# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Februar 1855_S50
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

50 On the Doctrine of the Holy Preaching Office.

The Word that opens and closes the door of grace and of hell has its power not in Christ alone, but also in the pastor, who enters as a mediator into the relationship between Christ and His own and, by thus interposing himself, necessarily turns the glad, free Gospel into a doctrine to be obeyed under the law before faith, because the promised salvation in all its fullness is first opened to the former (faith) within the order of the ministry (and thus faith does not possess the keys principaliter either). But man remains man and can add nothing to the Word; and in order to be saved, we need no other person to intrude alongside it, but only that the Word come to us first with grace and that we come to believe it, whether this happens through the preaching ministry in its proper, ordered embodiment—which is certainly the most desirable—or whether it is offered to us in some other way pleasing to God. Where one can establish the preaching office and does not do so, there is contempt for the divine gift and thus for God Himself. What, then, does Wucherer intend by the emphasis he places on the word “office” on p. 90, in the sedes doctrinae from the Smalcald Articles, where Peter is discussed according to Matthew 16:18–19, since it is well known from a hundred and yet another hundred passages in Luther and the orthodox teachers of the Reformation era that by this term, in the broader sense, they understand the jus administrandi evangelii: the office as, by virtue of its institution, it is permanently present in the Gospel from the mouth of Christ in every congregation, among two or three gathered in His name (cf. Augsburg Confession and Formula of Concord, bl. cc., above, p. 4, note *); and that only from this concept do they derive, in accordance with Scripture, the narrower concept of the office that, in its proper embodiment, is administered by a qualified person—the presbyterate—in which its administration through a specific call is no longer abstracted from? What is present through the omnipresent God-man even among only two who have come to believe in the name of Jesus—for at least that many are required if the exercise of the office is in question, since a single person can exercise it only upon himself, whereas the essence of the office consists in service to another person’s soul and salvation—is surely not dead and unfruitful there; otherwise, why was the promise given? It is indeed also placed by Christ, through a congregation’s regular call, into the mouth of a teacher; but wherever the office thus concretely embodied does not reach, members of the church, insofar as they are capable of doing so and it does not conflict with the unity and order willed by God, may and should, for the sake of Christ’s love, assume the duties of a preacher. What, then, does Wucherer intend by the quotations from Dr. Luther’s writings on pp. 92 ff., since it cannot be denied at all that all upright preachers of the New Testament take the place of the apostles, from whom they have their origin—not through a successio episcopalis, nor by the favor of the common people, but through the church in faith, as it