturning false doctrine, into church fellowship, without requiring of him any public recantation. What is one to say to this? Does Diedrich perhaps take this Chinese whim for divine revelation? It is akin to his own nature, though it is claimed that he does not share it. If he did share it, we would have here a warning example of how someone can fight with the fury of faith against a doctrine that leads to Rome, and in doing so himself fall into a doctrine that must lead there by a still shorter road. But if he does not share it, it is all the worse. For then it is plain that Diedrich's fight against Dr. Huschke is not really about pure doctrine. He thereby issues himself the testimony of insincerity, as one who has always paraded pure doctrine and now himself shelters gross false doctrine. There remains, then, the well-founded suspicion that from the very beginning it was, with him, a matter of a craving for independence, to which the divine right of the governing office was, of course, bound to be intolerable. His greatest enemies could not have played a worse trick on him than he has played on himself. And his zeal has made him so blind that already, in the very shortest time — it is not yet a year — he has ruined his own work and brought himself, in the eyes of all discerning people, into complete discredit. This affair has only recently come to a rapid end. Will his defenders still be permitted to say that, though he has indeed sinned, he is nevertheless Lutheran, and that on that account one must maintain Communion fellowship with him? What? Is he to be Lutheran who first lays down the strictest principles concerning pure doctrine, and then knowingly acknowledges false doctrine alongside the pure? By what measure, then, is he to be measured, if not by the very measure with which he measures all the world? Let someone tell us how a church fellowship can stand which has placed itself on the ground of self-contradiction and self-destruction. Whoever enters into fellowship with it baptizes his own fellowship with aqua fortis. And does such a rupture count for nothing any more, which, according to Galatians 5, belongs among the manifest works of the flesh? Is there no commandment which says: Separate yourselves from such?

The "Erlangen Zeitschrift" on the Separation of Church and State. That the periodical named would not be found favorably disposed to speak on this theme was to be expected, and it is quite fitting that it warns against prematurity, and points out that people over there are not yet in the right state of readiness for this event. But its argumentation, and above all the manner in which it seeks to substantiate its propositions, and in doing so again speaks disparagingly of us, is truly, for the greater part, unworthy of Lutheran theologians, and a sad exposure of the real reason why these gentlemen so greatly dread a separation of Church and State. For it says, namely, in the 2nd issue of the current volume, p. 78, etc.: "When the separation of Church and State takes place, the Church is thrown upon herself and must maintain and govern herself. If she is