# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Dezember 1856_S366
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

366 The Distinction of Estates in the Church.

an unbeliever leads it just as well as a Christian does, so also is the
office of the secular sword such that it makes people neither Christians
nor non-Christians."

"The Protestant church constitution, as it took shape in most
countries, was not so much the fruit of an exact calculation and
organic articulation of its elements, as rather an accommodation of
Reformation principles to what was given and already present
everywhere, as well as it could be managed." (How important this
observation is for our Church here! To what mistakes must it lead,
accordingly, if one regards the national church constitution here as
normative!) Rudelbach continues: "This was, indeed, on the whole
something uniform: the de facto abrogation of episcopal power" (as it
had been expanded in the Roman Church), "without the combined rights
of that power having been formally transferred to anyone," etc.

"The Reformation Formula of the year 1545 is a clear picture of the
state of emergency in which the Church found itself, but at the same
time of the unbounded trust with which people gave themselves over to
the evangelical princes — who themselves had for the most part come
out of those very struggles by which the Church's freedom had been
won — of whom one therefore believed one could surely presuppose a
fatherly disposition toward the house of God. In order to forestall
greater evils — for example, the unrest at popular elections, the
fragmentation of governance, and so on — people wished to show much
forbearance, believing that whatever was once duly modified would in
time submit itself to the necessary limits. This quiet hope expresses
itself especially in the most important point regarding the church
constitution that occurs in this Reformation Formula, namely in the
assertion that the establishment of consistories was now necessary and
required ... Great and joyful was the expectation with which the
consistories were greeted ... But it soon became evident that they
were neither a protective wall outward nor a fructifying stream
inward: the circles through which they made their way together with
the power of the state grew slack. To one's dismay, one had to become
aware that in the composition itself something had gone amiss, that
elements had here been thrown together which could not otherwise be
maintained, but which, according to the confessional writings, needed
to be kept separate. The consistories were supposed to form a worthy
representation of the laity — but one had to confess that never were
the rights of the Christian people more set aside and abandoned."

"The episcopal system (in the historical-Protestant sense) rests on
the general proposition that the jus rerum sacrarum [the right over
sacred things] rightly belongs to the supreme power of the state, and
it links itself historically to the religious treaties (the Peace of
Passau, the Peace of Augsburg), with which a repeated determination in
the Instrumentum pacis Westphalicæ [the Peace Treaty of Westphalia]
was later combined — by concluding that the right which formerly
belonged to the Roman bishops