# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juli 1859_S220
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

220 The Agenda Controversy in Baden.

pieces of the Lutheran and pieces of the Heidelberg catechism; and that
is exactly the less-than-pleasing image of the positive union, which has
here proved once again that it is one thing to sketch out a fine idea of
union and another to carry such a union into effect. The unity of the two
churches is neither found nor present, and so it can neither be realized
nor represented.

But where two conflicting quantities are to be united and welded
together, one of them will always have a tendency to expel the other.
That is what has happened in Baden. The Lutheranizing outlook has its
roots only to the smallest degree in the congregations; the populace,
against this, together with a large number of prominent leaders, stands
on the side of the Reformed, or better said, of the rationalizing and
rationalistic outlook. This ruling faction has resisted and expelled the
Lutheran character, because it holds the upper hand. It wants nothing to
do with a positive union. To it, the union is the means of ridding itself of
some churchly ballast and old-fashioned statutes. Having tasted the new
freedom, it will not let itself be caught again for the sake of a few pretty
notions. Who is to compel it? Freedom of teaching has, through that
very Synod of 1855, again been given a boost, except that no one may
teach decidedly Lutheran doctrine. Hundeshagen and Rothe deployed
their whole influence for this. Strictly speaking, then, it is a wrong to
restrict public worship and to compel a free student of Scripture, who has
arrived at quite different views, to feel, pray and confess in a Lutheran
manner during worship. Indeed, it is not at all clear how one can still
speak of union at all, where not merely two churches are thrown
together, but all sorts of ways of thinking, past, present and future, are
granted civic rights. If, after all this, one wants in the end to bring only
historically-churchly views to dominance, then one has only oneself to
blame if one is bitterly disappointed. It is indeed true, on one hand, that
the same forces that caused the Bavarian mischief have also been active
in Baden. But whereas the Bavarian Supreme Consistory, when it had to
yield, could at least say that it had not beforehand made the ground
unsteady under its own feet, in Baden, by contrast, an attempt was made
at something that had to appear, in advance, very risky and doubtful,
because the formal right to it was not fully present in every respect.

Perhaps, however, this serves to help toward the recognition that the
churchly proletariat — the great mass of the merely well-intentioned,
whom Scripture calls the world — is not to be won over by any and all
concessions and accommodations. Meet the age halfway as much as one
likes, the well-intentioned will accept the concessions most gratefully, but
will not be satisfied until one has given them, along with coat and cloak,
the very shirt off one's back as well, and returned with them to the
laudable state of nature. The Lutherans have been reproached for having
no footing and