# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1857_S393
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

[p. 393]

...given to the church rules in conscience; the [other two estates] are,
although they serve what is spiritual, nevertheless something worldly in
their essence — two bodily governments, existing only for this world and
which will cease — while the other government is enduring, even when, in
beholding [God] in glory, faith and hope must give way. Where this
foundation is not maintained, both a return to the Old-Testament-Jewish
standpoint and a confusion [of the two] are unavoidable, cf. p. 17,
against which the Reformation fought constantly. The consequences that
necessarily grow out of this are of the gravest significance. Not only
the effort to present an authority of church polity [*Kirchenverfassung*]
as ordained by God at all, p. 11, 17 (that is, to install law and sin in
Christ's place) — but also what the 5th Synodical Letter accordingly means
by this, p. 11, 15: "the articulation of the holy Church in its
visibility," namely according to clergy, household government, and civil
authority, to the exclusion of everyone else — is directed harmfully
against the dearly bought freedom that belongs to every individual
Christian through divine grace, a freedom that grants none of them any
outward precedence or privilege. For only because not all can take part
in the exercise of certain rights — rights given also to baptized
children — namely, whatever the use of the means of grace either requires
or is at least conducive and fitting to arrange — must the administration
of these be entrusted to representative persons; the manner in which
this happens constitutes the very concept of a church polity, and there
is not a trace of any ceremonial command in this regard; obedience is
determined solely by the bond of peace and unity. But the most hostile
thing of all is that, in a manner veiled under specious talk yet easily
detected, the preachers are treated as the ones who properly hold
authority, while heads of households and civil magistrates, each
according to their calling, are treated rather as the obedient executors
of the former's pronouncements and decisions, cf. pp. 12-14, 16ff — and
these latter two, according to their worldly estate, are, as it were,
grafted onto the church government, whereby a driving force of the Law,
in a domain where it simply has no business, steps in alongside
[government] — harmful and corrupting to the Holy Spirit, who, doing of
Himself everything and more than any human law could command, dwells in
all who have become members of the spiritual body of Jesus Christ. — No:
the sole Head of that body is, and remains, the King of all kings; the
scepter of His kingdom is the preaching of righteousness and salvation
sent out from Zion; the one commandment that, without exception,
concludes everyone under sin is love, through which faith is engaged in
action without compulsion; the one estate that holds power over all
creatures is that of Christians, whose totality comprises the one holy
Church. All are, according to the inward man, subject to it, and
although, according to the outward man, subject — for the Lord's sake —
to the kingdom of nature and all its ordinances, yet in heart and
conscience they are free, exalted above these, and all equal to one
another, insofar as each one possesses the whole of Christ; only the
gifts of the Spirit are diverse, and work various degrees and branchings
of one and the same office [*Amt*], which originally, in common, and
eternally belongs to all, but which, mediately, through God's gracious
gift, is for this present age [entrusted] to bishops or pastors, for the
sake of the Church and their calling — an office made outwardly
recognizable through the administration and use of the means of grace.
The higher the gift, the more service it entails; whoever wishes to be
greatest must be everyone's servant. For even the Son of Man...