# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_November 1856_S337
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

337

(Submitted.)
On the Call of Church Ministers.

"The election and call of church ministers belongs, by divine right,
to the whole Church, and cannot rightly take place
without the consent of the people.

Explanation: 1) We do not reckon the call of church ministers among the princely rights of the civil authority, to whose civil power we ascribe only a small share in it.

2) Nor do we leave it to the people to the exclusion of church government and the authorities.

3) But rather we maintain that God has the supreme right and unrestricted plenary power to appoint church ministers, not only by immediate but also by mediate calling; to the Church, however, we ascribe, by way of delegation, the right to install capable ministers of the Word.

4) Since there are in the Church three distinct estates,* the ecclesiastical, the political, and the domestic — or the presbytery, the authorities, and the people — of all of which, as members, the Church consists, no estate is excluded from this work; rather each has its share and its part in the mediate calling of church ministers.

5) Yet the calling of church ministers is to take place, by the whole Church and all three estates, in such a way that due order is observed and confusion avoided. 1 Corinthians 14:33.

6) Such order is most surely maintained when the election and calling of church ministers takes place through certain and eminent members of the Church, in the name of and with the consent of the whole Church.

7) To the priesthood belongs the examination, ordination, and installation; to the Christian authority belongs the appointment, presentation, and confirmation; to the people, the consent, election, acceptance, or also, as circumstances require, the petitioning.

The opposite is maintained by: The Tridentine Council, on the Sacrament

* Here the word "estate" (ordo) is not to be taken in the Roman sense, according to which, for example, the preaching office is an estate in the proper sense of the word, namely a kind of self-perpetuating priestly caste, but rather in the sense of order. Gerhard, too, is far from reckoning the domestic and magisterial estate as such to the Church, but only insofar as Christians live within these estates. Hence Gerhard and others write: "The prince, as prince, is by divine ordinance the head of the state; as a Christian, he is a member of the Church." (Loc. th. de magistr. § 458.) When, therefore, Gerhard and other theologians, in the article on the Call, etc., point out that not only clergy but also the persons of the domestic and magisterial estate belong to the Church, they do so only so that no Christian, in whatever estate he may find himself, be deprived of his share in the rights of the Church — not, however, in order to put the estates in the place of the Christians. — L. u. W.

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