# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_October 1856_S289
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Lehre und Wehre.

Jahrgang II.                October 1856.                No. 10.

The Distinction of Estates in the Church.

Motto: "The civil government concerns itself with many other matters than the Gospel. Worldly power does not protect souls, but body and goods against outward violence, with the sword and bodily penalties. Therefore the two governments, the spiritual and the temporal, are not to be mingled and confounded with one another." (Augsb. Conf. Art. 28.) "Hic totus locus de discrimine regni Christi et regni civilis literis nostrorum utiliter illustratus est, quod regnum Christi sit spirituale h. e. in corde notitiam Dei, timorem Dei et fidem, justitiam æternam et vitam æternam inchoans. Interim foris sinat nos uti politicis ordinationibus legitimis quarumcunque gentium, inter quas vivimus, sicut sinit nos uti medicina, aut architectonica, aut cibo, potu, aëre... Nec viderunt, evangelium cordibus afferre justitiam æternam, foris autem probare statum civilem." (Apologiæ A. C. art. XVI.)*)

In the "Address at the Opening of the Fifth Synodical Assembly" of the Buffalo Synod, delivered by Mr. P. Grabau on June 23 of this year, it says among other things:

"We have not yet ventured to call the former constitution of the Lutheran Church a mere ceremony. For what God himself has ordained and given therein is no mere human institution. The Reformers did not set up any general government of Christendom by the people, in which the heads of the crowd ruled according to their own will and agreement" (quite true!) "but rather, with clear insight, they perceived how God himself had shaped the visible Church in its members. They set it forth as a palpable truth—

*) We are obliged here to vindicate Luther against the charge that he bears the blame for the intermingling of Church and State in Germany, which has brought such great harm upon our Church and which here gives great offense to many; and some now wish, on the contrary, to demonstrate that such an intermingling is the proper, normal condition of the Church, indeed to transplant it, so far as that is at all possible, even to America — whereas we ought rather to praise God that we have here been delivered from that sorrowful condition of the Church. The marriage of State and Church in Germany is a marriage within forbidden degrees, of which it is said: What God has not joined together, that man shall put asunder.                    L. u. W.

19