# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Februar 1857_S38
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

38 How Are Truly Lutheran Congregations Founded and Raised Up?

power and to punish it. A Christian prince is one only insofar as
he, precisely in a Christian frame of mind, that is, out of faith working in
love, governs land and people, and, in protecting the upright and
punishing the unjust, administers law and justice, be it even through threats,
punishments, and by the power of the sword — whether those thus made
secure be individual citizens and private persons, or civil corporations, or
church congregations.

The third answer to that question above, why now "the so-called
historical right" of the princes to govern the Lutheran church as supreme bishops
is being so vehemently agitated and pursued, is this: that this whole movement is a
masquerade of the wicked Satan, who, full of malicious cunning, lurks behind the scenes
and so manipulates the hidden wires and cords that the persons who are
thus made to act do not notice it. For who else but he is it who
first of all now, within the Lutheran church, so eagerly seeks to cloud
and falsify the pure Lutheran, that is, evangelical, doctrine of the church and of the
church's teaching office, as Scripture establishes it and the church's symbols
attest it, under the name and appearance of the church, indeed with a deceptive claim
to the divine Word? Who else is it, who, in connection therewith, thereupon
pushes the question of the constitution of the church so much into the
foreground, as though the welfare and prosperity of the church today depended
no longer on the pure evangelical doctrine and on the justifying faith worked by it in the
hearts of penitent hearers, and on the evangelical godliness flowing from
it, but rather on that middling matter,
the constitution? Who else but this old and new arch-sorcerer and
master of a thousand arts is it, who, in addition to these two forms of trickery and
deception, adds a third — namely, that "by historical right" it belongs to the prince
in the Lutheran territorial church, as supreme bishop, to
govern the church in his land?

But to what end is all this? What is the devil's ultimate design in
disguising himself here as a proper churchman and presenting himself as an angel of
light? Nothing other than this: in order, not only out of the ever
more dissolving and blurring, formless and shapeless union-church,
but also out of the Lutheran church — especially on the eve of great world-shaking
upheavals, of tottering and collapsing thrones, of worldly kingdoms
passing away and arising, and amid ever-increasing injustice — to
lead a great prey to his oldest and most faithful son and vicar of
his church on earth, the Antichrist at Rome.

Having taken this look at the Lutheran territorial churches of Germany, with
regard to their shameful dependency, indeed bondage, within the bonds
of the government of the worldly territorial lords as so-called supreme bishops, let
it now, in accordance with our above-stated intention, be permitted us to cast a glance
upon our own Lutheran church in this land, and to fix our eye upon it,