# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Mai 1863_S148
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

148 Something about Those Who Have Seceded from the Breslau Supreme Church Council.

church order.*) This, then, rests not on resolutions, still less on the ascription to them of a divine obligation binding upon the conscience; rather, it grows up spiritually and freely, according to the measure of God's gifts. Church order is grounded not on a "You must," but on a "We will" — that is, on love and freedom — and its purpose is not to be enforced as such, but rather to keep the peace in our times, to serve as a wholesome reminder to the weak and forgetful, and to check caprice and unseemly conduct. Disorder is to be corrected by testimony, entreaty, and admonition, but by no manner of compulsion, command, or threat of punishment. These means well befit the civil authority of this world, but not the Church. In church order, then, the first necessity is that it be churchly, and churchly — that is, spiritually — administered. Only thereby can the churches flourish, and will gladly serve one another and show themselves at all times, in love and faith, to be One Church, even with those who have other orders. — As a factual proof of how these principles are put into practice, the correspondent then adds that Pastor Diedrich has finally communicated the draft of a church order, which is a compilation of what is customary in his congregation. The essentials of it are also found in Magdeburg and Ruppin. It stands otherwise in Hamburg and in the Weimar district, from whose congregations the pastors (Meinel and Vollert) were likewise present. But no one hit upon the thought that these orders must be alike. That there must be order is a divine command. What order, however, is to obtain, is a matter of liberty. To insist on maintaining an existing one absolutely is against God's Word and against our confession. It was through this very thing that the controversy arose — that certain pastors no longer wanted certain orders, but that these were forced upon them, because the claim was made that obedience was owed to the church order just as to God's command. This latter claim was in turn bound up with the doctrine of the divine institution of a church government over a total body of congregations. Diedrich and others opposed these doctrines and gave the opposition effect in practice as well; for this they were suspended, and hence stems the separation of these men together with their congregations.

According to God's Word and the confession of the Lutheran Church, the principles and teachings of the seceded pastors and congregations are right as against Breslau, even though what they themselves set forth may by no means yet have come to a satisfactory conclusion; this, too, has been frankly ac-

*) Since Diedrich and those who go along with him will have nothing to do with any collegialist rights, a great vacuum remains here in their confession, unless the pastor fills it in. For by their saying that the truth of God creates the church order, the matter is no more resolved than when, with Grabau, Diedrich says that the preaching office flows out of God's Word. Indeed, the former statement is even highly liable to misunderstanding — for if the Word of truth creates the church order, is it, then, of human right? L. u. W.