# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Februar 1864_S46
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

46 Church Service and Military Service.

... finally, at the congregations, among whom true believers must be found. But woe to him who ascribes to the ordinances themselves — which after all have proceeded only from men — as well as to the persons publicly officiating in the church for this purpose, the same authority, in relation to this, as the pure preaching of the divine Word and those who conduct it possess, and on this ground demands obedience toward the former as though it were owed for God's sake!
(To be continued.)

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Church Service and Military Service.

Voices from the Church on This Subject.

To learn what judgment both the ancient church and our Lutheran church, in its best days, passed on the relation of church service to military service may well not be uninteresting to those to whom the relevant writings are not accessible — especially now, in our sorely afflicted fatherland, where thought is being given to drafting even the servants of the church into military service — indeed, it may render good service to many for the correction of their conscience. We intend, therefore, in what follows, to communicate some public as well as private pronouncements of Christian teachers of the church on this subject. We must, of course, remark at once and in advance that the sources on this our subject flow rather sparsely, particularly concerning what especially interests us here: how a preacher of the gospel ought to conduct himself when he is called by his government from church service into military service. That a servant of Christ cannot voluntarily become a soldier has been, throughout all the centuries, but a single voice in the church; everywhere we encounter vigorous protests against it, not only in the private writings of the church's teachers, but also in the public confessional writings and church orders of the church. On the other hand, there was less occasion to declare oneself on the question whether one consecrated to the service of the church must also, at the command of the government, wield the bodily sword and carry on the bloody trade of war, because in earlier times armies were, in part, brought together only by the recruitment of volunteers, and in part the servants of religion were legally exempted from military service — and this latter was the case not only in the states of Christian rulers since Constantine the Great, but also in almost all heathen states and empires.*)

Caspar Ziegler, the famous Lutheran jurist, professor and consistorial councillor at Wittenberg, who died in 1690, did indeed write a special treatise bearing the title: "An Ecclesiastical Absurdity, or the

*) According to Dionysius of Halicarnassus (Antiq. Rom., book 2), the law of Romulus already exempted the priests from military offices and burdens, because he, as Dionysius writes, "held that the republic was more safely defended by religion than by swords." (Cited by Ziegler, loc. cit.)