# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Februar 1855_S49
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

On the Doctrine of the Holy Office of the Ministry. 49

...may be. Two or three gathered together in the Lord's name are true believers who are together with one another, regardless of whether others besides them are present or not; they have indeed come to be there through the preaching of the Gospel; but with them is the one in whose honor they do this; that a preaching office therefore exists among them can only be the effect of what precedes it, as its cause; there can be talk of particular officeholders only insofar as those believers make use of the power that the present Christ gives them, and entrust to one person the calling of the ministry of the Word. For why else would Luther, immediately before the last citation, p. 353, point out that in a case of necessity even an ordinary layman may absolve another and become his "pastor," if he had not intended thereby to go back to the ultimate grounds of the locus de ministerio, which are laid in the royal priesthood of all who are reborn through baptism? (Cf. p. 353, in the middle.) Since the Roman bishops were unwilling to ordain qualified persons for the Evangelicals, these were compelled, by divine right and duty, to help themselves — and indeed no less so even when they had no pastors at all among them who had already received the laying on of hands, as that same Luther clearly writes to the Bohemians. Cf. Smalcald Articles, ed. R., German text, p. 567 bottom to p. 569 end. The choice of the Christian people, as is expressed here repeatedly, makes the qualified and tested man a pastor in statu ordinis; the ordinatio in the narrower sense "has been nothing else than confirmation." This is, in the last instance, where the nervus probandi [the crux of the proof] in the passage above rests — not as Wucher arbitrarily restricts it, p. 105; and otherwise it would fail entirely, and the citing of the case of necessity would have been pointless and useless, so that he would have said just as good as nothing — indeed, strictly speaking, would have contradicted the very thing to be proved — were it not that the call which goes forth from believers to one person is fully valid before God. For if the mandate of office comes merely by inheritance from the apostles, and not through the mediation of the congregation that has stepped into Christ's place, then no layman may presume to anything even in a case of necessity, since it is not given to him at all. That is clear and certain. What, then, is one to say? Is it carelessness, or a deliberate passing-over, that Wucher pays no attention at all to this so important locus classicus, but rather himself ignores it altogether? Indeed, from the very fact that the pastors are given to the congregation by the Lord as a gift of grace for the office (p. 89), the symbolical books prove that it belongs — to those gathered together in Christ's name in general, at large, wherever they may be, and not merely to particular persons (which holds just as true of Lutheran officeholders as of the Roman pope, cardinals, bishops, and the like) — to transfer the office of reconciliation which the Lord has given and thereby ordained for them, and which he gave first of all to his apostles. If the church has the keys of the kingdom of heaven only in the public preaching office, then it has them mediately, (not immediately,)