# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juni 1862_S191
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Church News of the Day.    191

there are indeed also differences between us and the Buffalonians, which I have not concealed — for example, in the matter of Pastor Dörfler and his congregation. Of the commission in Toledo, as also in Jabel, I said alike: such a spectacle I would rather not have seen from the commissioners. C. E. (Carl Eichhorn?) holds this against me in Nagel's paper, as though I were contradicting myself. Let him look more closely. Pastor Grabau thinks he agrees with Ebert and Lohmann. Perhaps so. — Further, the Martinsville matter is also unclear. Neither the royal ministry nor the synod seems to have taken hold of it at the right end. Article 28 of the Augsburg Confession assigns to the bishop or pastor the right to establish order in the church. That must, however, remain within the church, that is, confined to matters concerning church order, the Word, and the Sacrament. By no means does it extend to levies, taxes, and other worldly matters. Those belong before the civil authority, or, depending on circumstances, before the heads of households." This resolution of Pastor Räthjen's is, unfortunately, mistaken, just as, in general, it is evident that in the present conflict within the Prussian Lutheran church only a half-truth is contending against error.

From the Prussian-Lutheran Church. We read the following in Räthjen's church paper of Feb. 3: In Thorn a congregation of about a hundred communicants has separated from the Supreme Consistorial Council and called the Rev. Dr. theol. Schröder as its pastor. This congregation has joined our synodical association, and, at its request, Pastor Diedrich installed Pastor Schröder in his office on the Sunday after New Year. At the same time, the congregation of Krebs, near Marienwerder, has renounced Breslau and joined us. So there would now be, in the province of Posen and Prussia, as in Brandenburg and Saxony, three parishes each. If God grants grace, the small independent synods may yet come, despite all distress and in spite of Breslau, which we sought peacefully but in vain through our petition of Sept. 1860 in Breslau. Silesia and the Rhineland will follow, and — Pomerania! — — In Schmiedeberg (Berlin-Potsdam Province), several members of the congregation have been compelled, by the teaching and measures of Consistorial Councillor Lasius, to withdraw from his pastoral care. He had gone so far as to forbid the reading of Ehlers's church newspaper. The copy that several held jointly and had already paid for was intercepted by the warden (an adherent of the new Breslau doctrine) just as it arrived from the post, who declared: "The pastor has forbidden its reading." Lasius, on the other hand, had ordered Dr. Huschke's Schutzwehr to be read aloud during the service, which was in fact done. Whoever would not accept the doctrine openly set forth was turned away from the altar. After several souls had thus gone without the Holy Supper for over a year, they finally found themselves compelled to seek the true Word and Sacrament elsewhere. They have joined the congregation of Pastor Wolf in Magdeburg. — In Berlin itself, likewise, several have renounced Lasius's pastoral care and have called Pastor Diedrich to feed them with God's Word. — According to a letter from the Rev. Ehlers, he is ready to serve the small congregation at A. Kranz. He has also been asked to install Pastor Witte at Meseritz. —

The Prussian-Lutheran Church. In a review of several publications from the anti-Breslau Lutherans, Ströbel expresses himself as follows: "Were I to give a brief overall judgment of the writings before me, I would know none better than Lohmann's statement in the preface to the synodical paper: 'Everything is still fermenting in very unclear confusion, and some have themselves only recently attained to some clarity and firmness.' Out of this fermentation strange notions rise to the surface — 'enthusiasm to the right and to the left.' Yet one thing at least is already clear: the division among the Silesian Lutherans does not turn on differences of church constitution, but on deep religious oppositions. The dispute at present centers chiefly on the concepts of the (visible and invisible) church, of the 'divinely instituted churchly office of command' ('church-government organism'), of the status hierarchicus triplex, of divine and human right, of 'schism' and separatism. Some have already traced these points of dispute back to definite principles: Diedrich, Könnemann, and Lohmann unanimously accuse the Breslau synodical majority of 'chiliasm and papism.'" But even this reproach is, as yet, only the loud conclusion drawn from deeper-lying, everywhere perceptible