# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Januar 1858_S5
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Preface to the 1858 Volume.    5

episcopal power, and in it also the potestas clavium [power of the keys] and ordination, are ascribed. (p. 340, 60, ff.) If one combines the relevant passages, only then does the full truth emerge. For on the basis of Holy Scripture no one will, in the extreme and scarcely occurring case, deny to a church without a pastor the aforementioned authority; nor will anyone grant it to her apart from the presbytery belonging to the church, when and so long as one is present. *) . . No single passage alone, but all of them together, one subscribes with a light heart." (p. 60, 61.) Löhe thus means that there are indeed many such individual propositions in the Symbols, but that these find their corrective in others. Alongside Rudelbach and Löhe stands likewise Mr. Superintendent Münchmeyer, who, despite his strongly emphasized confession to the Lutheran Church — which has procured for him in Germany itself a certain standing among the more decided confessors of the Lutheran name — has nevertheless declared that he has found error in the symbolically fixed doctrine of our Church. — As far as we now are from wishing to place the latter on the same level as those who, with their mouths, indeed confess unconditionally to the Symbols, but in their hearts take up an opposing stance toward several important points as they are discussed in the Symbols, and who, in order not to let their orthodoxy be called into question, reinterpret the Symbols — so also do the former belong among those on whose account one would be inclined to conclude, from the watchword grown ever louder again, "Lutheran Church! Ecclesiastical Confession!", that a rebirth of our Lutheran Church has taken place in our days.

The saddest thing about this is that, given this state of affairs, one partly gives oneself over to the delusion that everything stands excellently, or at least most hopefully, and partly, where one does recognize the damages, applies all sorts of human means to help the Church.

It is indeed this condition of the Church which, as has been said, at the beginning of a new volume of this our theological journal, clips the wings of our hope of finding great favor with it. Nevertheless, we venture all the same, in the name of Him who has so earnestly commanded the confessing of the truth and promised it the victory, to continue confidently in our testimony, in the confident hope that the LORD will let dawn for His Church either the day of her eternal glorification, or once more a time of gracious visitation. But just as, three hundred years ago, the gracious visitation which the Church experienced through the Reformation was nothing other than a renewal of the apostolic

*) Here Pastor Löhe evidently misconstrues — though without doubt unconsciously — the Smalcald Articles, in order to come to terms with them politely and to have to object to and reject as little of them as possible. For in the passage cited, the discussion is not only of what the Church may do in case of necessity, but above all of what right and power it has originally and immediately (principaliter et immediate), apart from the order in which both of these are to be administered according to God's prescription.