# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_October 1864_S297
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Two Documents from the Prussian Lutheran Church.    297

causes that might lie in their own dogmatic standpoint — the recognition of their belonging "to the body of the Lutheran Church" (to repeat here this often-used expression), and consequently the Lutheran church and altar fellowship resting on this, merely because they no longer belong to the outward Breslau ecclesiastical constitutional and ministerial organism, or because separation from an outward ecclesiastical constitutional body would in and of itself already be a sin, or an act abrogating church fellowship. We demand rather that no compulsion be placed upon our consciences in this respect, to let the same sustaining brotherly love and patience be shown to adherents of the Diedrich tendency and separation as to others.

We are convinced that, if it is at all otherwise possible for theological tendencies so deeply different as those present among us to remain ecclesiastically united and thus to bring their doctrinal struggle to a right and God-pleasing settlement, this can happen only under the conditions we have designated and by the way we have proposed.

Steeden, July 1864.
The Lutheran pastors in Nassau,

Fr. Brunn.    J. Hein.

Appendix. — Five Theses against Huschke's Doctrine of the Church.

I.

When Huschke, apparently agreeing with the Symbols, says on p. 64*) that "the true Church consists in the believers," he nowhere explains how he understands this, but shows plainly that he understands it quite differently from the Symbols. For when on p. 91 he rejects the view that "unbelievers fall outside the true Church" — thus wishing them to be counted as belonging to it — and yet says in the same place, "we become members of the true Church only through faith," this is either a senseless contradiction, or H. can only mean this: the believers are the principal, as it were tone-setting, part of the Church (somewhat like the rational soul in man), or the part in which properly the purpose or the apex of the Church rests, without the other parts of the Church being wholly excluded thereby. — The Symbols, on the other hand, plainly set the "true Church" in opposition to the ungodly. The true Church, says the Apology, Art. 4, is the body of Christ, and members of this body the ungodly cannot possibly be; Church in the proper, that is, true and real sense of this word, is therefore only, exclusively, the believers.

II.

Huschke says on p. 67: "Insofar as outward things (that is, church ordinances, etc.) are divinely ordained, they too belong to the essence of the Church"; on p. 70: "Church government and church order are not to be separated from the Una sancta";

*) Huschke, Die streitigen Lehren, etc. Leipzig, 1863.