# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1858_S102
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

...institution of the preaching office, nevertheless do not, as against
the spiritual priesthood, weigh the office sufficiently, in every respect,
as a divine institution in its rights and duties — that we may perhaps
have more sense and eye for the rights of the universal spiritual
priesthood of all believers than for the rights of the office — and if
you state, as the first ground for this, that we lack a real church
government: then here too, indeed, significant misunderstandings again
prevail, as will become clear below; but they could not prevail, at least
not to this degree, unless a difference in doctrine likewise underlay it.
The more recent Lutheran theology, which has, alas, so often strayed from
the doctrine of our church and yet at the same time carries itself so
loftily, places, with its externalized concept of the church, not only
the outward point of union and unity but the very center of gravity of
church government in an outward, articulated constitution; for it, this
constitution is not the consequence but the condition of unity in spirit
and of the organic whole of the church — and indeed an indispensable
condition; it conceives of the church, in direct contradiction to
Scripture and the Symbols, chiefly as an outward politia; hence, for it,
the confessional statement has also nearly vanished altogether: "it is
enough for the true unity of the Christian churches that the gospel be
preached there in harmony, according to a pure understanding of it, and
that the sacraments be administered in agreement with the divine Word,"
and the other: "therefore the church can never be better governed and
preserved than by our all living under one head, Christ, and all the
bishops, equal according to their office — though unequal according to
their gifts — diligently holding together in harmonious doctrine, faith,
sacraments, commandments, and works of love, etc." Only through
constitutional organization does the church, which is after all the body
of Christ, become for it an organism; church government is for it
essentially nothing other than the superordination and subordination of
those who command, on the one hand, and those who obey, on the other. But
that is entirely the papistic way of viewing things, foreign to Lutheran
doctrine, which, on the ground of Scripture and according to our Symbols,
conceives of the church as a spiritual body, as a spiritual organism,
which therefore posits, as the inner bond of unity and union, the one
faith, and as the outer bond, the unanimous confession of the one
Christian faith; which finds the true government of the church in the
power of the Word, since the Holy Spirit governs the hearts of believers
by the gospel, and does this precisely through and by means of the holy
preaching office. Only consequently, and because we still walk here in
the flesh, and the gifts and functions are various, does an outward
church government also become, in a relative sense, necessary. From
these genuinely Lutheran principles, which guide us and which are in
force and practice among us, you too, beloved brother, however evidently
unwilling to do so, nevertheless depart significantly toward the other
side, in that you demand, as a chief article of firm church order, the
presence of a church government in the sense that the church should
therein present itself as a closed