# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_August 1857_S233
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

How Are Truly Lutheran Congregations Founded and Brought Up?   233

"and us" — that is, precisely not only the apostles and elders, but the whole congregation, and so forth.*)

From this one historical fact alone out of the apostolic age of the Christian church — and this one example is as good as ten and a hundred — it appears sufficiently, at least as historical evidence, that the Christian congregation not only has the right and the power to take its affairs into its own hands, but that it also actually exercised the same, and that at a time when the apostles were still living, who were far from doing what the pope or the princes do today, or Romanizing Lutheran parsons and ecclesiastical corporations, who, in violation of the fundamental evangelical rights of the Christian people and by falsifying the divine Word, arrogate to themselves a kind of canon-law regime over even one, let alone over all the congregations founded by them or by their assistants.

Likewise it becomes evident from the letters directed by the apostles to the whole congregations that it belongs to them too, precisely as Christian congregations, that is, as congregations anointed with the Holy Spirit (1 John 2:27), "to try the spirits, whether they are of God" — and accordingly to judge doctrine (1 John 4:1) — "to mark them which cause divisions and offenses contrary to the doctrine which they had learned, and to avoid them" (Romans 16:17), "to contend for the faith which was once (for all) delivered unto the saints" (Jude 3), to forgive and to retain sins, and to put away from among themselves him that is wicked (1 Corinthians 5:4, 13; 2 Thessalonians 3:6, compared with Matthew 18:18), and the like. Of course, "congregation" is here everywhere understood as meaning neither the representative body of hearers to the exclusion of the shepherds and teachers, nor the latter to the exclusion of the former, but both in the manner and according to the order in which the Holy Spirit — in accordance with the Gospel and with the New Testament character of things, and not according to the outmoded and abolished legal form of the Jewish church, or according to the reprint of it in the papistic and Episcopal church — has organically joined the two together "for the common good."

Where, then, as here in America, conditions of the church similar to those of the apostolic age obtain, and where, through the fundamental separation of church and state here, she has by God's gracious ordering been freed from the imperious tutelage of the latter and from her enslavement under it, there she would truly act very foolishly if she wished to transfer once more the evangelical rights of self-government, dearly purchased by Christ's blood, to a narrower committee out of her own midst — call it church council, or church vestry, or church board, and so forth — for its regular administration in her stead. Every local congregation would, as has already been shown above, in such a case rob itself of a rich and manifold

*) In the Greek the definite article "the" also stands before the word "brethren," so that this word cannot be referred back to the apostles and elders as a mere addition.