# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_October 1857_S289
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Lehre und Wehre.

Jahrgang III.                    October 1857.                    No. 10.

(Communicated.)
From a Country Pastor.

. . . . . August 20, 1857.

. . . . . . You think: in rejecting the invisible church one must agree with the Buffalonians. A congregation of saints without a visible congregational union, you say, would be a contradiction. Believers become a congregation or a church, you say, precisely by coming together visibly as a congregation. Visibility as a congregation therefore belongs necessarily, you say, to the essence of the true church.

If you are right, then there are just as many holy, Christian churches as there are visible congregations, and the Christian faith has been in error down to this hour. And whoever ever confessed, "I believe in one holy Christian church," has been either a dreamer or an ignorant man deceived. For it is undeniable both that the Christian congregations have never yet come together into one visible congregational union embracing all the individual congregations, and also that, when one gathers the congregations after the manner of statisticians into the general concept of the Christian church, one has merely one concept in his thoughts, by which the number of the congregations themselves is by no means altered or transformed into a unity. I am convinced, however, that no knowledge formed in faith out of God's Word finds errors in the Apostles' Creed; and in this article concerning the church I must communicate to you, my dear brother in office, as to an unbeliever and as about something unknown: not the visible congregational union, but faith alone makes Christians into the one holy Christian church and communion of saints.

He who believes in Christ is not for a single moment of his life isolated. For through faith Christ, out of whom the whole body of the church is joined together, dwells in real presence in all believers. United and bound together in Christ in a divine manner, they form a holy fellowship separated from the rest of men. Yet not merely in this manner, which surpasses the natural powers of the creature, in Christ's

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