# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Februar 1855_S34
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

...anything ceremonial-legal still have validity in the New Testament? Surely one does not mean to include the holy sacraments under this category as well? Are these not rather comprehended in the word of promise — containing, for all, the essence that is bound up with the visible signs, which then, of course, are to be received in faith, as is already contained as a command in the first commandment? Likewise the office — the office of proclaiming God's great deeds, of spreading abroad the word of His grace, and of declaring His glory with praise and honor — is given in the Gospel, as the Symbols and Catechisms teach, and it is at the same time also promised in that same Gospel that God will bring to realization, through His Spirit, the gifts needed for this in believers — preeminently, however, in those who plant the congregations of God or who feed the planted congregations with wholesome doctrine; the calling of such men, insofar as this is to be done through human agency, is likewise, like all obedience of faith, indeed God's commandment: Thou shalt have no other gods before me. But just as He compels no one to faith, compels no one to the wholesome use of the sacraments — although He does compel the outward observance of this or that through the domestic or civil government — so too what may spring only from the fresh breath and blowing of the Spirit must not, through human agency, be made to stiffen into works of the law: namely, the receiving of the preachers from His gracious hand. Even the economy of the Old Testament had its legal ceremonies only as prefiguration and image of historical facts in the kingdom of Christ Jesus, and without the faith of the priestly people the purifications and sacrifices of the Mosaic office were wholly insufficient for righteousness and reprehensible before God; and in the time of the New Testament, should the holy church of God — to which the fulfillment has indeed already been given — first attain this, and with it her own proper life, both in the right measure and its full sense, through a priesthood that took its origin, set over her, in a wholly empty ceremony? Then she is not built upon Christ, the eternal Rock, but upon human intercession, which did not even exist in the Old Testament with respect to the essence — for they received faith in the Messiah through the word inherited from the fathers — but only with regard to the types. And organized and held together by an external mechanism brought to bear upon her, driven and compelled within that mechanism to make use of the preachers for the care of souls, she never becomes a spiritual kingdom, but remains a people that is ruled and regulated by commandments and statutes.

1 Tim. 4:14. 2 Tim. 1:6. 1 Tim. 1:18 must be taken together. From this it follows that at the first-named place, as the very idiom of the language also teaches, it must be construed thus: Neglect not the gift that is in thee, which was given thee through the prophecy, accompanied by the laying on of hands, of the presbytery; the second passage sums it up briefly: Through the laying on of my hands. As witnesses present together at the worthy young man's good confession and at the address of the ordaining