# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juni 1858_S183
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Irvingism. 183

1:25 ff., was the formative principle in the whole Christian economy; that the spirit of prayer had gathered those who sighed for the deliverance of the Church, for the restoration of the house of God, and to this spirit the hearing had come. So one turns away from the wise and the clever, to the Christian people. (3. Preface.) But this must above all be acknowledged everywhere first (immediate experience itself puts it in hand), that the condition of Christendom — not only now, but for centuries — has been such, both in great and small circles, in the mighty world-churches as in the hidden secessions, that the renewal of the Church is not to be sought by way of removing, healing this or that defect, or introducing a restoration of this or that particular thing, but rather only there, where it plainly lies, namely in the reawakening of the original gifts, offices, and powers which God himself has designated as the chief organs of his activity in the Church. (3. 42.) For indeed this hope in the second coming of the Lord is the one means, the one lever for the instauration of the Church; necessarily, however, this second principal lever must also come in, indeed is properly already comprised in the first, in that only the congregation so adorned can await the Lord from heaven and go to meet him at his return. (3. 59.) And that the more, because on the one hand this (especially according to Ephesians 4:11, 1 Corinthians 12:28) is what is properly normal, the foundation of the Church, while on the other hand the deterioration and departure from this foundation did not begin merely with the death of the apostles, whereby the chain was broken — for the bishops were not able to preserve the measure of the original fullness of the Spirit, so that the institution into office through a bishop must also be recognized as one lacking the full power and the consecration of apostolic ordinance (3, 135 f.) — but rather it had shown itself already in the days of the apostles that the apostolic office could not attain its goal; so that an unstoppable decline had set in. (3, 14. 25.) The great turning point of the complete degeneration of the Church (although it may be acknowledged that the fall did not happen with the full consciousness of the Church) is to be recognized in the elevation of Christianity to a state religion under Constantine the Great; the theory and practice of the Roman Church, according to which the original order was to be replaced by a self-created organ, was in itself null and void, and did not arrest the decline of the Church but rather carried it to the extreme (3, 141—69); indeed the whole history of church constitutions is to be understood as nothing other than so many self-willed and arbitrary attempts, proceeding in an ascending line (councils and synods, the metropolitan constitution, the papal system), to supplant the only organs possessed of true life. (1. 18.) But the medicina which the Reformation offered out of the treasury of the Gospel was likewise wholly insufficient, and was unable to heal Christendom — if for no other reason than this, that the Reformation itself was an overreach, having arisen out of