# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_December 1863_S374
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

374 The Discords in the Lutheran Church of Prussia.

with the existing church order. To be sure, a boundary that one can draw, according to subjective opinion, now wider, now narrower. Who can and may, therefore, decide in every individual case whether action was always taken rightly and wisely? Who would doubt the fidelity and conscientiousness with which the Breslau Supreme Church Council sought, according to its best conviction, to fulfill its official duty, and whom would it not fill with deep pain when the resolve with which the Supreme Church Council pressed for obedience to the existing church order little by little brought division into countless congregations and led some ten to twelve pastors to separate from the Breslau Synod! Who could hear it otherwise than with sighing, when the venerable old Kirchenrath Ehlers, editor of the Lutheran Kirchenblatt, was subjected to disciplinary investigation and threatened with suspension, when men of such well-known fidelity and integrity as Pastor Crome fell as victims of the church conflict and had no choice left but to lay down their office or to separate from Breslau, sometimes with whole congregations, sometimes with fragments of them! And who, finally, can depict the misery and the harm done to the souls of all the torn congregations, who can reckon how many impure elements everywhere seized upon the conflict and exploited it to their own advantage!— The writer of this has dear friends, revered by him, in both parties; he will judge no one; he knows men on both sides who are accustomed to act faithfully and according to honest conviction, and yet his heart is full of deep lament in view of the whole passionate character which the conflict has increasingly assumed and from which only few have kept themselves free; he laments bitterly that the whole doctrinal controversy has had such practical consequences at all, and that people did not better understand how to confine it to the field of a theological, scholarly contest.

After this brief overview of the history of the conflict, I will try to sketch briefly the present internal and external state of the parties.

The watchword of the Breslau party, at whose head stand the members of the Supreme Church Council, is the divine institution of church government. One regards the church as a closely bound organism of members, equipped by the Lord with various gifts and offices. The totality of the whole organism is thought of as the subject in which the power dwells to order and to govern itself, and this power is exercised in the organs or offices instituted by the Lord within the body of the church. Over against this power of the whole and its executive organs, the individual stands only in a subordinate position demanding obedience; above the individual stands the church, its authority, its office and government, present as a divine authority whose ultimate ground and source lies not in faith but in divine institution. — For the biblical foundation of this doctrine of the divine institution of church government, one calls to aid the doctrine of the