# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_December 1863_S379
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Church and Contemporary History. 379

sin;' and that it 'was a cruel and absurd reproach to accuse the thousands of our Christian brethren who hold slaves as sinners against the divine law, since they did nothing but what the Word of God allowed, under the Constitution and the existing laws of their country.' 'I know,' he says, 'that the doctrine of the holy universal Church was clear and unanimous for the lawfulness of slavery during eighteen hundred years.' Bishop Potter of Pennsylvania and seventy-five Episcopal clergy of his diocese have felt compelled to publish a protest 'indignantly disapproving' of the views of Bishop Hopkins, as 'unworthy of a servant of Jesus Christ,' and as 'an effort, by biblical principles, to support the states which are in rebellion against the government in their attempt to erect, by force of arms, a tyranny in the name of a republic whose cornerstone shall be the everlasting bondage of the African.' Bishop Hopkins publishes a letter to Bishop Potter in reply, dated Oct. 5, and announces in it to the Bishop of Pa. that within a few months he will publish a book and prove in it, by the most incontrovertible authorities, that there have been slaves and slaveholders in the church from the beginning, that slavery was held to be compatible with the Christian principle by the fathers and the councils, and by all Protestant theologians and expositors of Scripture down to the end of the last century, and that this fact was a general one among all churches and sects in the whole world." — However true what Bishop Hopkins writes may be, he seems nevertheless not to have considered that we now live in the age of "Progress," in which humanistic philanthropy has long since outstripped antiquated Christianity. What folly, then, to appeal now to the old Bible, after it has long been loudly proclaimed that the old Bible and the old God are abolished, and a new anti-slavery Bible and a new anti-slavery God must be introduced! And — to speak in earnest — we should always prefer that one renounce the Bible for the sake of the new religion and worldview, rather than that one register the new religion and worldview into the old Bible. For that a number of souls will nonetheless remain who, for safety's sake, stay with the old Bible, despite all the scorn and mockery of an "advanced Christianity," should surely not be doubtful to any true Christian who knows Matt. 16:18; 28:20; 24:35; 1 Cor. 1:19-20.

Political-Ecclesiastical Syncretism. The following we read in the "Evangelist" of Oct. 24: At the recent state election in Ohio the clergy took part more zealously than ever before. In some places the ballot boxes were opened by them with prayer. Very many preached, on the Sunday evening preceding the election, on the significance of this election from the Christian standpoint.

The "Observer" and the Missouri Synod. In the "Observer" of Oct. 9 there is an essay on the German church in America. In it the Missouri Synod is not only characterized, in the manner peculiar to this paper, as a paragon of intolerance, but it also states, among other things: "The Evangelical Union of the West forms a wholesome counterweight against the Old Lutheran tendency of the Missouri Synod." One sees from this that the declaration officially given eighteen years ago by the chief representatives of the General Synod, in a public letter sent to Germany, that the church of the General Synod is in America approximately what the united church of Prussia is in Germany, is still held fast by the great "Observer" party within that body, while nothing is done against those members of the same who do not agree with this and who claim a Lutheran character. So one should indeed not be surprised, and should cease speaking of intolerance, when we, who wish to be Lutheran, will have nothing to do with such a General Synod.

The "Observer" goes so far in its tolerance and broad-mindedness that in its number of Oct. 9 it seeks to justify the transfer of Dr. Reynolds from the Lutheran to the Episcopal church, writing among other things: "Our church recognizes the right and, under certain circumstances, the propriety of a transfer from one Protestant-