# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_December 1863_S383
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Miscellany. 383

their approval, be made known. Still, I believe I may already indicate their content
briefly: 1. On the basis of the Lutheran symbols we reject union with the Reformed,
that is, fellowship at the altar and in the pulpit. Not unity of constitution but
unity in doctrine grounds the unity of the church. The differences between Lutheran
and Reformed doctrine are of such a kind that they do not admit church fellowship.
2. Likewise it is impermissible to hold church fellowship with manifest false teachers
within the so-called Lutheran church, under the pretext that through their departure
from the faith the publica doctrina (the public doctrine) is not thereby annulled in
its validity. It is not that right teaching should be given, but that right teaching
actually is given, which is the indispensable condition for membership in a
congregation. From this also follows the principle of our confession: impii doctores
deserendi sunt (false teachers are to be fled and shunned). 3. We reject the opinion
of those who say that through the Reformation, and the separation from the papacy
that resulted from it, a [historic] form of the church has lapsed, whose restoration
we ought to strive for. 4. We reject the doctrine of a divinely instituted ruling
office in the church apart from the office of the Word. The preaching or teaching
office is charged with publicly wielding the keys — namely, with preaching the Gospel
and administering the holy Sacraments — and on that basis also with judging doctrine
and life and accordingly shepherding and guiding, that is, ruling, souls spiritually;
but not with prescribing ordinances and statutes and imposing them upon the church as
though by God's authority — as this is described in the Augsburg Confession. 5. We
reject the opinion that any congregation, even though its public confession is the
right one, could in this its outward existence be regarded as the Church of Christ;
or that a representation of it could be formed (a supreme church council,
a synod) which as such would constitute the church and its authority. 6. There is no
command of Christ that a congregation must, with respect to its ordinances, attach
itself to some larger whole, nor is a union of several congregations in these matters
contrary to the nature of the church, so long as Christian liberty and the sole
validity of the Gospel are preserved in the church. If God's Word stands in full and
complete dominion, then love, without legal compulsion, will nevertheless seek and
find the closest possible union — indeed will rather cherish and maintain praiseworthy
arrangements handed down to it. — We reject, with every legalistic constitutional
principle of the church, the very principle of Independentism, properly speaking.
7. It is a harmful delusion that the church still goes forward toward some essentially
different, outwardly glorious form in this age of the world, by which it would first
present itself as God's congregation. Rather the church has at all times had its
glory alike under the form of the cross and the form of a servant in the word of
life. — We reject every gross and every subtle Chiliasm." These theses sound quite
good. Was it perhaps over the fourth that they did not come to a conclusion?

Miscellany.

Materialism. Moleschott, formerly professor in Zurich, now in
Turin, has recently, in order to explain confessional differences from matter,
"scientifically" demonstrated "that tea is a Protestant and coffee a Catholic
drink, in that tea gives wings to judgment and reason, coffee to the imagination."

The Ninth and Tenth Commandments. In a review of Euler's
catechetical handbook, in Guericke's periodical of this year, p. 555, H. D. Köhler
rightly remarks: "The author rightly avoids the channel of J. Gerhard, who divides
the two commandments according to the kinds of desire, '"actual desire and inherited
desire,"' — it is rightly shown,