# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Dezember 1856_S362
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

362 The Distinction of Estates in the Church.

by the Lutheran Church and the individual congregations we do not at all
understand 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 a common life and working ... We
speak here of the members whom our Lord God, according to their manifest
kind and character, has ordained in the visible Church for church
governance ... Therefore, according to the usage of the Lutheran Church,
only these three members should be admitted to church governance:
pastors, heads of households, and magistrates; and by no means the
so-called independent or voting-eligible persons of twenty or twenty-one
years." —

This theory of church constitution and church governance may seem to
many entirely harmless and good Lutheran doctrine, since Mr. P. G.,
apparently following our orthodox fathers in accordance with it, wishes
persons from every estate to be drawn into church governance. On closer
examination, however, it is found that this theory is anything but
Lutheran and harmless. When our fathers, in matters of the election and
calling of preachers, of excommunication, of the determination of
ceremonies, of judgment concerning doctrine, of synodical resolutions,
and so forth — that is, in matters of church governance — wished persons
from all three estates to have their right and their share preserved,
they did so while holding fast to the principle that no one should rule
in the Church, that the supreme judgment belongs to the whole Church,
and that therefore church governance is constituted in an evangelical
and just manner only when not merely one estate or another, but all the
estates present in the Church, are represented in it. They ascribed to
Christians in all estates their share in church governance, not in order
to vindicate for the estates as such some particular privilege in the
Church, but in order to preserve for all Christians within them their
Christian freedom; not because Christians are members of certain
estates, but because the members of all estates, as Christians, have
their right to a share in church governance; not because any estate as
such ought to govern the Church, but because no one's estate, however
worldly it may still appear, may exclude him from it. Mr. P. G., on the
other hand, takes up the doctrine of the estates into his system of
church polity in order to get rid of "general Christian government" and
yet gain the appearance that his system is not a hierarchical one. What
our fathers, through their application of the estate-relationships,
wanted to preserve and give to Christians, that Mr. P. G. wants, by this
same fair-seeming means, to deny and take away from Christians. Whereas
our fathers used the division of Christians into estates so that the
general rights of Christians might be exercised in a good, godly,
natural, and wholesome order, Mr. P. G. uses that same division for the
purpose of allowing Christians as such only the privi-