# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_December 1858_S354
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

354 Kraußold and the Doctrine of the Ministry.

good right, when he accordingly takes a stand against Höfling's views of the office,*) yet the weapons with which he combats the latter are not always the correct ones, since he himself holds neither the genuine Lutheran view of the Church nor of the office.

To cite only a few points: Kraußold, in order to prove the divine institution of the office, quite plainly distorts the 8th Article of the Augsburg Confession in a grievous way. He writes: "According to the Apology, this (the 8th Art. of the Augsb. Conf.) was meant, on the one hand, to guard against the misinterpretation which the Catholic Confutation had actually made, as though the Reformers excluded the mali (the wicked) and hypocritae (hypocrites) from the concept of the Church (!) altogether, and, on the other hand, they wished to meet the Donatist error, as though the efficacy of the sacraments depended on the personal character of the one administering them rather than on the power of the Word. "'We have set down the eighth article for this very reason and cause, so that no one may suppose that we intended to separate the wicked and hypocrites from the outward fellowship of Christians or the Church, or that it was our opinion that the sacraments, when administered by the ungodly, are without power or effect.'" Accordingly the somewhat condensed (!) wording of Art. VIII in the Confession contains two propositions. The first is: quanquam ecclesia proprie (according to its proper essence) sit congregatio sanctorum (a gathering or assembly of saints), tamen mali et hypocritae ab ecclesia non segregantur, but rather belong (!) to this congregatio, to the Church." When we read this, we could scarcely trust our own eyes. The Apology says that the Confession does not wish to separate the wicked and hypocrites "from the outward fellowship" of Christians or the Church; from this Kraußold makes out that it does not wish to exclude them from the concept of the Church, but rather to let them belong to it! And in order to construct this unbiblical and un-Lutheran sense, Kr. leaves out the words "ab externa societate" (from the outward fellowship)! And what a conclusion: the wicked have outward fellowship with the Church, therefore one may not exclude them from the concept of the Church, therefore they belong to it! This is equivalent to the conclusion: thieves are in the outward fellowship of honest people, therefore thieves are not to be separated from the concept of honest people, but belong among them! In addition, it stands expressly in the 8th Article: Cum in hac vita multi hypocritae et mali admixti sint (since in this life many hypocrites and wicked are intermingled), by which the hypocrites and wicked are indeed excluded from the Church, only not "according to the outward fel-

*) Unfortunately it has come to this, that nowadays everyone who rejects the Romanizing doctrine of the ministry is regarded, in this teaching, as a Höflingian and is suspected as such, whereas Höfling's doctrine of the ministry and that of the Romanizing Lutherans are the two opposite extremes, between which the pure Lutheran doctrine — to which our Synod alone has confessed and still confesses — lies in the middle.