# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1858_S103
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Answer to a Voice from the Lutheran Church of Germany, etc.    103

...whole (naturally the territorial church, or an ecclesiastical
association of several individual congregations, a synod) is represented
in its head and supreme authority; and indeed you do this to such a
degree that you thoroughly abhor our constitution — which rests, as a
free union of the individual congregations, upon the one confession, and
is rooted in unity of spirit and in the need that the gifts should show
themselves for the common good — but which, in accordance with
Scripture, the Symbols, and apostolic practice, leaves to the
congregations, not indeed, as you imagine, without paternal oversight,
but certainly without any decreeing intervention by commanding
authorities binding in church law, the supreme judgment in matters of the
church. We are, to be sure, far from wishing to deny that an episcopal
constitution, too, could be built up on a genuinely evangelical
foundation, de jure humano, and that such a one, historically arisen, has
existed and could still exist. So too are we far from agreeing, with some
of the more recent Lutheran theologians who wish to be regarded as
pillars, or who are indeed all but taken for such, in unhistorically
enough deriving all the present misery of the Lutheran Church of Germany
from its original territorial-consistorial constitution; rather, we are
of the firm conviction that a consistorial constitution, too, can exist
and has existed in a genuinely evangelical sense and spirit, and that the
original consistorial constitution of the German Lutheran territorial
churches was at first just such a one. But then, both the episcopal and
the consistorial constitution rest upon the principle that the bishops or
consistories, as representatives, administer only powers and rights that
are foreign to them, entrusted to them — namely, precisely the rights of
the individual congregations — and only so long as this principle is
preserved and actually brought into practice do those constitutions
retain their evangelical character; and demonstrably the
state-church-like misery of the German Lutheran territorial churches
stems precisely from the abandonment and surrender of that principle,
from the sorry time when the consistories became all-powerful heads,
decreeing simply and arbitrarily, of the dead machine of the state
church.

Now when you further assert that we, with our principle and our practice
of the self-government of the individual congregations and their free
union in love, on the ground of and for the preservation of the one,
pure, Scripture-conformed confession, depart from the whole
eighteen-hundred-year course of Christian and ecclesiastical order
hitherto; and when, to prove this, you yourself appeal to the apostolic
church and raise the question, "where, according to the whole order of
the church since the days of the apostles, has a mere local congregation
ever had such power and authority in matters of the church? — then we
cannot indeed refrain from a measure of righteous astonishment and
wonder. You proceed from the view that the apostolic congregations, even
if not formally expressed and fully developed, nevertheless already had,
in essence, the diocesan-episcopal constitution, in that the apostles
were their episcopal princes of the church, in wel-