# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1848 05 24_S177
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New Volume

(Submitted.)
The Episcopal Church and Lutheranism.

-fold conflict, hatred, and misapprehension have been experienced.

bring to light what lay hidden in darkness, and the faithful laborer receive praise from God. difficult question: Is the so-called evangelical-

in which, as with others, or rather sects, it presses forward toward union with the Roman-

Catholic Church, as it already existed in the first centuries of the Christian era, a city of God set upon a hill, making blessed all who were its living members, from which to depart was a betrayal of the Eternal

the task of every watchman upon the towers of the Lutherans-

ever anew through the new birth of the Spirit-

Both the standpoint from which, and the goal toward which, Lutheranism (that I may use this expression for brevity's sake) proceeds, has, like willing reception, met with manifold

It may count for little with him to be judged even by Protestant brethren or by any other human tribunal; it is the Lord who pronounces judgment, who will also bring to light

reveal the counsel of hearts; then only will it be — To him nothing less is at stake than the one, weighty

Lutheran Church nothing but a particular church,

-ish, or is she the ancient, one, holy, truly

is directed toward that which the fire of judgment consumes as mere hay and stubble. The churchly consciousness of true Protestants, however scattered they may be among the various heresies, is to be quickened and strengthened, and gathered into the church which cannot be grasped with the senses, but which can be known by faith as the light of the world, as the bride and congregation of Jesus Christ, standing firm against all the gates of hell — call her what one will — is the

pinnacles, at the loss of his own salvation, entrusted to him by God — and he is not thereby to shut himself up in mere forms and grow rigid against the life-giving breath that

blows upon the dead men's bones, but rather also to praise with grateful joy what God has given in our time amid all the unspeakable misery that oppresses it, yet to test all things by the Word that abides forever and to hold fast what is good. Division into parties and their intrigues should be hateful to him in the deepest ground of his heart; with loving care he should seek out where kindred finds its kindred; man should not put asunder what the Spirit out of God has joined together — the wind blows where it wills, and one hears its sound well enough — only above all things the pillar and foundation of truth should stand fast with him, and in this he should prove himself, in the strength of his Lord, by

Theological Supplement
22. [illegible]

No. 4.

*

weapons of righteousness on the right hand and on the left, whether through honor and dishonor, through evil report and good report, as the disciple who is not above his master.

If we, grounded upon this rock, as in the consciousness of doing right before God, turn against the endeavors of the so-called episcopal or Anglican church, which in recent times also concerns Germans and Norwegians who have been left without pastoral office and care, particularly in the state of Wisconsin and in northern Illinois, and which, through the translation of the common prayer-book into our native language and through the appointment of a German preacher at Louisville, gives evidence of its progress: this happens, then, not with uncertain steps, still less out of an unloving disposition and bigoted, narrow-hearted sentiment; we are firmly convinced, as of the widely branching usefulness of the English missionary enterprise in general, so also of the nobility and purity of intention of many among its promoters — (for to us the church is by no means confined to a mere, empty notion of outward appearance, but is rather the invisible temple of Him who is the fullness of all life and who, in gracious presence, dwells above all with His believers) — but rather, on the one hand, to warn by open confession, against the splendor and appearance of the Anglican church, those who are still unwary, and, on the other hand, to offer comfort and counsel to doubting consciences against the danger of losing the dearly bought freedom of the Gospel, and of clouding, through human legal doctrine and additions, the pure fountain of light, the living water within themselves.

(The English theologians of the Reformation, in its earlier period, stood far nearer to Luther's teaching than did the later ones. Bishop Dr. George Bull states without hesitation that they rightly took the Augsburg Confession, and not Calvin, as their model. Many of our own, e.g., Dr. Ernst Sal. Cyprian, in his work on the union of the Protestant churches, regarded a union between the Lutherans and the English Church as exposed to the fewest difficulties. Undoubtedly the former avoid the reefs both of the Anglo-Catholics and of the Anglo-Protestants, and it would be worth the trouble to carry this out further. The points of controversy here, too, concern above all questions which deeply move our age and its greatest minds in religious respects — church, office, and the means of grace, in close connection with the fundamental concept of the Gospel of the righteousness of faith.)

We wish, for the present, to say something in general about the English Episcopal Church, and thereupon

Lutheraner.

specifically to set forth the untenability of episcopal succession as a mark of the true church, and finally to point to the fundamental error of a visible church institution.
The Episcopal or bishopric church, also called English or Anglican in the narrower sense, because it became the dominant one in the mother country of the American colonies, as distinguished from the so-called Dissenters (Nonconformists), Presbyterians (also called Puritans), Independents or Congregationalists, Baptists, Quakers, etc., etc., was first established under King Edward VI, insofar as the separation from the papacy, begun through the memory of Wycliffe and the arbitrary will of Henry VIII, then came to pass. The long and strict reign of his second sister, the virgin Elizabeth, who succeeded the Catholic Mary, succeeded in establishing a closed state-church body under the symbol of the 39 Articles, confirmed in the year 1571 by an act of Parliament. The liturgy was composed into a common prayer-book as the church's order of service, and became the strongest bone of contention in the times that followed, on account of the dominance of its outward forms. (Besides this, also the Book of Homilies in two parts, of no small worth.) Religious vitality remained more with the Dissenters, so that even the national universities, with their memories of ancient greatness and strength, were not to be secured against the inroads of the former. The imperial church split into a so-called high church party and low church party, of which the latter contains more indifferentist, the former more hierarchical elements. Out of the same there developed, about 14 years ago, Puseyism; opposed to it arose the evangelical party.

As to the doctrinal system of the Episcopalians, the 39 Articles declare themselves essentially Calvinistic,*) although with regard to the election of grace

*) It is noteworthy that a spokesman of German Reformed theology, Dr. Alex. Schweizer, as I gather from literary journals of the old homeland, unreservedly admits that Calvin's and Zwingli's type of doctrine is, on the whole, thoroughly the same, and in particular that the forms in which the two framed the article on the sacrament of the Lord's Supper are only modifications of one and the same tendency. That such a result should have been able to escape Professor Schaff of Mercersburg, whom God has equipped above others to help guide "the stream of development" within American Christendom into its proper channel, is incomprehensible. May it please divine Providence to win for our western world, for the unabridged confession of biblical truth, to which all subjectivity must be subordinated, a man from whom the writer of these lines would himself gladly learn so much, without his thereby becoming "a narrow-minded, proud Old-