# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_December 1863_S376
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

376 The Discords in the Lutheran Church of Prussia.

or pastoral rule, however much he himself protests against all rule in the church.

This one-sidedness of Diedrich's seems to be becoming clearer, the longer, the more, to a large part of the opposition party. I personally know quite a few who, with all their strict opposition to the false doctrine of the divine institution of church government, now guard themselves just as strictly against the Diedrich extreme. Thus, with God's help, a right and therefore reconciling middle way may form between the parties — a middle way that proceeds from the fundamental principle of our Lutheran confession, that it is the church to which, according to the Smalcald Articles, the power is given to preach the Gospel and to call and ordain ministers of the church.

Therefore the church as such must also have the power to establish, in Christian freedom, the outward orders necessary for this, and to give itself a government that, authorized by the church and as its free representation, indeed does not rule as an authority instituted by God nor constitute an unevangelical power of law in and over the church, yet is nonetheless a government to which, "for love and order's sake," as the Symbols say, subjection is for us just as holy a duty as the purpose of the church, which all church order serves, namely the eternal salvation of souls, is itself a holy one.

On the standpoint of the right middle way expressed here also stands entirely the opinion on the Breslau synodical resolutions recently published by Professor Harnack of Erlangen. It rejects, very clearly and decidedly, both extremes: on the one hand the divine institution of a governmental church power as it is taught in Breslau, and on the other the precipitancy of the Diedrich opposition, which would declare the whole body of the Breslau synodical resolutions to be an unevangelical, antichristian, papistic structure and would dissolve all church order into individual arbitrariness. In particular, Harnack points out two chief institutions of the Breslau church order as having proceeded from and being borne by an unlutheran spirit — the order of elders and the procedure of church discipline. Finally, Harnack lifts up as an indubitable axiom the assertion that in the church, by virtue of the moral principle of order sanctified by God, there resides an authority of order, by virtue of which it is empowered and able to give itself its own order and government — an authority which we, for "love and order's" sake, precisely for that reason also owe service and obedience "for God's sake." The Harnack opinion could work all the more beneficially just now, when the heat of the conflict and the first excitement of minds have somewhat cooled, and one has become more receptive to discussions such as his. The sincere and heartfelt longing for a peace resting in the truth, and for a reconciliation of the conflict pleasing to God, is expressed in the majority of the Prussian Lutheran pastors at the great pastoral conferences arranged for this purpose — last year at Angermünde, where indeed