# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_September 1856_S288
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

288 Miscellaneous Church News.

...even at times when her own members take offense, the manifold wisdom of God, working in her and for her, is made known to the principalities and powers of heaven (Eph. 3:10).

Dr. Ernst Sartorius's (General Superintendent's) work, "On Old and New Testament Worship, especially the Sabbath, the Priesthood," etc., Stuttgart, published by Liesching, 1852, octavo, is reviewed in Rudelbach's journal both by Rudelbach himself and by Ströbel. The former writes: "We did not doubt for a moment on which side the great theologian would take his stand in the controversy, raised by the late Höfling, over the basic meaning and the root of the transmission of the church office; nevertheless it has truly refreshed us to meet repeatedly in this work with the most decided pronouncement against this false (Höflingian) view. Finally, the expanded, scriptural concept of the Eucharist set forth here deserves in particular to be most urgently recommended to the deepest and most thoroughgoing attention of all to whom scriptural truth is dear." Ströbel, on the other hand, writes in his review of the same book of Sartorius: "Sartorius's standpoint is a judaizing unionism, which simply cannot conceive of the existence of the New Testament Church without a ceremonial-legal disposition and constitution on the part of its members, and which therefore clings with unconquerable tenacity to those notions — combated by the apostles and the Reformers — of the religious necessity of fixed times, places, persons, and institutions for worship, and does battle with the holy and symbolical writings by means of violent glossing. Understandably, on this standpoint the "office" too, bestowed by the Lord not upon "Christendom" but upon the "clergy," must also be duly struck out. "We cannot forbear (it says in Sartorius's book, p. 192f.) to oppose, with all decisiveness, the view held by Dr. Höfling, according to which the evangelical and sacramental office of the New Testament — to which Paul gives so great a preeminence over the predominantly legal and sacrificial priestly office of the Old Testament *) — is supposed to rest not on the continuation of the apostolic sending, but rather on a transfer from the Church and congregation as the primary holder of the office." **) To be sure, Sartorius here entangles himself in a contradiction that is a strong testimony in favor of Höfling's teaching: the power of the keys, he says, has indeed been given to the whole Church, but not the office of the keys (p. 181); for, he writes, "the keys and the office of the keys must certainly be distinguished." From this distinction, moreover a merely sophistical one, Höfling's assertion follows with just the same necessity with which a consequent follows from its antecedent. — And when, finally, it says on p. 111f.: "We may and must understand the words of the holy Testament in no other way than that bread and wine are truly and essentially the body and blood of Christ, because He Himself, present at His table, causes the essence of His glorified body and blood to flow into them, and thereby takes them, penetrating them, into communion with Himself" — further: "The transfiguration of Christ at the institution of the Holy Supper is also a transfiguration of the bread and wine through the communication of His glorified body and blood" — and: "According to their substance, bread and wine are already in themselves what body and blood are; through the imparting consecration and the working of the glorified Christ, they become His body and blood" — then this is by no means the evangelical-Lutheran doctrine of the Supper resting on the unio sacramentalis, but rather the Metabole formerly defended by Nobak, which in the end amounts either to a transformation of the body and blood of Christ into bread and wine, or to a rhetorically overwrought Zwinglianism ("glorified" bread)." — Grievous as it is to see from this that the Romanizing tendency in the doctrine of Church and office, and the wish to make new discoveries in the doctrine of the sacraments, comes to the fore even within the united Church to which Dr. Sartorius belongs — and this in the very Sartorius who, alongside this, has otherwise brought forth so much that is splendid and genuinely Lutheran — it is nevertheless still far more disheartening to read how a Rudelbach can praise such deviations from the old evangelical doctrine as faithfulness and progress.

*) Remarkable, that so learned a man can so mistakenly understand the passage 2 Cor. 3:6–11, and can take the office of the Old and of the New Testament to mean that which was administered before and after Christ respectively — placing the distinction in time rather than in the objects — just as though the office of the New Testament, or of the Gospel, had not already been administered in the time of the Old Covenant, and as though the office of the letter, or of the Law, did not still have to be joined even now with that of the Gospel! — The Editors of Lehre und Wehre.

**) Just as though the office could not be both a continuation of the apostolic sending and, at the same time, the Church its primary holder! — The Same.