# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1852_S204
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

— 204 —

who, because it knows the Lord's voice, and in the voice of the
under-shepherd hears no stranger's voice, for that reason — and for that
reason alone — gladly and willingly obeys the one through whom the
mouth of the beloved Lord and Shepherd speaks to it.
    But is anything thereby taken from the office and its divine dignity,
if the preachers seek no office other or higher than the one with which
God Himself has clothed them, and which is the highest that exists in
this heavenly kingdom — namely, to administer publicly, among sheer
kings and priests and prophets, the office of a priest, so that the
heavenly dignitaries entrusted to him may be ever more equipped and
made fit for the work of their office, which is given to them together
with their dignity? Is there, then, a higher dignity than to be the mouth
of the Lord in the midst of the congregation, a father in Christ who
brings Him children, begotten from the imperishable seed of His Word,
which He has placed in his mouth and commanded him to preach — His
fellow-worker and helper, who saves himself and those who hear him?
    Is the office thereby stripped of its divine authority, when it must be
established at Christ's command, and is rewarded with unrestricted
dominion according to the Word and through the Word by the Lord and
His congregation? Is the Word of God perhaps not a sufficiently strong
support in the congregation of God? I, at least, know of and would want
no stronger or better one!
    Can there even be so much as an apparent case for human bondage,
for pandering to fleshly freedom, where no one wishes or is permitted to
rule except the One alone whom all gladly obey — the Lord, who has
bought them, whom they know and love, who not only demands
obedience but creates the obedient heart? Where, at the same time, no
one is recognized as a member of the body of Christ, nor tolerated in the
outward, visible fellowship of the congregation, who has shown himself
to be an impenitent and stubborn enemy of Christ and His Word, and
whom the Lord Himself, according to Matthew 18, commands to be
treated as a heathen and a tax collector?
    Is the divine calling thereby turned into a merely human one, where,
to be sure, it is taught, according to Scripture and our confessions, in the
most definite terms, that there is in the Christian Church no essentially
different office than the one to which we are all called in holy baptism
and to which we are all anointed, and which is therefore common to all
who believe in the Lord — so that the public pastoral office is not rooted,
by some special ordinance of Christ, in a few privileged members of the
Church who then propagate it further through ordination, but rather in
the Church itself; where, to be sure, it is taught in the most definite
terms that this office is, precisely for that reason, nothing other and can
be nothing other than the exercise of this office common to all, in public
service, but where it is likewise just as firmly maintained and defended
that this public exercise of the office common to all must and shall,
according to Christ's ordinance and institution, be entrusted to
individual members found fit for it and lawfully called to it, and that the
Lord still today appoints shepherds and teachers just as He once
appointed and called the apostles? How, then, is the public pastoral
office being confused here with the universal priesthood — where, not in
the sense our opponents give it, but in the sense of Christ and His Word,
the two are strictly kept distinct, and nothing of any such confusion is
tolerated or found in our congregations?