# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_October 1864_S290
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

290    Two Documents from the Prussian Lutheran Church.

part ways and come to clarity. To do this without on the one hand injuring our fidelity to the Lutheran confession, and without on the other hand injuring the forbearing love and patience which we owe to erring brethren, and without injuring the ecclesiastical fellowship with the latter — so long as faith and conscience at all permit — while upholding it and, where possible, winning the necessary room and ground for it: that is our earnest endeavor and the standpoint from which we address our present petitions to the reverend Synod.

In order to indicate to the reverend Synod our theological and ecclesiastical position, we refer to the recently published pamphlet: "A Simple Confession Concerning Our Church Controversy, by Fr. Brunn," in which this our position is set forth more fully. With reference to it we also declare here:

I. That we are conscious of the essential distinction between our theological and ecclesiastical position and that represented by Pastor Diedrich, and that, insofar as the separation of Pastor Diedrich and the pastors associated with him has been influenced by their dogmatically one-sided and extreme tendency, we cannot but express our disapproval of it. Yet we hold a further discussion of our view on this matter to be the less necessary, since the Diedrich party (to use this expression for brevity's sake) has already taken its own firmly determined position outside our synodical fellowship.

II. We find ourselves in deep and fully pronounced opposition to the theological direction of the reverend Supreme Church Council [Oberkirchencollegium], as this has been set forth in particular by Mr. Director Huschke. We must here especially and above all emphasize that the matter for us is not merely the question of the "divine institution" of church government [K.-Regiment]. This expression seems to us in general capable, in part, of quite various more or less false interpretations, and in part it could possibly be limited to bounds within which it might indeed take on a less important or, symbolically, perhaps even less fixed meaning, as some among us think. What is at stake in the opposition to the theological position of our O.-K.-C. is a whole, in itself fully rounded doctrinal system, which reaches into the very depths of all the parts and principles of our Lutheran doctrine of the Symbols and, in our conviction, overthrows it.

We name in particular:

1. Huschke's doctrine of the Church, according to which the outward constitutional and ministerial organism [Verfassungs- und Ämter-Organismus] of the Church is so reckoned into its essence that the true Church is conceived not merely as the communion of saints or as a purely spiritual kingdom of faith, but at the same time as an outward institution organized in offices — from which follows, as the apex and as it were the shibboleth of this concept of the Church, the assertion that even the ungodly who live within the outward fellowship of the Church participate in the essence of the Church or are members of the body of Christ. (For particulars, see the appendix.)