§ 177.1. The Evangelical Union.—Circumstances favoured this movement. Both in the Lutheran and in the Reformed church comparatively little stress was laid upon distinctive confessional doctrines, and pietism and rationalism, for different reasons, had taught the relative unimportance of dogma. And so a general accord was given to the king’s proposal, at the Reformation centenary of A.D. 1817, to fortify the Protestant church by means of a Union of Lutherans and Calvinists. The new Book of Common Order of A.D. 1822, in the preparation of which the pious king, Frederick William III., had himself taken part, was indeed condemned by many as too high-church, even Catholicizing in its tendency. A revised edition in A.D. 1829, giving a wider choice of formularies, was legally authorized, and the union became an accomplished fact. There now existed in Prussia an evangelical national church with a common government and liturgy, embracing within it three different sections: a Lutheran, and a Reformed, which held to their distinctive doctrines, though not regarding these as a cause of separation, and a real union party, which completely abandoned the points of difference. But more and more the union became identified with doctrinal indifferentism and slighting of all church symbols, and those in whom the church feeling still prevailed were driven into opposition to the union (§ 193). The example of Prussia in sacking the union of the two churches was followed by Nassau, Baden, Rhenish Bavaria, Anhalt, and to some extent in Hesse (§§ 194, 196).

§ 177.2. The Lutheran Separation.—Though the union denied that there was any passing over from one church to another, it practically declared the distinctive doctrines to be unessential, and so assumed the standpoint of the Reformed church. Steffens (§ 174, 3), the friend of Scheibel of Breslau, who had been deprived of his professorship in A.D. 1832 for his determined opposition to the union, and died in exile in 1843 (§ 195, 2), headed a reaction in favour of old Lutheranism. Several suspended clergymen in Silesia held a synod at Breslau in A.D. 1835, to organize a Lutheran party, but the civil authorities bore so heavily upon them that most of them emigrated to America and Australia. Guericke of Halle, secretly ordained pastor, ministered in his own house to a small company of Lutheran separatists, was deprived of his professorship in A.D. 1835, and only restored in A.D. 1840, after he had apologised for his conduct. From A.D. 1838, the laws were modified by Frederick William IV., imprisoned clergymen were liberated in A.D. 1840, and a Lutheran church of Prussia independent of the national church was constituted by a general synod at Breslau in A.D. 1841, which received recognition by royal favour in A.D. 1845. The affairs are administered by a supreme council resident in Breslau, presided over by the distinguished jurist Huschke. Other separations were prevented by timely concessions on the part of the national church. The separatists claim 50,000 members, with fifty pastors and seven superintendents.

§ 177.3. The Separation within the Separation.—Differences arose among the separate Lutherans, especially over the question of the visible church. The majority, headed by Huschke, defined the visible church as an organism of various offices and orders embracing even unbelievers, which is to be sifted by the divine judgment. To it belongs the office of church government, which is a jus divinum, and only in respect of outward form a jus humanum. The opposition understood visibility of the preaching of the word and dispensation of sacraments, and held that unbelievers belonged as little to the visible as to the invisible church. The distribution of orders and offices is a merely human arrangement without divine appointment, individual members are quite independent of one another, the church recognises no other government than that of the unfettered preaching of the word, and each pastor rules in his own congregation. Diedrich of Jabel and seven other pastors complained of the papistical assumptions of the supreme council, and at a general synod in A.D. 1860 refused to recognise the authority of that council, or of a majority of synods, and in A.D. 1861, along with their congregations, they formally seceded and constituted the so called Immanuel Synod.