# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_November 1859_S347
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

The Evangelical Supreme Church Council and the Evangelical Church Gazette. 347

...the Son of Man will also be ashamed of him when he comes in his glory and in the glory of his Father and of the holy angels" — and filled with the conviction that, if the government of the Church were to take a different path than the one marked out in the Word of God, and if the outspoken testimony that all Christians are obligated to bear under certain circumstances — especially the literary organs of the Church, which have taken upon themselves something like a vow to bear such testimony — were to fall silent, the Church would cease altogether, and then judgment would break in unstoppably. — As has been said, the Right Reverend Evangelical Supreme Church Council has not softened, by so much as a single word, the harshness of its stance toward the Evangelical Church Gazette, against which it knows only how to warn all the seven thousand clergy subject to it. It is owing to the wording of this decree that it has so often been understood not as directed against a single article of the Evangelical Church Gazette, but as a condemnation of the whole paper and its editor. We may perhaps, on such an occasion, gently recall that it was the Evangelical Church Gazette which first, with energy, promoted the idea of an independent supreme authority separated from the Ministry of Ecclesiastical Affairs, and drafted the plan for the establishment of such a body, and that its arguments in this regard were probably not without some influence on the later development of the matter.

What has further grieved us in the decree of the highest ecclesiastical authority is that it has judged spiritual matters in so unspiritual a manner — that it has contented itself, without any engagement with the substance of the matter, with pronouncing harsh accusations and threats. According to sound churchly principles, a spiritual authority, when it meets with opposition in the spiritual sphere, may not immediately proceed with censures and penalties; rather, it must, above all, demonstrate from the Word of God that it is in the right and that the one attacking it is in the wrong.*) In the present case, however, it seems quite obvious that the path taken cannot be the right one. If the Evangelical Church Gazette is correct in its claim that the decree of the Right Reverend Evangelical Supreme Church Council of February 15 concerning the remarriage of divorced spouses is contrary to the Word of God — which is all the more likely to be assumed since its detailed arguments on this point have to this day stood unrefuted even in the literature (for no competent judge will regard the article "Law or Principle" in the New Evangelical Church Gazette as a refutation) — then the decree lacks any firm basis, and nothing remains for it but to censure certain words here and there, which is a quite subordinate matter: an overreach in expression, however much it is to be avoided, falls, in the main, to the account of the one who gave occasion for the matter in the first place.

*) Those who now advocate for religious freedom all too often wish to claim it only for themselves. L. and W.