# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1864_S122
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

122 Church and Contemporary History.

which they likewise possessed at that time by human right, are confounded. To wish to rob the bishops of those privileges was, the confessors at Augsburg naturally declared, altogether far from their intention in their entire endeavors toward reformation; the church has had, and has, nothing at all to do with that. But as for the ordinary power of church order which the bishops likewise held by human right, to this the confessors were willing to render obedience "for the sake of love and of peace" — an obedience which, therefore, they plainly call a "legitima obedientia" not in their own sense, but in the sense of the bishops. — How dangerous, moreover, Prof. Harnack's doctrine of an obedience, owed on the ground of the fourth commandment to church ordinances which the church has made by virtue of a power given to it by God, further appears from the following statement: "It is God's will (ordinatio Dei, as the Conf. Aug. Art. 16 and the Apology 163, 50 say of the earthly polities) that congregations of the same confession should, according to the given historical, national, and territorial conditions, also outwardly order themselves together into an overall body under a single church government." (P. 28.) So then, even the joining of a congregation to a larger whole, and its subordination under a church government held in common with others, is to Mr. Prof. H. not a matter of Christian liberty, which is bound by nothing but love! And so that nothing may be lacking to subject the individual Christian and every individual congregation, with their life and conscience, even in matters of doctrine, to a larger whole, Harnack concludes: "A great part of these questions is truly not of a kind to be used for a violent breach. The main questions, however (concerning the church and its government), reach in turn much too deeply into the heart of the Lutheran church and its present movements for individual persons to have dared trust themselves to force, as it were, a definitive resolution of them according to their own judgment. Not even an individual synod, in itself already dissenting within, was suited and competent for a final, fundamental settlement of the matter. The solution would, in good time, have had to be sought not unilaterally, but in the joint fellowship of the whole church, and awaited in patience and peace." (Pp. 55f.)

We must confess that Mr. Prof. Harnack, in this verdict, has let us hear not the voice of our orthodox church, but the voice of "the stranger." John 10:5.

Church and Contemporary History.

I. America.

Some Things concerning the History of the American Lutherans. In the number of February 19 there appears in the "Observer" a communication about the intrusion of the harmful poison of symbolism and hyper-Lutheranism into the General—