# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Mai 1863_S154
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

154 Church and Contemporary History.

Next, the opinion of the various consistories of the land is to be obtained on this proposal of the Commission. The pre-synod, it is understood on good authority, will be convened in July of this year."

The territorial church. Dr. Münkel writes: „It will in the long run be impossible to hold a territorial church together without strong concessions, when faith and unbelief, church and world, confront one another so sharply and hostilely within it, without there being any power present that could master the contradiction. Let one only say to oneself in advance that the decisive choice comes sooner or later to every man; it can only do harm if one conceals this from oneself with vain hopes and is willing to yield as much as possible, because one believes that in the end everything can be taken back again."

The renunciation at baptism belongs also among those things against which the opponents of the new Hanoverian catechism rise up. Dr. Münkel therefore writes: „For the baptizer this creates the difficult situation of whether to refuse baptism to the child on account of the sponsors' unbelief, or whether nevertheless to baptize the innocent child. That this would not be handled uniformly was to be foreseen. When some pastors refused baptism, the parents or sponsors were bold enough to appeal to the consistory at Hanover for protection of their supposed right and actual unbelief. The same body has, in the majority of its members, decided that the sponsors are to be excused the renunciation, while the renunciation is instead to be worked into the baptismal address in a suitable way. This is an expedient which seeks to save the confession but reduces the renunciation to nothing, since it has meaning only in the mouth of the sponsors. But the worst of it is not this, but that a concession is thereby made to unbelief — and in an act which is thereby itself annulled."

The Prussian Lutheran Church. Hengstenberg reports in his foreword for this year: „A conference of pastors, which met in October at Angermünde and consisted half of men who fully profess allegiance to the Supreme Consistory, and half of men who stood in a more or less strained relationship to it, has produced a gratifying result. It has, to be sure, not been able to heal the wound entirely, nor to bring the seceded back again, but it has succeeded in setting a limit to further secessions. Agreement was reached on the very reasonable (!) resolution that obedience is to be given to the ordinances of the Supreme Church Council, but that it be left to each man how he squares its authority with his own conscience — whether he derives it from divine or from human right." — That is reasonable enough, but whether it is Christian is another question. How can a man obey a directive presented to him as resting on divine authority, when he is convinced that it has only human right as its basis? Would that not be a manifest sin of idolatry? If this private "squaring of accounts" helped anything in such a case, then indeed the holy martyrs would have been fools when they refused to burn incense to the emperors, and chose instead the most agonizing death.

Hanover. The author of a pamphlet published at Bremerhaven against Luther's Small Catechism gives the whole Hanoverian ministerium this gratifying testimony: „The younger clergy have almost without exception fallen prey to the demon of confessionalism." Praise be!

Prussia. „In our nearest fatherland, Prussia," writes Hengstenberg in the survey contained in his foreword for this year, „it is first of all the changed direction taken last year by the House of Deputies that draws our attention. In its two sessions one cannot fail to recognize, in its prevailing majority, a "progress" — from indifferentism or half-hearted goodwill to a decided hostility toward the church and its confession, a hostility whose intensity is evident from the fact that it remains the same under all circumstances and seizes upon every opportunity, however unsuitable, to assert itself."