# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_December 1855_S379
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Theses on the Church etc. 379

2. With this concept is given the distinction between the invisible Church, which is the communion of saints, and the visible, which is an organism embracing both believers and unbelievers.

3. The purposes of this organism are, first, to beget and rear Christians, and second, to bind them together into fellowship. These purposes it attains by means of the forms of life of confession, constitution, and cult. Since these forms of life have their divine center in Word and Sacrament, pure doctrine and the right administration of the sacraments are rightly regarded as the marks by which the Church is known.

4. The Church is one, insofar as it is one body and one spirit, and holy, because in its essence it is the communion of saints. It is apostolic, because it rests on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, and catholic, because it has the goal of receiving mankind into itself. If the first two attributes relate predominantly to the invisible Church, then the latter two relate predominantly to the visible.

5. None of the particular churches into which the old catholic Church has divided itself may claim the attributes of the Church exclusively for itself, the Lutheran included.

6. Yet the Lutheran Church may well call itself the pillar and ground of the truth (1 Timothy 3:15), because it is the Church of the confession that accords with Scripture."

Kahnis, who publishes these theses in his Kirchen- und Schulblatt, adds the following remarks:

"One may say without exaggeration that the question of the Church is the fundamental theological theme of the present.. But what at present moves men's minds in the question of the Church, and unfortunately divides them, are the basic determinations of the Church. Here a conference which does not first have to discover a concept of the Church, but confesses itself bound to the determinations of the Symbols, can, if not achieve, then at least open the way toward an understanding. And that a unification in these basic determinations is in a high degree necessary for the fellowship of those who stand upon one foundation, of this there can be no doubt. There are now especially two points on which the confessional theologians do not speak with one voice, namely the doctrine of the invisible Church, and the question of how the Lutheran Church stands in relation to the church universal — whether it is namely the Church, or only one church alongside others, even if the relatively purest. In order to give the discussion a basis, the reporter, in agreement with the Leipzig friends, has taken the liberty of framing theses. Of their deficiency no one can be more convinced than he himself. He therefore urgently asks that they be seen as nothing more than a thread for the discussion. They are meant to serve as a string on which the conference may thread its pearls. The theses begin with a definition of the concept of the Church. Our definition follows most closely