# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Januar 1856_S20
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Church's Decline Does Not Overturn the Doctrine of the Office, Etc.                    20

...what he does by virtue of it, according to their will, not as someone standing over against them. Therefore what a highly esteemed theologian of the old fatherland objects against our doctrine does not touch us at all, when he says: "It is not to be seen where, under such circumstances, the preacher is supposed to take the courage to assert his official standing, and to address the congregation as though it were dealing not with a man but with the Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God Himself. If preaching and administering the office are to be more than a somewhat edifying address and act, if they are to be the battle of the Kingdom of God against the world and its prince, against the flesh and hell, then indeed it takes real consciousness and confidence to stand on this battlefield, amid this throng and this hail of shot, by divine power, and to fight as a mere instrument of Christ." — To be sure, a preacher no doubt always has, among his hearers, a part that secretly belongs to the world and its prince; but only secretly: for as soon as anyone shows himself to be an ungodly person, he is, according to our doctrine of the office, counted out of the congregation by the bearers of the office — after having already been outside it all along. But a preacher's congregation, as such, is never the world.

It is a sad proof of how deeply the rubble covers the foundation walls of the devastated sanctuary, that the ablest instruments of the German Lutheran Zion become so greatly confused in their views of the Church. One would gladly grant them that, given their present circumstances, little more can be done than merely to clear away the rubble again, for a start. But — so far does the comfortless illusion of despair go — now even the disordered lay of the ruins is supposed to become the plumb-line for the whole building. And what is one to think when the very first master-builders must, over this, forfeit their credit? For in the writing from which the above is taken, it says, among other things: "She" (the Church in America) "has had to fall back on the theory of the dogmaticians, and, as is not otherwise to be expected" (thus the shame falls not upon our own clumsiness, which we have never denied, but upon our leaders, the old dogmaticians) "has produced something that may be regarded as a makeshift."

Is it any wonder that these dear men experience no more joy in their sons in Christ, seeing that these sons honor so little the fathers who begot them? — Yet we do wrong to complain of the cracks that arise from this, since through the rubble they open for us a path to the cornerstone. Cf. Matt. 10:35.