# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_December 1863_S373
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

The Discords in the Lutheran Church of Prussia. 373

could in no way be reconciled with ecclesiastical order, but was bound to undermine and call into question the whole fabric of ecclesiastical fellowship. Likewise, when Diedrich was not content to point out particular things as false and in need of improvement in the existing church order, but when his spirit, driven by an opposite, false extreme, carried him ever further to regard the whole of the Breslau synodical arrangement as pervaded and borne by an unlutheran, chiliastic, papistically legalistic spirit and character, and when with him the question increasingly turned on the very being or not-being of the whole church order, then a church government likewise could not look on in silence, especially since it was asserted so unsparingly in public, as it was by Diedrich. — After the close of the Synod of 1860 the events followed one another very quickly: a disciplinary investigation against Diedrich, the dispatch of a commission to him, against which he behaved in the most insulting manner in public, and finally the demand that he declare himself, with a simple yes or no, regarding his obligation toward the whole body of the Breslau synodical resolutions. Diedrich showed himself no less resolute and energetic than his opponents: after he had laid the matter before his congregation's judgment and it had declared itself unanimously for him, he, together with it, renounced the jurisdiction of the Supreme Church Council [Oberkirchencollegium] and the Breslau synodical association.

Thus the breach had come about within the bosom of the Breslau Synod. Once it existed, it could, so long as the causes that had produced it were not removed, only increase the fire and drive it to break out into full flame. And that is indeed what happened. Diedrich's closest and like-minded friends, Pastors Räthjen and Wolf, soon found themselves directly compelled to declare themselves, regarding their position toward Diedrich, especially on the question of church and communion fellowship with him, and after a brief negotiation with Breslau they likewise renounced their ties and joined Diedrich. And the conflict inflamed and kindled the whole church fellowship, pastors and congregations, ever more completely. A considerable number of pastors came, since the Synod of 1860, to the clear conviction of what was really legalistic and unlutheran in the synodical resolutions and in the Breslau doctrine of church government; yet in their stance toward Diedrich they remained quite varied, some drawing nearer to him, some less so. A conference in Berlin in the year 1861, to which the leaders of the contending parties gathered along with respected foreign theologians, remained without result, except that the opposing views in doctrine grew ever clearer and more decided and came fully into the light. The reconciling truth had not yet been found. Meanwhile the Supreme Church Council continued, while declaring publicly on the one hand that it acted only according to its official instructions and not according to its private opinions in doctrine, to institute disciplinary investigations against such pastors as seemed to it, in their opposition, to overstep the bounds of what was compatible—