# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1858_S101
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Answer to a Voice from the Lutheran Church of Germany, etc.    101

...the preaching office — nevertheless indisputably instituted by God —
can likewise be nothing other than the exercise of the rights of the
church, of the spiritual priesthood, in the public office on behalf of
the congregation. How clearly is all this set forth in Walther's
development of Thesis 7; how unobjectionable it is, once one has rightly
grasped the principles and accurately perceived their connection, to
assert that every layman is entitled and called, for himself, to make use
of the means of grace, and also to dispense them to others who do not yet
have them. Or could you suppose that it is an encroachment upon the
prerogatives of the holy preaching office if a layman, among blind
heathen in whose midst he finds himself and who gather about him, by
virtue of his spiritual priesthood freely and publicly proclaims the
gospel of Christ? That people draw false consequences from this clear,
certain doctrine grounded in God's Word — as, for example, that
accordingly every layman may mount the pulpit — this only shows that they
have not understood it. And if one finds, further, ridiculous
contradictions in it, such as that, according to this doctrine, the
layman has the right to hold office yet may not exercise it, this alarms
us so little that we can only smile at such monstrous inferences. As for
your saying that just as every natural human being has the capacity to
beget children, while only within the order of marriage is there the
actual divine calling and command to do so — so likewise every baptized
believing Christian has the capacity to absolve his brother savingly and
to administer to him the Lord's Supper, etc., but does not have the call
to do so, because God has placed that call in the preaching office he has
instituted — this comparison, in the application you have made of it,
namely to deny the spiritual priesthood almost any and every exercise of
its own rights, would only fit if the spiritual priesthood really
contained in itself nothing more than a certain general capacity for the
priestly office. The point of comparison lies, rather, if the analogy is
to hold at all, only in this: that just as the institution of marriage
forbids the begetting of children outside of marriage, so the institution
of the holy preaching office forbids the unauthorized exercise of the
rights of the spiritual priesthood in the public office on behalf of the
congregation — but not the exercise of these rights as such, which you
yourself indeed concede for the case of necessity, and which you
certainly will not deny in the case of a layman finding himself in the
midst of heathen. No, Walther's presentation suffers by no means either
from a lack of proper elaboration or from a lack of consistent
execution; rather, it is a false consequence when the divine institution
of the holy preaching office is extended so far that the spiritual
priesthood is thereby, in effect, stripped of its original, inalienable
rights, goods, and powers, which are instead assigned to the preaching
office as to a repository; and it is precisely in order to reject this
false consequence that this thesis is laid down, and it must necessarily
be held fast.

If you further fall into serious concern that we, the divine