# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_December 1859_S372
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

W. 16, 661 f. closes with the beautiful words, directly applicable to the case before us: "In sum, the protesting estates recognize, wholly and severally, His Imperial Majesty as their rightful natural lord and emperor ordained by God, to whom they also offer and submit themselves, with their bodies, lands, and people, in all obedience, help, and subjection: but that His Majesty, by confirmation of the imperial estates' recess, should also presume in any way to be a lord over the same estates' faith, souls, and conscience, or to command them to accept something whereby they would depart from the truth, act against their conscience, and provoke God as a Lord to anger — that would go too far and would encroach, without mediation, upon the government and lordship that God has reserved to himself alone, who has kept for himself all power and jurisdiction in this matter, and has left to no man on earth even the least authority herein: Coelum coeli Domino, terram autem dedit filiis hominum — that is, the heaven and what is spiritual, God the Lord of heaven has reserved to himself; but what is earthly, he has committed to earthly men alone. No man, moreover, is bound to obey either the emperor or any other earthly authorities in such a matter, for in this case, as Scripture says, it behooves us to obey God rather than men." As long as we are called Protestants — and this name will last as long as the Church of the Gospel endures, because it contains an essential definiteness of its nature — it will also be permitted and a duty, under certain circumstances, to protest, that is, solemnly to safeguard the rights of the heavenly King against earthly authorities and majorities. To outlaw such protestation unconditionally and to regard it as an attack upon the authorities is a sign of religious indolence and impotence, and is reasonable only from the standpoint of atheism, which no longer perceives anything of the hidden background of all authority on earth, and which fails to recognize the great truth that is the theme of Psalm 82: "God stands in the congregation of God; he judges among the gods" — for such a person the statement that one must obey God more than man is folly, and in the appeal to this word he sees only a fig leaf for obstinacy and stubbornness.

If the ecclesiastical authority has, in some matter of the day, already set out upon a wrong path, that does not free one from the duty of bearing witness to the truth — it rather increases it. For us, truly, the maxim does not hold: "Rome has spoken, the matter is settled." We test everything, including the measures of the authorities, against God's Word, the "sole rule and standard by which all doctrines and teachers alike are to be judged and evaluated," "the sole touchstone," as our confessions say; and where the ordinary office stumbles, it is precisely there that the obligation passes over to the extraordinary, since otherwise the Church would cease altogether. When the priesthood under Jeroboam, in the kingdom of the ten tribes, departed from the right way, when it bound its interests inseparably to those of the false cult, then the time had come for the appearance of the sons of the prophets banded to-