# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Februar 1857_S37
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

How Are Truly Lutheran Congregations Founded and Raised Up? 37

the people in Germany done penance, that, according to God's righteous judgment,
the year 1848 should return, and the thrones collapse and everything
turn topsy-turvy, and the devil, staging a bloody reign of murder,
should rage as he did then in France — indeed, should he throw off his mask entirely and, against
the church of Christ and the saints of the Lord, rave and rage — nevertheless
God's Word will preserve the faithful, and they will, in such darkness,
shine all the more gloriously as lights in the Lord and bring others
to faith; for it alone has the promise — not the kingdoms of the world — that
not even the gates of hell shall overpower it.

Further: had the so-called spiritual estate trusted the Lord and the
power of his Word with its whole heart — which surely alone is the supreme
Bishop even of the Lutheran territorial churches — then it would continually
bear witness to this truth and seek to bring the evangelical principles, as guiding
and authoritative for a sound shaping of church government, into the
knowledge and conscience of all its churchmen, be they princes or day-
laborers; it would then not only stand far apart from
lending, in any way or place, its voice to the repugnant monster of Caesaropapism,
which robs the church of Christ of her noblest rights no less
than does the Roman papacy, but would, on the contrary, apply all earnestness and diligence
to opposing it through pure evangelical doctrine, and to
furnishing proof that to the territorial lord as such, that is, according to his civil
government, no governance whatsoever in the church belongs; but also, insofar
as he is a Christian and a member of the spiritual body of Christ, that is, of his church,
that only a part of this governance falls to him, as, for example, joining in the calling of the church's
ministers to the local congregation to which he himself belongs, joining in watching over
doctrine, joining in the appointment of church courts, joining in the establishment of church
discipline; further: with regard to the outward affairs of the church within his
territory, that it is his duty — and this not, indeed, as a Christian, but as a civil
authority — to grant to the church, as a moral person, the necessary external
legal protection, as, for example, in the unhindered exercise
of her worship, in the unimpaired possession of her worldly goods and
the like. By no means, however, does it belong to the territorial lord or the civil
authority — not even insofar as he is a Christian and belongs, as a member, to the church — to
encroach upon that same right of the other members of the church; indeed, in destruction
of that very right, to fill the pastoral offices within his territory, and to appoint
ecclesiastical authorities who, in his name and through laws and
ordinances given by him, govern the church in his land; for it is not
by this kind of church government that he is a Christian prince, but rather
an unjust usurper and church-tyrant, who tramples underfoot the evangelical
rights of the Christians, the free children of God and his fellow brethren,
and takes their conscience captive under all sorts of man-made commandments contrary even
to Christian freedom, while treating the very assertion of those rights
and this freedom as rebellion and insurrection against his civil