# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Dezember 1856_S368
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

368 The Distinction of Estates in the Church.

it leaps immediately to the eye that the alleged historical motivation
is a false one. For if the reference is to the rights of the princes
over the Church, which flow from the right of sovereignty (jus
majestaticum), then anyone easily sees that it is wrong to say they
received these rights only through the treaties in question, or that
the rights devolved upon them then. But if the collegial rights that
were transferred to the princes are also meant, then these could by no
means have been conferred by Roman Catholic princes or estates, who
plainly had no such rights to bestow. In any case, one would have had
to go somewhat deeper and recognize from history that, long before the
notion of such a devolution, a de facto relationship, grounded in love
and mutual trust, had already formed between the evangelical princes
and their peoples — though admittedly only a provisional state of
affairs ... But that is precisely the chief accusation against that
system, and it must remain so, that despite the distinction between
potestas externa and interna, it nevertheless failed to maintain the
boundaries between spiritual and secular power that the Augsburg
Confession had drawn so clearly — in part because, in adopting the
aforementioned division taken from canon law, it excepted from the
princely power in church matters only the potestas ordinis (the
teaching office and the office of the keys), even though internal,
collegial church rights also occur in the other categories; in part
because it was impossible to determine, in each individual case, what
should be reckoned to the potestas externa and what to the interna. —
How much the doctrine of the three estates, transferred here from
another field and applied to determining the organic distribution of
church power, contributed to this confusion is not hard to see. Here
Thomasius is certainly right when he derives this procedure from a
confounding of the Church with the secular state; just as Pufendorf,
before him, had already taught with the greatest determination,
entirely in the Protestant sense: "that the office a person holds in
the state is not regarded once he enters the Church, since here only
the person of the Christian comes into consideration." From this
substitution of the purposes and forms of the state arose the entire
tendency toward clerocracy (the rule of the clergy) within the
episcopal system — a tendency which even the more level-headed and
noble could scarcely hold at a distance, since the ministerium itself
was regarded, along with the magistracy, as a privileged estate."

"Even the usual determinations concerning the connection of the three
hierarchical estates to the composition of the Church are highly
inadequate. The magistracy, it is said, stands there as a wall and
bulwark of the Church; but even granting the possibility of this, the
assertion itself, in this generality, can nevertheless never be
admitted. Even under a hostile magistracy Christianity must show
itself to be a power of God, and has its purity and glory