# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_August 1857_S234
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

234   How Are Truly Lutheran Congregations Founded and Brought Up?

...blessing, and would never in all the world bring things even to the beginning of a properly evangelical congregational life, much less to its progress and its ever more vigorous Christian and churchly formation.

On the contrary, the danger would arise that among the governed the participation in the weal and woe of the congregation would grow ever smaller, until at last the actual truth — that the church board holds the church government in the congregation only in consequence of an authority transferred to it by the congregation — would more and more vanish from the consciousness of the body of hearers, while in the consciousness of the church board there would take root the delusion that it governs in consequence of an authority belonging to it as an inherited right.

And if finally the misfortune were added that the pastor, behind the mask of an especially churchly man, were really a fox and a wolf at once, who, with false and deceitful appeal to God's Word, first won the church board over to his particular plans and designs and through it ruled the congregation — then, despite every appearance of the Lutheran Church, a thoroughgoing papacy would already be present in such a congregation, under the deceitful pretense of the Lutheran confession.

The second question, then, was this: "whether it is conformable to the Gospel to place, in this country, the government of the Lutheran Church, as of each individual congregation, in the hands of the so-called three estates, namely the teaching estate, the defending estate, and the sustaining estate?"

When our orthodox teachers after the time of the Reformation speak in their dogmatic systems of such a representation of the church and such a form of church government, they do so, first, without injury to the pure doctrine of the church and the ministry, and secondly, in accordance with the external circumstances of the church current and inherited in Germany with respect to her relation to the secular authority, insofar as that authority itself confessed the evangelical faith and took up the government of the church, first out of necessity and then out of custom.

Further, it is indeed not to be denied that, in connection with this, the doctrine of the religious freedom of conscience of the individual subjects of the evangelical princes did not come into its full right in actual realization; rather, territorialism (cujus regio, ejus religio; that is, the lord of the land is also lord of the faith of his subjects) in a certain respect encroached upon this right and hindered its evangelical application and execution, so that here and there, by decree of the authorities — of the evangelically minded princes and of the councils of the free imperial cities — pure doctrine was introduced and Lutheran pastors were called, and thereafter the government of the church was chiefly exercised by them, the authorities. It would, however, have been the right evangelical way of acting on the part of the authorities if they had conducted themselves passively and had merely placed no obstacle in the way of the course of the Gospel, much as Frederick the Wise did in his conduct toward the evangelical testimony of Luther and