# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Februar 1857_S42
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

42 Lutheran-Theological Pastors' Library.

loving intentions of God for the preservation and spread of his church,
to carry them out all the more powerfully to his own honor.

In sum, to return after this digression to our subject:
we have every reason always to thank God that here in
this land that most pernicious and lamentable civil marriage between church and
state — which the Word of God does not bless and confirm, but rather
forbids — does not exist, a marriage from which all sorts of monstrous bastards*) are born.
Free, unhindered, and unrestricted, the Word of God stands here in the field, in order to
form and preserve orthodox congregations. Whoever does not wish
to enter into such a congregation is not compelled from without; whoever does not wish to
remain in it, and openly resists the Word of God, is, by Christ's own
ordinance, put out of it, or the congregation gathered around that Word publicly declares,
through the mouth of its minister, that person's own malicious self-exclusion,
and renounces him, as it would a heathen and a tax-collector.

But where, according to God's Word, orthodox congregations come into being,**)
there is truly no need of the human, or even supposedly divine,
"three-estate church order" of Herr P. Grabau, be it now the Pome-
ranian or the Saxon, or whatever else, all of which remain a free adiaphoron
that neither helps nor hinders the congregations in having a blessed continuance,
but only that the congregations thus come into being, for and within the right
and wholesome cooperation of the church's teaching office and its hearers, let God's
Word rule and govern among themselves.

(To be continued.)

⁂

Lutheran-Theological Pastors' Library.

(Continued.)

A preacher often has need of a book which he can put into the hands of his
hearers, so that from it they may inform themselves about the difference
between the evangelical-Lutheran and the Reformed church. Of writings
suited to this purpose there is no small number. The
best older work of this kind is, in our judgment, the following: "Con-

*) One such bastard, recently proposed for naturalization in the Lutheran church here,
is the claim recently put forward by Herr P. Grabau, in the 5th synodal letter of the Buffalo
Synod, that it is "a divine right, established by Christ, that the church be represented in
its government by the three (so-called) Christian estates."

**) For such a coming-into-being, however, essentially and properly nothing whatever
is required, except that a larger or smaller assembly of orthodox Christians (the so-called
company of Herr P. Grabau) call, according to 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1, an orthodox,
apt-to-teach, and blameless man, to serve them, as Christ's minister and steward over God's
mysteries, with the Word and Sacrament — whereby he becomes, not a lord, but a servant
of the congregation, which, as the wife of the house, has received from the Master of the
house, Christ, together with the Gospel, the Sacraments and the preaching office instituted
by him, in order to have that same Word and Sacrament publicly administered to it for its
use and benefit.