# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juli 1864_S218
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

218 On the Church Controversy of the Lutheran Free Church in Prussia.

and it would in any case be correct to ban a willful transgressor of these human
statutes just as one would ban a transgressor of the sixth commandment, because
he despises the divine authority — just as in former times under the papacy. Only
Huschke introduces, with regard to the ban, the mitigation that the banned person
is excluded merely from the visibly outward church, without that having any
significance for his inward relationship to God. From this we would indeed
conclude that, by Huschke's own admission, the visible institutional church is
after all not the first and foundational thing, for otherwise there would be no
salvation outside it.

If Huschke, by this route, does in fact arrive at a governing church, then only
the capstone of the whole is missing — and with that a very great deal is missing.
He has not been able, and has not been permitted, to abolish the right and duty
of the believing congregation to test doctrine, and that puts an ugly gash through
the authority of the government. As is well known, the chief task of the
government is care for the pure doctrine; all its other tasks stand only in a
subordinate and serving relation to this one. To take from the government the
care for doctrine means to gouge out its eye, if not rather to tear the heart out
of its body. What authority, then, does the government have in this matter? A
self-derived one, none whatever. There can be no doctrinal decisions that are
binding in and of themselves. Even where it wishes only to assert and apply a
doctrine already long since settled, it must submit to having every layman watch
its fingers, to see whether it has not made a mistake. Every layman is obligated
to do so by the word: Believe not every spirit, but test the spirits, whether they
are of God. As soon as it is a matter of doctrine, the church government stands
under the judgment of the believing congregation. But if, in this chief matter of
the government, the final decision and highest authority lies with the congregation
of believers, then Huschke's whole edifice collapses. It is not true that the
church's authority originally lies in the institutional church and the organism of
offices. It is not true that the government represents an authority instituted by
God. It is not true that this authority must be obeyed as though one were
obeying God himself. Even for his own government Huschke retains, of the
church's authority, only the patched and pieced-together coat of church order or
of outward human statutes — a coat that will certainly perform no great acts of
government. For all the decisive struggles and movements within the church
turn on doctrine. Whoever is not master here does not govern, but must be
governed.

It is simply not possible, within the free church, to establish such a church
authority as Huschke wants it to have; for the church's authority in the
territorial church has an entirely different ground. If one wants to erect a real
governing church, one must go all the way to the last step which the Catholic
church has long since taken. One must transfer doctrinal decisions to the
governing office and take them away from the believing congregation. But then
one must also transfer the governing office to the clergy and make them bishops,
because doctrinal decisions belong to the nature of the spiritual office. Whether,
in the event of possible disagreement among the bishops, a pope would not then
be indispensable is likewise worth considering. That is a whole, coherent thing;
there everything hangs together as by a thread. Huschke's view, by contrast, is
an ecclesiastical syncretism — in plain German, a hodgepodge. He has drifted
into Catholic waters, but when the harbor of Rome seems about to open to him,
the Protestant current holds him back, so that he can neither make land nor sail
back, but must cruise on a sea that very easily wrecks such sailors on its cliffs.
How gladly one would see so distinguished an admiral sail under a more
favorable star!

For what, then, will be the fate of the church struggle? One would wish from
the bottom of one's heart that a peaceful settlement, or at least a mutual
toleration, might be achieved, and everything urgently counsels toward that in
this time of confusion, when the church seems to be coming apart at the seams,
and the defenders of right doctrine often find themselves mounted on a pale
horse. But now, after Huschke has expressed himself so clearly, I almost doubt
that the opposing views can be made to bear with one another any longer. The
free church separated from the Prussian territorial church for the sake of
doctrine; with Huschken the constitution has now been added, which, as one
sees, is for him an essential part of the doctrine itself. What, then, is to
become of it? Is the free church now to carry within itself the very condition
which it, by its separation,