# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Februar 1855_S40
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

40 On the Doctrine of the Holy Preaching Office.

But what, then, is to be the principium from which the office proceeds on earth, if it is not faith? For Word and Spirit cannot be that principium without faith, because they are not preserved on earth without it. How is a persecuted little band of Christians who have no preachers to partake of these if the mandate of the office does not proceed from the spiritual priesthood, and if the remaining, larger and corrupt part of the visible church refuses to confer it? And how can the corruption of the church be resisted and checked through reformation if it is chiefly the hierarchy that resists, if no public teacher can be found to bear witness to the truth, and if necessity and love still cannot bring about a divine call and official acts, which would have to be absolutely indispensable for a work of church reformation?

We gladly subscribe to what Wucherer otherwise adduces by way of exegesis against Dr. Höfling: that the office of presbyter existed from the beginning and that it existed as one and the same office among Gentile Christians as among Jewish Christians, pp. 13–34. But we readily return to him his assertion that no clear passage of Scripture can prove that the congregation is the heir to the apostolic mandate of office, p. 34, since we recognize far more than that as grounded in God’s Word. Concerning what he subsequently advances against Ströbel from the election of Matthias—

In connection with the original founding of this kingdom, already Adam, Seth, etc. (cf. Genesis 4:26), and above all in the New Testament the apostles chosen by an immediate call. Wherever this pure doctrine is now proclaimed, there the bearer of the truth, the body of Jesus Christ, becomes manifest; that is, the holy catholic church becomes visible—not in its members, for these can never be identified with certainty, but as their assembly, with which hypocrites and the godless are also mingled. (Hence our theologians rightly concede that “any particular assembly that retains and professes the catholic faith in its entirety may be called the catholic church,” namely by metonymy, the effect being put in place of the cause.) In heterodox communions, however, the synagogue of error is embodied: the synagogue of the wicked children of Cain and the Ishmaelites, born of Hagar into bondage, who, burying the pure and unadulterated Gospel beneath works of the Law, have no share in the Jerusalem that is above. Nevertheless, members of the communion of saints must also be hidden among them, since the fragments of truth within the heretical bodies are, side by side, both the cause and the effect of the invisible church’s retaining within them the foundation and substance of the true faith. In consideration of these alone, by synecdoche, the falsely Christian religious parties belong to the universal visible church. And conversely, the members of the invisible church within the true visible particular churches are exclusively the living, true members of the latter; their dead members are not members of the invisible church at all and, precisely because they are dead, no longer belong to the visible body as such either, although they have not yet been separated from the outward communion—just as the chaff is no part of the heap of wheat, and the weeds are no part of the wheat field, but only part of the whole heap insofar as wheat lies mingled with the chaff, and part of the field insofar as it is a whole consisting of wheat and weeds. Cf. Baieri compend. theol. pos., pp. 756ff., 763–771 (ed. Lips.); Jo. Gerhardi conf. cath., p. 717, especially § 10 (ed. Francof.); Quenst. syst. th. IV, pp. 488, 492 (ed. Lips.), etc. See more on this in “Lutheraner,” vol. IX, supplement to No. 11, p. 15ff.; No. 12, p. 17ff.