# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1858_S100
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

100    Answer to a Voice from the Lutheran Church of Germany, etc.

...is a divine institution, contradict one another and mutually exclude
each other? Then indeed Luther is, then the Symbols, which assert both,
are in contradiction with themselves; then only the alternative remains,
either to deny, with Höfling, the divine institution of the preaching
office, or to conceive of it, with the advocates of the office, in such a
way that the preaching office is a privileged, favored estate in the
church, the possessor and bearer of the spiritual, heavenly goods that
Christ has acquired for his church. And toward this latter view you are
evidently driven, since you hold fast to the divine institution of the
preaching office, yet find the "on behalf of the congregation"
incompatible with it. In that case the preacher does not exercise the
rights of the spiritual priesthood in the public office; rather, he first
mediates these rights to the spiritual priesthood, which does not possess
them directly at all; the preaching office is then an Old Testament,
legal, Levitical priestly office. But with that there also falls Thesis IV
of Part 1, unshakably grounded in God's Word and attested most definitely
in our Symbols: "It is this true church of believers and saints to whom
Christ has given the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and it is therefore
the actual and sole possessor and bearer of the spiritual, divine, and
heavenly goods, rights, powers, offices, etc., which Christ has acquired
and which exist in his church." As a consequence, the concept of the
church necessarily becomes a different one; it then becomes properly
nothing more than an outward institution of salvation, not the blessed
kingdom of God in which the triune God reigns in grace, not the spiritual
temple and body in which he dwells with the fullness of his goods, not the
bride who has everything from him; rather, the preaching office is the
repository of the spiritual, divine, and heavenly goods, rights, powers,
offices, etc., which Christ has acquired for us; to the preaching office
the keys of the kingdom of heaven are then given directly, the preachers
are then the spiritual priesthood, which lets a share of the priesthood
fall to the poor laity. Believe us, it is precisely the thesis you have
objected to that the controversy over the ministry really and properly
turns upon, and it shows, moreover, how closely the doctrines of church
and ministry are bound up with one another, and how a straying in the one
point necessarily draws errors after it in the other. Certainly, whoever
takes offense at Thesis VII of Part 2, and particularly at the phrase "on
behalf of the congregation," has not yet recognized Thesis IV of Part 1 in
its full import; for him the biblical and symbolic concept of the church
as the congregation of the saints likewise does not yet stand immovably
fixed, however much he may nonetheless believe himself convinced of its
correctness. Whoever, on the other hand, is divinely certain from God's
Word, through the Holy Spirit, that the church in its essence is and can
be nothing other than the holy people of God born of God, for him it also
stands unshakably fixed that it must have its whole inheritance, with all
goods, powers, and rights, directly from its birth, from baptism and
faith; for him, then,