How the Missouri Synod is Judged in Germany Today.
[A review of an 1881 pamphlet by Pastor Rudolph Hoffmann of Germany]
By Pastor Ch. Hochstetter, Stonebridge, Canada.
This [Prussian] Union does not consist in the power of the spiritual authority given to the saints as such <page 77> by Christ, but in the power of the royal cabinet order, whereby the Church has been treated more and more as a police institution which has religion taken care of on the side. Whoever, as Hoffmann does, wants to separate the congregation of saints as the ideal Church from the real congregation in such a way that the latter (the saints) no longer exercise any activity whatsoever, that is, should no longer profess their faith through church service, turns the ecclesiastical, living organism into a raging state machine, and keeps only a hollow constitutional building in place of the true Church. On the other hand, it sounds very tendentious when Hoffmann says that the Missourians do not give the emperor what is the emperor's, but take the side of the Romans in their consideration of the state, because we want to distinguish between secular and spiritual power, as the Augsburg Confession expressly demands. We reject the teaching of the Jesuits, which the New Lutherans approach in relation to the judgment of civil marriage etc., as if the state, without recognizing a papal sovereignty, was equal to a band of robbers. We know what is written in Rom. 13 and we honor God's order in the secular authority, but we also honor the Word of Christ who confessed to Pilate, the representative of the Roman state power: “My kingdom is not of this world.”
On the other hand, it must still be replied to the reproach of the democratic constitution that we, if in truth the Christocracy belonging to the Church still stands, regard the constitutional form of the visibly represented church as an indifferent thing [or adiaphoron]. The Lutheran Church can bear many different constitutional forms, in Sweden and Norway the episcopal constitution, and in the good old days a consistorial government. In this connection it is only to be taken into account that the consistories were originally only advisory bodies, just as all representative assemblies should never forget that they may only advise and act in the name of others in what concerns all and in what everyone has a stake, and only according to the Word of God. If in former times godly princes in their thoroughly Lutheran country also took part in the church government, we do not reject this activity either, as long as the church leadership is only an Evangelical church government and not a mastering princely government. Luther called this activity of Christian princes an emergency remedy! This alone shows how superficial and null Luther's objection is, to which Hoffmann in his writing p. 31 refers, that the Missourian pastor Hübener from Dresden had sent the “very poor” assertion into the world that the Church was born as a free church, but Luthardt is right to say [p. 31]: whether, because we are born as children, we must also remain children!
Unfortunately, today's state churchmen are by no means men in Christ, but eager servants of the state authority! St. Paul reminds the Galatians [Gal. 4:31] <page 78> in very serious words that as children of the free they are taken from the Jewish theocracy and the poor statutes, how much more must the modern state [in Germany] without religion, which favors unbelief, be in servitude for Christians loyal to the faith, which despite the fat profits that the royal pastors and professors enjoy, is nevertheless only a glittering misery. Are we therefore to become servants, servants of a state power that is becoming more and more pagan, because we are called to the Christian Church as free children of God? Quite different from Luthardt and comrades, the old teachers saw the service that Christian princes, as long as they remained true to the faith of their fathers, wanted to render to the Church. Hartmann [1640-1680] writes in his Pastorale:
“So also in our time the godliness of our princes is to be praised, according to which they provided their subjects with skillful and efficient teachers, not so that the congregations were deprived of their rights, but because the people neither understood nor used their rights, and the right judgment of the same was prevented by old madmen, they took the same under their guardianship and represented the place of the church.”
Hartmann thus calls the state that existed under the territorial system a life under guardianship. Hartmann does not teach that the Christianity of the New Testament, born as a free church, thereby made progress towards manhood; how much more would he deplore the present state of the state church, which is not unjustly called a prince's maid by the Romans [Catholics].
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