# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Februar 1864_S49
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Church Service and Military Service. 49

...committed something more grave.” (Fuchs, Bibl. der Kirchenversammlungen, II, p. 572.) Further, the 1st canon of the Synod of Telepte, of the year 418, says: “Whoever takes up soldiering after baptism shall not be able to obtain a spiritual office.” (Loc. cit. III, 438.) Further, the 7th canon of the ecumenical Council held at Chalcedon in 451 says: “That those who have once been placed in the clergy, or become monks, shall come neither to military service nor to any worldly dignity, or, if they venture this and do not return penitently to what they chose for God's sake, let them be anathema.” (See Ehinger's already-cited work, p. 154, where he adds the remark: “This canon is not entirely free of superstition. For important reasons can arise why a person devoted to church office rightly passes over to a civic way of life. And with greater right would idle monks fight against the Turk than that they should carouse and commit fornication in their monasteries.”) Still under the capitularies of the Emperor Charles the Great and Louis the Pious, from the 9th century (lib. 6, sub num. 61), the following constitution is found: “If a bishop, presbyter, deacon, or subdeacon should go to war and arm himself with weapons of war for purposes of war, he is to be removed from every office, and indeed in such a way that he does not even receive lay communion.” (Ziegler, loc. cit., F 2.) At the Tribur provincial council held in the year 895, the following resolution was passed: “Those who have once devoted themselves to the clergy may pass over neither to the soldier's estate nor to any worldly dignity, as was established at the Synod of Chalcedon, canon 7, lest they be such as St. Isidore said of them: that, like the centaurs, they are neither horses nor men, and are driven, like unreasoning beasts, free of their own desire.” (Ibid., F 4.)

The Church could speak out the more strictly on this account because, from the time of Constantine the Great, namely from 319, all servants of the Church had been legally exempt from military service, *) so that if they took part in warlike undertakings, they did so purely on their own initiative. Only for a short time, in one part of the Roman Empire, was this privilege taken from them. As Sozomen reports, Julian the Apostate, in order to wound them especially keenly, had all the clergy of Cappadocia enrolled in the military lists and placed them under the command of the prefect of that province.**)

In the same way as the ancient Church, the Lutheran Church too has judged the relation of church service to military service.

*) See Neander's Kirchengeschichte, vol. III, p. 288.

**) Sozomen appends to his account the remark: “Quod est nimis grave et vehementer injuriosum” [that this is too grave and altogether injurious], that is, what is far too harsh and utterly disgraceful. (See Autores H. E. recogn. per Rhenanum, fol. 446.) Ziegler, however, rightly observes: “Although that cannot be disgraceful which one does without one's consent and against one's will.” (Loc. cit., C 2.)