# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_October 1856_S290
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

290                    The Distinction of Estates in the Church.

—truth, that God has placed three principal members*) or estates in his
true, visible Church: the holy preaching office, the household estate, and
the governmental estate. And this public truth they made the foundation
of the constitution of the Church. They called it the "estate of teaching,
of nourishing, and of defending." This doctrine of the Lutheran Church
has in more recent times fallen into neglect and contempt, for in
practice men preferred rather to help themselves by constructing and
building up everything from the doctrine of the merely invisible universal
Church... By the constitution of the Lutheran Church and of the individual
congregations we do not at all mean the above-mentioned human
treatises and constitutions, but rather the articulation of the holy Church
in its visibility, as God himself orders and joins it together for common
life and activity. The members of the Church who are to govern must
therefore be nothing but plants that God himself has planted, otherwise
they will be rooted out. But by the members of the Church we here
understand not the individual souls down to the child, as faith otherwise
comprehends it, for here we speak of the members that our Lord God,
according to their manifest kind and character, has ordained in the visible
Church for church government. — What do we find of this in Scripture?
We find (1 Tim. 3, Tit. 1, 1 Pet. 5, etc.) the holy preaching office as
the first member, which God has given for the care and government of
his Church... Now because the hearers, whether they be in the household
estate or the governmental estate, are to obey the Word of God — that
is, their teachers and spiritual leaders who set it forth — Heb. 13: it
follows that obedience to the Word of God" (or, as it is expressed above:
to the teachers and spiritual leaders!) "is the highest and noblest thing
in the Church, without which the divine preaching of the teachers cannot
take place with joy, but must be done with sighing. For the whole
government of the Church is directed and aimed at this obedience to the
Word of God. The question then arises, whether God has also placed
such members on the visible body of the Church whose calling it is to
put the obedience of the holy Word of God into practice and to see that
it is maintained. And the Lutheran Reformation answers this with a
joyful Yes! For there stands in the Word of God the dignity of the head
of the household, who is to teach his whole house to walk in the fear of
God and in obedience to his Word, and the confirmation of his authority
to punish the members of his household who do not so walk. The head
of the household has behind him in this the divine authority of the fourth
commandment. Standing on this pillar he rules over his household and
his children; indeed, he is also the head of his wife. Here, then, we meet
the second member that God has placed on the body of his visible Church,
in order to se-

*) Præcipua membra ecclesiæ ["the chief members of the church"] are indeed called kings
and princes in the Smalcald Articles, but not the heads of households; the application of
this expression to the three so-called estates is therefore mistaken.                    L. u. W.