# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_December 1859_S384
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

384 Ecclesiastical Contemporary Affairs.

...all the historical proofs of his divine mission help the healthy and the righteous just as
little as his bodily appearance helped the Pharisees. The lack of a proper demonstration of
being lost without Christ weighs heavily on the apologetic writings of a Seiler, a Reinhard, a
Planck, and others, in whom the Pelagianism that had crept in did not allow this to happen.
Only once that foundation has been laid can the inner testimonies of the Holy Spirit to the
truth and divinity of the Gospel follow immediately upon the historical proofs. Thus the
inner experience of sin leads to faith in Christ, faith in turn to the inner experience of
redemption, and this in turn to faith in the Redeemer, and so it proceeds in a living
reciprocal action."

"If Christ is not true God, then our salvation has a twofold, divided ground in God and in
Christ, in which case the soul can by no means attain true rest and understanding. This
leads to polytheism, which even in heathendom robbed men of all true unity of the inner life."

"It is a strange contradiction to forbid images and yet to make mere images out of the
sacraments. It is a strange contradiction to make bread and wine in the Lord's Supper into
mere outward memorial signs, and, as soon as they have been made into that, to consume
them — when they ought rather to be preserved as a remembrance."

Waldeck. The Ev. K. Z. is accordingly informed as follows: "A united [i.e., Prussian
Union] missionary society has now set itself up alongside the Lutheran missionary society.
It was introduced in St. Kilian's church at Corbach with the bold assertion: Union and
mission are the watchword of our churchly age, and they belong together, and what God has
joined together, man shall not put asunder! There is nothing to be added to that. It is
thoroughly German cosmopolitan fancy to wish to set up, alongside churches and sects that
conduct mission on the basis of their own confessions, an unconfessional union-church out
there in the field. The new society has for the present attached itself to the Barmen
mission. It is distressing to see how, from the Lutheran side in Waldeck, help is being given
to bring a Rhenish-Westphalian union-church into the heathen world — a church that, in its
mission liturgy, offers for free choice: 1. the Dordrecht [Reformed formula], 2. the
Dutch-Lutheran, 3. the United (Unterbarmen congregation), while, according to Section 6 of
its church order for missionaries, basing itself on the Augsburg Confession, Luther's
Catechism, and the Heidelberg Catechism."

Paris. The Consistory-General of the Church of the Augsburg Confession recently
passed the resolution: "Our pulpits are altogether forbidden to all clergy who belong to a
church that is separated from the recognized and existing Protestant cult." Over this the
Darmstadt K. Z. laments greatly and adds: "So then also all the venerable and truly pious
men, such as a Fr. Monod, who belong to the Union des Eglises Protestantes!"

Melanchthon's three-hundredth death anniversary (April 19) is, on the proposal of
the Eisenach Conference, to be observed next year with a churchly celebration in
Germany.

Dr. Luthardt, a decided chiliast, writes in his Saxon Church and School Gazette of
October 6: "A Lutheran synod of North America has placed under the ban this understanding
of this passage" (namely, the belief that, according to Romans 11, a still-future general
conversion of the Jews is to be expected). This is a plain untruth. Our synod has, indeed,
only disavowed this alleged article of Christian faith or hope — which come to the same
thing — and has declared only gross chiliasm to be church-dividing, particularly when it is
firmly held and publicly taught by a preacher.