# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Mai 1864_S155
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Church-Contemporary Affairs. 155

Christians have received at all times. — For this reason it is a simple
matter that the holy men, driven by the Holy Ghost, spoke as they spoke. But
from this it follows, in turn, that wherever, later in the church, men and
women were found who gave themselves up to the workings of the Holy Ghost
with the same faithfulness and simplicity as the apostles, their word had to
have the same weight and the same power to edify the congregations as that
of the apostles. .... The name "Word of God," in its ordinary sense, can
therefore be applied to any speech to which God avows Himself as to His own
word, and time can make no difference here: wherever a believing person
animated by God speaks, there the word he speaks is a word of God. — The
"Maanedstidende" rightly remarks on this: It is indeed lamentable that
preachers who advance such a doctrine may remain in the Lutheran Church, and
still more distressing that the church government and the congregations
tolerate them. — The same church paper also contains an explanation by
Prof. Johnsen of Christiania of what he means when he says that the
question of the origin of the Apostles' Creed is "an open question" — an
expression that was charged against him by the Grundtvigians as a
concession to their side. Prof. Johnsen now shows how he does not regard as
an open question: whether Scripture is the sole source and rule of our
faith, or whether the Apostles' Creed is such a rule standing above
Scripture, "a word out of the Lord's own mouth"; the former is a question of
faith, a "vital question for the church," which the Lutheran Church has
answered with Yes, and for that reason the Grundtvigians, who maintain the
latter — namely, that the baptismal confession is "the word out of the
Lord's own mouth" — thereby separate themselves from the Lutheran Church;
but the question of the origin of the baptismal confession — when, by whom,
or in what form it was composed — that he regards as an open one, for that
is a historical question which can only be answered by historical inquiry,
and about which one may be ignorant, or even hold a mistaken opinion, and
yet still be a good Lutheran Christian. — We rejoice with the
"Maanedstidende" over Prof. Johnsen's firm and sharp stand against the
Grundtvigians and over the judgment he pronounces against them. C.

Nice. The senior pastor at Bautzen in Saxony, Dr. Rüling, publishes in the
Evangelische Kirchenzeitung of December 2 of last year a request for support
for a church building in Nice, from which we learn that a little Lutheran
congregation has arisen there under a certain Pastor Mader, of whom
Hengstenberg remarks that he personally knows him as an excellent preacher
and pastor of blessed effectiveness. The request reads as follows: "Nice, a
refuge for those suffering from chest ailments, counts more and more
evangelical Germans among its guests. Some return home cured, others find
an early grave in foreign soil. To these sufferers a German preacher of the
Augsburg Confession has for seven years now offered, through his hospitable
house and through his faithful, plain testimony concerning Him who is our
salvation and life, strengthening for body and soul, and, on their
sickbeds, the comfort of the holy Sacrament. After many trials, the
Evangelicals settled there have at last succeeded, by imperial decree of
December 5, 1861, in being recognized as a "Congregation of Protestants of
the Augsburg Confession in the Department of the Alpes-Maritimes," and in
purchasing a building site, on which, God willing, the cornerstone of a
modest church is to be laid this very winter. Yet the treasury is so
exhausted by the down payment of the sum of 29,000 francs — long and
laboriously collected — for this expensive building site, that even the
pastor's modest salary cannot for the present be covered. There goes out,
therefore, from there to all who are bound to Nice by ties of gratitude or
memory, or who otherwise take an interest in this important outpost of the
German Reformation amid the wild currents of the so-called new-Italian
Protestantism, the heartfelt request that they make this church building
possible through gifts of love; and the undersigned, at the request
received and after his own conscientious deliberation, has offered to
collect and forward such gifts, and in due time to give public receipt for
them. To the possible objection, however, that many wealthy foreigners
themselves reside in Nice, we meet from the outset with the assurance of
Pastor Mader that the greater part of his hearers do not belong to the
wealthy."