# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Januar 1858_S26
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

26                                    Menius and Flacius in the Controversy over the Office and the Priesthood.

...be [saved] — for, thus he says, Luke 24: "You are witnesses of all this," and Acts 10 Saint Peter says: "This same Jesus God raised up on the third day, and caused him to be made manifest, not to all the people, but to us, the witnesses chosen beforehand by God," etc. — therefore it shall remain at that same fixed number of apostles, and the writings of the prophets and apostles shall be, and remain, for all time until the end of the world, the sole and eternal foundation on which the whole kingdom of Christ, that is, the whole church and Christendom, until the end of the world, shall be built. So that God, from now on until the Last Day, will call or send neither prophets nor apostles through himself, without mediation."

This, however, shall henceforth be the divine and proper calling: that every church shall call for itself ministers, pastors, deacons, teachers, etc., who are qualified to set forth and explain that which the prophets and apostles received from God and the Lord Christ, set down in Holy Scripture, and left behind for them — just as Saint Paul appointed Titus, Timothy, and others to such an office, and charged them that they should do likewise in the Christian congregations."

"Now if Illyricus should presume to boast that he has been called and sent by God without mediation, to judge, correct, and reform the teachers of so many Christian churches and schools, I say against this, without any hesitation, that he lies; for God will call no one else in that manner beyond the prophets and apostles whom he called without mediation, just as little as he will give a new doctrine or preaching beyond the doctrine and preaching that he gave to the apostles."

— — — "But as Illyricus cannot boast that he has been called and sent by God without any mediation, so he can boast still less — and even should he wish to boast of it, he could not prove — that he has been called through men according to divine order; for he has no testimony of this from any church on earth — — and even if he had good and truthful testimony, indeed even if it were beyond dispute, well known, and true, that he had at some point been called by some church to the teaching office, and had also publicly exercised it, how would he prove that he is therefore also called to be judge, master, and reformer over other churches and their ministers?"

From this presentation the following result emerges as Menius's view: 1) a teaching activity such as Flacius has publicly exercised through writings is not, in its essence, distinguished from a teaching activity such as the lawfully called ministers of the church are bound to exercise; 2) a teaching activity such as Flacius has publicly exercised through writings is only then no presumption, when it is exercised by ministers of the church who have been called to it, according to divine order, through men.

This result, as the core of Menius's view, alone requires further examination, while the exaggeration, as though there had