# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Februar 1857_S34
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

34 How Are Truly Lutheran Congregations Founded and Raised Up?

-workers, that they had not actually brought the Reformation of the church fully to
completion, and that it was reserved for them, the (supposed) completers, to bring
it to fulfillment, namely through a sufficient settling of the question of
church polity, whose core and pole-star always is and remains: that the territorial lord
is, though only by human right, the supreme bishop and regent
of the Lutheran territorial church.

If one asks, however, after the origin of this "human right" and
after the grounding of the so-called "historical right," one is, at best,
led off into all sorts of strange considerations about the 3 estates,
as though the church consisted essentially and properly of them, and as though accordingly
it especially belonged to the estate of the sword, that is, to the civil government, also to govern
the church.

If, however, one looks with a simple eye, unconfused by modern theories,
at this so-called "historical right," one actually finds nothing
but a tradition, historical in nature, that conflicts with the evangelical concept of the church, and is
contrary to right.

The plain state of affairs, precisely when one examines history, is
in fact none other than this. At the time of the Reformation, when the Luther-
ans, that is, the confessors of the evangelical doctrine, were partly cast out by the Roman-papist
church, partly compelled for conscience's sake, on account of that church's persecution
of the Gospel, to renounce it, there was, on the one hand,
the common people, especially in the lower estates (having until then, in the papist dark-
ness, been kept also in dreadful ignorance of their evangelical rights
in the governance of the church, and moreover raised in slavish subservience
to the power of the pope, as though it were a divine power) scarcely
able at once to put these rights into practice and use
in a manner pleasing to God. On the other hand, there existed among the Evan-
gelicals godly princes, councilors, officials,
judges, and jurists, rich in knowledge and experience.

It was, then, quite natural — but properly speaking an emergency measure, and nothing
less than the origin of a "historical right" — that at that time those
princes and councilors, though not in that capacity, namely as holders of
civil government, but rather as evangelical Christians of high worldly
standing, partly according to the common calling of love, partly, as it were in an
Old Testament manner, became guardians and nursing-mothers of the church, and took
care for the orderly appointment of the evangelical preaching office, for the establishment
and maintenance of church courts, of higher and lower parish schools,
and the like. And this was by no means a right which they had,
contrary to the evangelical doctrine of justification, of the church, and of
Christian freedom, thereby claimed and arrogated to themselves because
they held the civil government in their hands — for indeed they knew
better, than many a present-day Lutheran theologian, from God's Word, that they, as
worldly lords, had such a right in the evangelical church of the New Testa-