# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1873_S10
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

— 10 —

From this it is certain and manifest that God's temple must be and remain even under the spiritual tyrants who rule and rage in it. For one certainly finds, even among those same tyrants, those who believe rightly, etc. Therefore a short and easy answer is to be given to this question: that the Church exists everywhere in the whole world, wherever the Gospel and the Sacraments are. But Jews, Turks, enthusiasts and factious spirits, or heretics, are not the Church, for they deny and destroy such things." (On Gal. 1:2. VIII, 1591 f.)

Luther: "It is true, I confess that the Church in which you (Papists) sit comes from the old Church, as we do, and has the very same Baptism, also the Sacraments, keys and text of the Bibles and Gospels; I will even praise more highly, and confess, that we have received everything from the Church among you (not from you); what more do you want? Are we not pious enough? Will you not now leave us unbranded as heretics? We know not to regard you as Turks and Jews (as said above), who are outside the Church; but we say, you do not remain in it, and you become the apostate, backsliding, whorish church (as the Prophets are accustomed to call it), which does not remain in the Church from which it was born and raised . . . We confess not only that you have come from the true Church and with us have been bathed and washed in Baptism through the blood of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, as St. Peter says here (2 Pet. 2:20–22); but we say that you are also in the Church and remain, yes, that you sit and rule in it, as St. Paul prophesies in 2 Thess. 2:4, that the accursed Antichrist will sit in the temple of God (not in a cow-stall), and so forth. But of the Church, or members of the Church, you are no more; rather, in such holy Church of God you set up, on top of your new apostate church, the devil's brothel." Against Hans Wurst [Hanswurst] 1541. XVII, 1673. 1676.)

So Luther. The Missouri Synod in particular has been attacked and reviled by Grabau on account of the doctrine here testified to by Luther and by us. At one time it was said: In your doctrine of the invisible Church, with its members among all the denominations that call themselves Christian, you have only a paper church; at another: With this doctrine of yours you merely speak a word for the Union with the false-believing communions. That we speak, however, wholly in the sense of the dear orthodox fathers, indeed wholly in their words, the following

Testimonies

also show:

Joh. Gerhard: "Because the elect and truly believing are not outside the multitude of the called, but within the multitude of the called itself, among whom hypocrites are mixed, therefore also the visible Church of the called is called catholic or universal in a subordinate sense." (Doc. de eccles. § 151.)

E. V. Löscher: "We regard the Calvinist-Reformed as an irregular (anomalo) part of the universal Church (ecclesiae universalis)." (Unschuld. Nachrr. 1709. p. 293.)

Especially those among us who earlier, perhaps, once so Romanized that they dreamed of an exclusively saving particular