# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_December 1864_S382
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

382 Church and Contemporary History.

II. Abroad.

The Territorial Church System. Even Pastor Rocholl, who was driven
out by a territorial-church church-government, nevertheless sees in
the form of the federated church the real anchor of hope for the
church. At the pastoral conference at Hanover on June 19, 1862, he
delivered an address, "Volkskirche and Freikirche" [National Church and
Free Church], whose main lines are presented as follows in Guericke's
journal of this year, p. 725f.: "To be sure, the territorial-church
system can have its dangers, and they are present in a bad kind of
territorialism, in bureaucratism, in the constitutional form of the
state with ministries answerable to mixed chambers — the author does
not close his eyes to these dangers; but in part these dangers do not
lie in the territorial church as such, and can therefore also be
removed from it again, and in part the dangers do not reach as far as
those which religious freedom necessarily gives birth to. But the talk
of the dead masses of the congregations in the territorial church, out
of which the awakened supposedly must withdraw, and of the falling-away
that has come about through the union of church and state, testifies
to little bearing and hoping love, and smacks strongly of Baptist
sentiment. To the principled zeal for the free church, which comes
over to us from the Reformed Church on the west wind, it must
accordingly be pointed out that the Lutheran Church, in the form of a
free church, cannot remain this same church. The Lutheran free
churches that have arisen out of necessity — 'here one little
banner, there another little banner' — carry grave dangers within
themselves, dangers mightier than the self-denial of the saints, which
alone could overcome them. The chief enemy within them is the
sectarian spirit, produced by the break with history and tradition,
which inevitably works itself out in men's minds as a break with the
historical sense as well. From this then follows that subjectivism
which does not bend, does not wait, wants to see only the finished
result, falls into restless agitation, elevates side-issues into
church-dividing factors, and gives the congregations the appearance of
something morbidly distorted. This spirit has a strong lever in the
fact that these free churches have their origin in the form of a
social contract, which they will likewise not be able to disown, so
that the center of gravity will remain in the congregation, which
knows 'how churches are made.' In place of the hitherto monarchical
and aristocratic lay element, the democratic one must therefore
furnish the social foundation. 'Against the features thereby engraved
into the new church system, no confessions offer protection. They
protect neither against Independentism nor against Chiliasm, the sigh
that the sect-form squeezes out.' Let no one object that dogma makes
the church, and that the conservative support even of the free church
lies in the preservation of pure doctrine. For it is not dogma alone
that constitutes the distinctive character of the Lutheran Church, but
dogma together with the social foundation. — This, in its main
outlines, is the content of the excellent address before us, which was
also, in essentials, the expression of thought of the pastors gathered
at the conference."

The Doctrine of Christ's Descent into Hell is treated in an
excellent manner by Pastor H. O. Köhler of Gross Vielen in Mecklenburg
— from whose pen several excellent essays have already appeared in
Guericke's journal — in an essay in the same journal for this year (4th
quarterly number). The dear man himself states the result in the
following words: "For the doctrine of faith, the following accordingly
results: after the bonds of death were loosed through the ζωοποίησις
[vivification], and the body of Christ was raised up to a spiritual
life, Christ (that is, the whole Christ, God and man, with body and
soul) went down to hell as the living one and as the prince of
victory. His weapon against that kingdom was the sword of the Spirit,
the word of his preaching — not a calling and redeeming preaching, but
a judging and crushing one. Death, and he who has the power of death,
can no longer do anything to him, for he now stands there in spiritual
life; and just as little can they harm his own, for head and members
are to dwell in equal security. In the descent into hell, therefore,
lies for us Christians the comfort which the Dresden Cross Catechism
puts so beautifully: 'when we consider that Christ in his descent into
hell triumphed over Satan, so that now all who believe in him shall be
redeemed from hell, come into heaven, and be saved.'"