# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juli 1864_S219
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Church and Contemporary Affairs. 219

thrust away from the Prussian Union at the cost of heavy sacrifices? Does she not
condemn her own separation, if she tolerates a divided doctrine which she herself
previously condemned in the territorial church? The matter would stand otherwise
if it were merely a question of theologoumena, that is, of theological opinions.
Perhaps some will view it that way; but the leading voices in the free church are
not of that opinion, and will not be persuaded of it either. What value Huschke
places on his doctrine one can see for oneself in his own writing. "To be or not
to be, that is the question"; and that is how one views the affair. God knows how
help is to come here!

For the present, one can still make a few other observations. No church body
has the promise that it shall be spared severe illnesses, even if it comes into the
world in the healthiest condition. The free church must not let it trouble her that
this is how it goes for her after her withdrawal from the Union; and therefore she
must take no occasion to go at the sick members at once with knives and cut
them off. It is, after all, also a divine dispensation that has come upon her, for
her testing, exercise, and humbling. That is to be borne with patience, with the
prayer to God to provide the right healing. To be sure, one says: healing consists
in excommunicating false teachers. Granted! But can one simply go straight at
it with excommunication — that is, with burning and tearing? Has one no regard
for the church as a whole? Does one not, under certain circumstances, have to
wait, when there is still some slight prospect of better conditions, and may one
tear excommunication away from the guiding arm of the gospel? If the General
Synod were to raise the false doctrine to the status of accepted doctrine in the
church, matters would indeed stand very seriously, and I could understand
giving her a bill of divorce. But I do not think her so blind; the most ordinary
prudence would have to have utterly deserted her, and God would have to put it
into her mind to break her own neck.

Besides, I do not at all believe that this free governing church has great
prospects for the future. The main current of history is evidently flowing
somewhere quite different, and this governing church seems to me to be only one
of the smaller countercurrents that tend to accompany the main streams. It is
plain enough what one-sidedness the main current suffers from; one must simply
put up with the countercurrent and see to it only that one brings the ship safely
through between the two. But to tear the church apart without great necessity
is an utterly desperate remedy, one to which a person should reach only under
compulsion. For even in the most favorable case, if things could not have turned
out otherwise, the severe after-pains will not fail to come. But an unfounded
breach belongs, according to Galatians 5, among the works of the flesh, and
carries its own curse within itself. (Neues Zeitblatt.)

Church and Contemporary Affairs.

I. America.

Mennonites. In order to assist an educational institution about to be
established by this sect, a Mennonite recently proposed, in their organ, the
"Christliches Volksblatt," published in Milford Square, Pa., that the doctrinal
teaching of Cornelius Ris be made the foundation of the institution, but that the
articles rejecting military service and the holding of civil office be declared not
binding. To this a Mennonite in the same paper of May 18 made the remark:
"In the first place, I would not know why this institution should be given the
name ""Mennonite Teaching Institution,"" if indeed one of the most important
Mennonite principles is to be ignored in this way. Secondly, I see no necessity
of calling such a thing into being at all, and I would rather advise that we unite
with the Baptists and make common use of their institutions. The difference
over baptism between us and them might more easily bear a modification,
without coming too close to Scripture, than the question of nonresistance. He
will also have to grant me that, if the human race had not fallen but had kept
the image of its Creator, then there would have been