# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_September 1862_S285
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Church News of the Day. 285

there must enter in a wrestling for the truth in love, on the basis of Holy Scripture and history. It must be striven for to establish: what is the essential and specific thing about the Lutheran, that is, the rightly-believing, Church? What constitutes it? That is evidently the sacrament of the altar. All who become one in doctrine and practice regarding this are, despite the other differences — which for the most part lie not in settled biblical truths but in theological consequences and in the dogmatic system — true Lutherans, can and should bear one another in love, seek and maintain church fellowship." So then, agreement in doctrine and practice concerning the altar-sacrament alone already

constitutes the Lutheran Church; all who agree on this are, "despite the other differences," true Lutherans and are to maintain church fellowship! To be sure, the differences lie only "for the most part" outside settled biblical truths, thus indeed to a small part they do lie within them: yet it is still better that one part of settled biblical truths be sacrificed than that the outward fragmentation should continue. St. Paul, to be sure, thought that a little leaven leavens the whole lump (Gal. 5:9); but this Paul seems also to have belonged to that "school of thought" which "wishes from the outset to be the sole and exclusively authorized one and to force all others onto its own last." This narrow-mindedness, which may still have clung to the Apostle from his Pharisaism, cannot possibly be authoritative. There are, to be sure, also "false unions" and a reprehensible "indifferentism"; but that consists in this, when one is not agreed in everything, even concerning Holy Communion, and yet maintains church fellowship; whereas a proper union exists when one is agreed only on the standard of the rightly-believing Church, under which banner each may then fight for or against whatever he pleases. So much at least is certain: Luther will have nothing to do with such church fellowship. He writes in his tract Against Hans Wurst: "Therefore the holy Church can and may tolerate neither lies nor false doctrine, but must teach nothing but what is wholly holy and true, that is, God's Word alone .. Life may indeed be sin and wrong, indeed is unfortunately all too wrong; but doctrine must be perfectly straight and certainly without any sin at all. Therefore nothing shall be preached in the Church but the sure, pure, and single Word of God alone. Where that is lacking, it is no longer the Church, but the devil's school." (Walch's edition, XVII, 1682, 1686.)

The so-called Friends of Jerusalem held their fourth Synod in Stuttgart on the 3rd and 4th of April. The last subject of the proceedings was, according to the "Zeichen der Zeit" published in Buffalo of August 1: The Temple in Jerusalem and its importance for the whole world. Concerning the fruits of the Temple, the Synod expresses itself as follows: "A power of the spirit unassailable by corruption, an increase of bodily strength for the prolonging of the span of life, and finally, up to the abolition of the last enemy, death; and, outwardly, a peaceful possession of the land — these are the fruits of the Temple. Only a faith that wills to bring about such conditions is the faith demanded by the Gospel." One can hardly believe one's eyes on reading such chiliastic stuff. To be sure, one can see from other utterances of the so-called Friends of Jerusalem that they do perceive the corruption in which Christendom now lies; but, in that they pronounce the most decided sentence of condemnation upon all religious communions, they reveal, through their proposals for improvement, their own complete spiritual blindness.

Berlin. Here the sermon which Chief Court Preacher von Hengstenberg delivered on the occasion of the opening of the Landtag, before the representative assembly, the King, and the Crown Prince, has caused great sensation. He said, namely, that the Prussian people had sunk so low that in bright daylight, in crowds, it sought its honor in its own shame. For this he was summoned before the King on May 27 and received a reprimand. Pr. K. Z.

Lutheran Mission. On the occasion of the annual festival of the evangelical Lutheran mission to the heathen in Leipzig, on June 11, three already ordained candidates of theology — Handmann of Greiz, Nörling of Livonia, and Schanz of Dresden — were commissioned by Dr. von Harleß to their calling as missionaries. The year's income proved to be the sum of 60,000 thalers (20,000 more than in the previous year). Wolf, who most recently was still, on account of