# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Februar 1855_S55
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

On the Doctrine of the Holy Preaching Office. 55

the Word does not exist on earth without communicating itself and its power, and subjective faith cannot be conceived without confession; and both have their unity in the essential Word, Christ, the Head of the body, and in His Spirit. If, then, I isolate the office, stripped of its connection with the faith of those who constitute the church, as a mechanical institution transmitted by hereditary succession, analogous to the Levitical priesthood, which nevertheless had only typical significance (cf. pp. 9 and 18), then from the outset the layman lacks the awareness that the divine character of this institution can be known only in the same way as all the other articles of faith. Through assent to the historical tradition, he already sees in the holders of the office the representatives of God, without first having to be enabled, through regenerating faith alone, to receive them as being in and with the Gospel, from the possession of which alone the office can be derived. He is thereby strengthened in that to which man is by nature so greatly inclined: allowing the visible, external, and legal aspects to predominate here and complying with them in the belief that this is a good work, while neglecting his own examination according to the measure of faith and his independent participation in the ecclesiastical organism, and gradually declining from such exercise of spiritual vitality or never seeking it at all. For him the office is regarded as the correct and legitimate interpreter of Scripture, while Scripture without the office is not regarded as intelligible. He subordinates the Scripture principle to the testimony of the clergy and thus, by building on human prestige and status, loses the inward, saving, sanctifying, and certain conviction of the heart through the Spirit from God. Unspeakable harm! We see it before our eyes in the papacy; it was long ago carried over into the Lutheran church, and therefore exists in our own vicinity as well. And when such fetters of an unchristian authority are finally broken, the poor people, because their faith does not rest upon divine ground and testimony, just as necessarily swing to the opposite extreme, and a destructive subjectivity and diversity of opinion among individuals—in a word, the disintegrating tendencies of sectarianism and freethinking—develop on the small scale as on the large.

The objection so often discussed elsewhere—that there is no danger, and that the opponent’s doctrine and view of the office leads to Romanism (p. 109 in Wucherer)—is refuted by sad experience. How could the Roman bishops ever have succeeded in passing themselves off as the direct successors of the chief apostle Peter if episcopal succession, together with the right of a direct vicariate of Christ, had not been accepted in general? It was the foundation. From it, the demonic pretensions of the priesthood escalated further, first to the primacy of the pope over the other bishops, and finally, through an unspiritual representation and governorship of God on earth—unspiritual because it was not rooted in the faith of the church—even to supremacy over all the princes of the world and to infallibility in decisions ex cathedra Petri concerning matters of faith. What is