# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Januar 1864_S31
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Church and Contemporary Affairs. 31

...of a faith grounded on Holy Scripture and on the confession derived from it. But in the church, as a fellowship of faith, preaching as well as public teaching must also stand in harmony with its confession and let this come to its full expression. To hold fast to this is the right and duty of the church government, even though momentary tendencies and currents of the age should stand against it. One would not let oneself be moved, by the estrangement from the faith of their church that the petitioners have shown, nor by the withdrawal from the church fellowship that they have held out as a prospect should their request not be granted, to transform the Reformed church of the land into a religious fellowship different from itself.

Hope of Better Times. In the "Kirchenzeitung für Lutheraner" (Diedrich's organ), in the issue of November of last year, there is found an excerpt from a Reformation sermon of Ph. J. Spener, in which, among other things, the following passage occurs: "Let us continue in earnest prayer, and the Lord will once again send help. For Babel must fall a second time as well, and then a more blessed state of the church thereafter shall not be lacking. At evening time it shall be light (Zech. 14:7) — this promise" (Spener has "hope" for this) "cannot fail, and then people will once again teach with confidence. But at last God will lead us out of the general Babel, or confusion, of this world into blessed eternity, where we shall then no longer teach divine grace, but shall sing and praise it alone and with entire confidence." — Do Räthjen and Diedrich, then, following Spener, also cherish a hope of better times after Babel's second fall, on the ground of definite promises — this twin sister of chiliasm — or has this piece come into their organ merely by oversight, without protest? Is it not remarkable that the Kirchenzeitung does not name Spener as the author of the sermon?

Hamburg. From the congregation here served by Pastor Meinel, which stands in connection with Pastor Löhe, a member writes in Wucherer's Correspondenzblatt: "A significant increase is, for the time being, not in prospect for our congregation; the ecclesiastical conditions here are too tangled and unclear for that; the remaining believers in this city seek, through strenuous effort within the state church, to reserve a place for themselves where they suppose they can live out their faith despite their communion fellowship with it. Our congregation has rather a decline to lament, since several older, tried and tested members have, in the course of recent years, been called by the Lord into His triumphant church."

Mecklenburg. On the occasion of the pastoral conference held on Sept. 1 and 2 of last year at Güstrow, among other things the theses on infant baptism put forward by Pastor Wilhelmi were discussed, the first of which read: "That absolution which makes the sinner a child of God takes place in baptism, and only in baptism." Against this, as a report on it states, Prof. Dr. Philippi in particular rose and argued that the "only" of the thesis was wholly unbiblical, since in Holy Scripture (Rom. 1:16, 1 Pet. 1:22, and others) the same regenerating power is attributed to the Word itself as to baptism, and the symbolical books likewise maintain "idem utriusque est effectus" [the effect of both is the same]; the concept of the verbum visibile [visible word] could not be established too strictly, and this was important for our time, because some theologians were beginning, in a questionable way, to exalt the sacrament at the expense of the Word; against such a one-sided overstraining of the concept of the sacrament he had to declare himself in the most decided terms. Likewise, as regards the effectus, that our church ascribes to the sacrament no other effect than to the Word, but only another mode of effecting it. In the same sense Pastor Flörke too spoke out against the view — which struck him as "uncanny" — that failed to consider that the old Adam remains in us and that baptism only releases us from the guilt of sin; in general Holy Scripture gives the impression that what matters is not some one means of grace that brings us salvation and transfers us into the kingdom of God, but rather that all the means of grace are, in their own way, concurrent in this; the preached Word can also make children of God without baptism; therefore that "only" of the thesis carries a "legally restrictive" qualification. —