# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_October 1864_S320
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

320 Church and Contemporary Affairs.

be established, by whom and how the baptism was performed, if that will still be
possible at all everywhere after years have passed. Since no one is to be admitted to the
Holy Supper who is not baptized, still further consequences attach to this. The Hamburg
church is thereby beginning to dissolve its fellowship with the rest of the Lutheran church
and to pave the way for a commonwealth into which Reform Jews may enter without
further ado. In Hamburg one does not renounce the devil at baptism; instead, one
renounces the triune God. So the "Christian" spirit would have it, the spirit that guides
all progress.
(Neues Zeitblatt.)
French Study of German Unbelief. French Catholics have indeed
written against Renan, but their writings mean as little as their scholarship. Since
Renan has drawn on German sources, the Archbishop of Paris has hit upon the idea of
sending his best seminarians to Germany, to draw from these same sources knowledge of
the Orient and especially of Hebrew, and to study German philosophy in its most daring
schools, so that they may combat the opponents of Christianity on scholarly grounds. The
next goal is the University of Tübingen, where Herr von Kuhn teaches Catholic theology
— too scholarly, to the annoyance of the Historisch-Politische Blätter. Next the young
Abbé Vollot, who passed the most brilliant examination at the Paris Sorbonne in ten
years, will go there. Others will follow him, and all are to become doctors of theology in
Germany. Thus the Archbishop hopes to restore the theological faculty of the Sorbonne,
once the light of the world, to its former splendor, and to set an effective dam against
unbelief. The distress must be very great, that the Catholic Church in France, or at any
rate its archbishop, borrows weapons from the German arsenals of scholarship, because
the authority of the church, its splendor and its worship, no longer suffice to repel the
dangerous attacks of scholarship. (N. Zeitbl.)
Hamburg. It is now becoming quite the fashion to write a "Life of Jesus," or to
present one briefly in a sermon, in order thereby to get the cornerstone of Christianity out
of the way. Among the people of this fashion belongs also a certain Doctor A. Krause,
a Lutheran (!?) preacher at St. Catherine's Church in Hamburg. On Rogate Sunday of
this year he delivered a sermon, now given to the press, on the theme: "The little that
we know, from Holy Scripture, of the outward fate (!) of our Lord." The narrative
sermon has three parts: "1. Of his youth, almost nothing; 2. of his manhood, scattered
fragments; and 3. of his death, transfigured things." In it, Christ's miracles are
explained as the application of natural powers, his resurrection as a legend of the
disciples, and belief in his ascension as an adventurous delusion. When this Krause says
that of Christ's death we know "transfigured things," a German periodical remarks on
this: "Everywhere the same wretched fear of stating one's unbelief plainly." A number of
earnestly Christian citizens are petitioning the Senate for protection against such
slanders of Christianity.
Obituaries. In Berlin there died on May 8 of this year the professor of church
law, Privy Councillor Dr. Aemilius Ludwig Richter, known for his writings concerning the
history of church law. — One of the two Lutheran missionaries most recently sent out
from Leipzig, Ahner, already died gently and blessedly in the Lord on May 22 of this
year. — On July 17 there died in Stuttgart the well-known Christian hymn-writer Albert
Knapp, after a long and painful illness. He had reached the age of 67 and had worked
for 30 years as a pastor in the said city.