# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1864_S119
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

New Literature. 119

Supreme Church Council at Breslau, delivered by D. Th. Harnack,
ordinary professor of practical theology at Erlangen. Erlangen. Published
by A. Deichert. 1863." 8vo. pp. II, 56. Having now ourselves read this
opinion, which until now we knew only from citations by interested
parties, we must say with regret that it contains no genuinely Lutheran
final judgment at all on the Prussian church controversy. It is true that
Professor Harnack, too, will have nothing to do with a special governing
office instituted by God alongside the preaching office; but he not only
says of the pastoral office as well that it, "as such, is just as much a
human institution as the office of elder [Vorsteheramt]," but he also
nonetheless acknowledges a governmental and regulatory power, attaching
to the church and binding the conscience, concerning things indifferent.
He writes, among other things: "I have wished here to point to and enter
into only the main point of the controversy, which I do not (!) find, in
the first place, in the question whether church government is of divine
right (divini juris) or of human right (humani juris), but in the other
question: whether the church, as an external society (societas externa),
has an external power and authority of its own and immanent to it, or
whether it receives this only from without? The latter is what the
opponents of the synodal resolutions maintain; the former is attested to
me by the whole church, and by the Reformation as well. But if the
church has a power of its own, then the question arises only in the
second place, on what this is grounded and whence it is to be derived;
that is, whether this power belongs to the church de evangelio, just as
the spiritual power does — which I deny, on the ground of our confession,
as unevangelical — or whether the church has a claim to it by virtue of
the fourth commandment and for the sake of order — which I affirm. Even
on this ground, it still holds that the church has its power from God, only
not by divine institution, but precisely through the order willed by God.
This accordingly secures to the church fully the authority due to it, but
also guards it against an assumed authority, because it keeps the order of
grace and the order of the church purely (!?) apart, without confusing
them, as the advocates of the synodal resolutions do, or separating them
both, as their opponents do." pp. 52-53. But it is clear that, if the church
accordingly has, as Harnack would have it, a regulatory power by virtue
of the fourth commandment, that is, de lege, then nothing at all is gained
by this if he will not concede to it that this power belongs to it de
evangelio. It then still has a power binding the consciences of Christians
outside the gospel, and that is exactly what our fathers, in the time of the
Reformation, rejected in order to safeguard the doctrine of justification
and of Christian liberty. Remarkably, however, Professor Harnack wants
to have found this new doctrine of his in the symbols of our church and
in Luther's writings. He writes: "If we ask whence our confession and the
Reformation derive this power of the church, proper and independent to
it, if it is to have its origin neither in the gospel as such, nor its support
in the power of the civil authority, then they (?) refer us to the