# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Januar 1855_S6
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

6                    On the Doctrine of the Holy Office of the Ministry.

...through the fulfillment of his promises pertaining thereto (Jer. 8:15; Joel 2:23; Ps. 68:12; Isa. 60:17; Clement of Rome, Ep. 1 ad Cor., ch. 42) and through the calling — proceeding from him, and through him likewise from her — to a leadership and administration not common to all (Heb. 5:4; Rom. 10:15), not only into those who teach and those who hear, but arranges even the former, among themselves, by a higher and lower order of rank. *)

The second passage is 1 Cor. 12:28 — a significant statement of the apostle! In the preceding verse, v. 18, he had said: "Now God has set the members" (of the natural, human body) "in the body, each one of them, just as he willed." He employs exactly the same manner of speech in v. 28: "And God has set" — as the members in the body, so — "some in the congregation: first apostles, second prophets, third teachers," etc. But if these dignitaries of the church just named are members of the holy body of the congregation, then they stand not over the congregation but in it, and serve it, in particular, as laborers at the Word — each with the gift he has received — just as in general one member otherwise renders help to another according to the working of each member in its measure (Eph. 4:16). Throughout the whole of chapters 12 to 14 of this epistle, the apostle deals, in the first instance, with the spiritual gifts — wherein love, as the bond of perfection, is due the royal rule over all — but then at the same time, just as with the powers, so also with the offices in the church, given to the congregation of God in a magnificent unity and freedom of the Spirit which, however, does not exclude order and calling. Cf. Rom. 12. For that to which all have a common right — although it is properly the (particular) gift that produces the (particular) office — no one should take upon himself without being chosen, ch. 14:40. And the humility which, through such recognition of those appointed by the Lord, restrains itself, is an ornament to the assembly of Christians.

Even the twelve disciples, although called directly by Jesus (as indeed could not have been otherwise), could never have been the firstfruits of the New Testament office if they had not first been firstfruits of the New Testament church, carried over from the Old Testament; for the church, in which Christ himself was born and grew up, arises out of faith, and it was out of the believers that they — the holy Twelve, the betrayer included — became the Lord's apostles. They too know themselves to be servants of his congregation, and know well that it is the heir of the

*) Note. Hence bishops-in-chief, superintendents, pastores primarii, deacons, and — by analogy with the latter — the assistant presbyters or congregational elders assigned to pastors (or the so-called lay assessors of the consistory) unquestionably have a divine calling; but their offices are only branches of the one ministerium divinum as the center point, erected out of that same center, in Christian freedom, after the pattern of the apostolic church, and distributed upward and downward.