# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Februar 1855_S45
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

On the Doctrine of the Holy Office of the Ministry.                    45

...have [the power] to judge all doctrine and to call teachers, to install and depose them, etc., which were all written much earlier,) "have applied to us, and this time we shall briefly answer how the aforementioned passages are properly to be understood. In all of them it is Peter — — were sent. Beyond that one must indeed confess that the keys belong not to one man alone, but to the whole church, and are given to it, as can be sufficiently proved with clear and certain reasons." (Luther says: "Beyond that — namely, beyond the fact that they were granted not to Peter alone, but to all the apostles in common"; he climbs even higher, it is a gradation, the words are plain, they belong to the whole church, to teachers and to hearers.) "For just as the promise of the Gospel belongs certainly and without mediation to the whole church, so (in the same sense, to the same extent, as the Gospel — for Luther understands nothing else by the word "church," see ed. Lat. R. p. 335 — every member of the true church, the congregation of the saints, ought to have and appropriate to itself, without there being need for anyone to negotiate between it and Christ, except for the message that proclaims salvation to it, from whatever source it may come,) Christ has bestowed the keys originally and immediately on the whole church (principaliter et immediate," without there being need of any intermediary person to whom the keys would first be given and from whom, as the cause, the effect and fruit would then reach the church,) "granted them, since the keys are nothing else than the office, through which by such a promise it is imparted to everyone who desires it," (the office of the Gospel, to proclaim the merits of Christ; cf. above p. 14 and ed. Lat. R. p. 353, the office of the Word and of the holy sacraments, see p. 3, 4) "just as, for that very reason, the church has principaliter the jus vocationis" (including et ordinationis), "the power [to call] church servants" (to call, to install,) "to ordain," (which latter word may be used in a wider and a narrower sense. The jus vocandi flows from the potestas clavium as the power of the church, given in the Gospel, to order everything that the administration and use of the means of grace either requires, or is at least conducive and fitting to; hence, besides that, also the jurisdictio ecclesiastica, or church discipline, the jus confessionis et reformationis — to judge doctrine and to determine it publicly according to God's Word, and to set it down in confessions (hymnals, agendas, etc.) — the jus sacrorum, that is, the ordering of the liturgy and of worship in general, and the jus rerum ecclesiasticarum, or the administration of church property and the like. That these derived rights, even in the times of the territorial system, were ascribed to the whole church, is proved by the matters cited by the church dogmaticians as belonging to councils and as arising from the freedom of the congregations —