# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juli 1862_S222
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

222    Church News of the Day.

and a better meeting-place, which pleases us all the more since it had for a long time been very difficult for us to obtain such a one. No less gratifying to us is the manner in which he has caused this place to come to us. For he has so kindly disposed the heart of the local senior pastor of the territorial church (Bödeker) toward us that he, with much effort, has sought out and secured a place for us." Anabaptism, then, has come into favor not only with the democratic North German newspaper but also with our liberal-minded clergy, and, now favored by the government, is beginning to sail with a better wind, and so will presumably do better business as well. The government's order reads: "The Baptist preachers de Neui and de Weerdt, at Ihren (East Frisia), are informed, upon their petition, that the Royal Ministry of Ecclesiastical and Educational Affairs has resolved to suspend for the time being, and to refrain from enforcing, the prohibition — under which they were forbidden, on pain of penalty, to act outside their place of residence through the spreading or promotion of their Anabaptist sect, as well as through the holding of meetings and the administering of the sacraments — without anything being changed in that prohibition as it concerns foreigners." How long will this last restriction still hold?

Free-Congregation Matters. As the "Magdeburg Correspondent" reports, the "leading city," Magdeburg, intends this summer once again to call a general assembly of the "League of Free Congregations in Germany," and the following resolutions are to come before the agenda: a) We celebrate the three great feasts of the Christian church, Christmas, Easter, Pentecost, by broadening their historically Christian basis into a universal human idea. b) We celebrate Good Friday with a reminder of the sacrifices which mankind's advancement has always cost; the Day of Repentance, with its admittedly unsuitable name for us, as an occasion for the reminder of moral accountability; Ascension Day as a spring festival. c) We propose to celebrate annually, say in the autumn, a festival with reference to the fact that our young members become entitled to vote at the age of twenty. Their names shall then be announced before the congregation; where feasible, they shall themselves come forward and speak.

The Doctrine of the Anti-Breslauers. Dr. Huschke, in the May issue of the Erlangen periodical, gives, among other things, some extracts from the writing of Pastor Könnemann, one of the most prominent of the Anti-Breslauers, directed against him (Dr. Huschke). The extract reads, among other things, as follows: "The office — that is, the persons clothed with it, insofar as they hold the office — because it is Christ's office, working only immediately in Christ's stead and not in the name of the church, forms 'the ground, the foundation of the church (that is, of every individual Christian soul, p. 101), on which it is built up in the Lord.'" Without it, therefore, there is no church, and only in it, and when it exists in unimpaired, unrestricted "'full power,'" does the church possess any glory. "'The full powers of this office are the potestas ordinis [power of order] (preaching and administration of the sacraments) and the potestas clavium [power of the keys] (absolution and the ban, which must belong to the pastor according to his sole judgment and without any human accountability, p. 125), and where the office, with these full powers, is present in a congregation, there that congregation truly is the church of Christ, and it belongs to its very nature that it is the church of Christ, neither more nor less'" (so that, accordingly, if the pastor dies — which seems to follow inescapably — this church of Christ is extinguished along with him, and comes into being again only with a new occupant of the office).

Württemberg. Until the end of last year, full enjoyment of civil rights was granted here only to Lutherans, Reformed, and Catholics; but a law of December 31, 1861 made all civil rights here wholly independent of religious confession.

Prussia. On Palm Sunday a collection was taken up in all the United [Lutheran-Reformed] churches of Prussia, its purpose being to make possible the founding and support of new parishes. In an address of the Supreme Consistory, which was read from the pulpits on that occasion, mention is also made of other ecclesiastical distresses which do in fact call to mind our own here. It says there: "Should it succeed, gradually, to establish the new congregations firmly