# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Februar 1855_S56
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

56 On the Doctrine of the Holy Preaching Office.

more dangerous, indeed more antichristian, than to turn ordinances instituted by men into God’s commandment. Yet everyone does this who presents the exclusive transmission of the episcopate or presbyterate by clerics as an apostolic ordinance of divine right. The resolution of the first Council of Jerusalem was also an ordinance specifically issued by the apostles. Why do we not abstain from blood and from things strangled? Because in such matters it was merely a wise, temporary accommodation to the weak who remained attached to Old Testament views. How do we know this? Because a principal part of this canon is not contained in natural law. Let the application be made! Whatever is not given by faith—which establishes only God’s eternal commandment, the commandment of love—is done in error; outward works of the law are placed alongside faith, and faith is thereby obscured and weakened. A beginning is often made in the Spirit, but the work is completed in the flesh.

Just as contrary to Scripture as the theory of hereditary transmission is, to be sure, the theory now being opposed above all in Germany by the friends of the former. It draws the office of the Lord Christ—which the Church, sanctified through that office, is to entrust in faith to the instruments given by God and promised in the Gospel—out of the realm of faith and into the sphere of human institutions, whose worth and validity rise and fall, whose duration may be limited at will, and whose realization requires no heart renewed in the Spirit. It deprives the preachers who are sent of their divine dignity; and instead of hierarchical encroachments, the necessary consequences are contempt for their proper ministry, for confession, etc., domination by the flesh on the part of the laity, and ecclesiastical anarchy. Nor does the consolation remain that even here the Most High rules in the midst of His enemies and preserves His sovereign authority in the divine household. Rather, those whose minds are thereby brought into conflict are driven back toward conversion to the Roman Church, in view of the compact and articulated order—so difficult to shake—in the imposing structure of the gigantic body of that seemingly ancient Church.

Yet, little as we assent to the hypotheses of a germ of future colleges of cardinals in an apostolic presbytery, etc.; of a communal office grounded in evangelical necessity that is nevertheless also supposed to be arbitrary; or of an office that does not remain among Christ’s congregation according to His institution in the Gospel, but comes and goes with particular persons or hovers in the aura populi, etc. (Wucherer, pp. 109, 114, 125–128), just so greatly are we astonished by the misunderstanding of the spiritual priesthood, the most precious possession of all humble worshipers of Jesus Christ. This misunderstanding is expressed particularly in the words of Dr. Sartorius quoted in Wucherer, pp. 114 and 118, unless room is to be allowed for some correction from our standpoint. By the holy Christian people we understand only those who, hidden among the great multitude of visible congregations of orthodox and heterodox confession, have been taught by God, anointed with the