# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Januar 1860_S20
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

20 Vilmar's Doctrine of the Office and the Church, etc.

means of grace, to mediate them to the congregation, and that the power
that goes forth from him is the power of the means of grace! No — the
clergyman, by virtue of his office, is himself

in special possession of the Holy Spirit, and he gives the Holy Spirit; he
does not derive it from the Word and the sacrament that he administers,
but from himself. The souls demand life and blessedness of him, and he
can give it to them only because he is set, in Christ's stead, into the
office of the Word and the sacraments: the Word and the sacrament first
have power and effect through the sacrament. Personally the clergyman
has the advantage over every other man, that Christ has set him before
the devil's dull serpent-eye; therefore he can (what no believer can) split
the head of sin with a single word.

What are the Word and the sacrament, next to the spiritual office!
They are all but dead members, which first become power and life
through him who administers them in Christ's name and stead, and who,
besides them, still has the Holy Spirit, through whom he is enabled to
give the Holy Spirit, the forgiveness of sins, life and blessedness to the
congregation. What, indeed, are the Word and the sacrament to the
congregation at all, if they do not reach it through the mediation of the
spiritual office! Simply dead goods!

If we were to read such things in the historico-political (Jesuit) papers,
it would not surprise us; that is where they belong. But when they meet
us out of the mouth of an Evangelical Lutheran theologian, a deep terror
seizes us. Nakedly and unveiled a theologian speaks — in the very same
book in which he sets himself up as a master in Israel, and in which he
takes it upon himself to school the theologians of every school of
thought — the word of Catholic dogma. Does he not know that he speaks
through and through as a Catholic, and is it mere naivety when he says,
in so speaking, that he places himself right in the middle of the Augsburg
Confession — which it would be easy for him to show, were this the
place to go into it (p. 51)? Or does he know that what he puts forth as
Lutheran is Catholic doctrine?

And he holds out to us a future in which this doctrine shall first
become truth in the Lutheran Church, and from which he expects all
salvation. Let us now picture to ourselves this future! . . .

Among the doctrines which the Church has lived through in the
course of time, Herr Vilmar lists that of God the Father, of the Son in
his divinity, of the Holy Spirit, of the Son in his true humanity, of the
nature of sin and the being of redemption, and of the order of salvation.
These five seals are broken; the sixth, however, remains to be broken —
that of the Church. "The doctrine of revelation," says Herr Vilmar, "has
been lived through completely; we shall live through no more new
doctrines, shall set up no more new propositions (dogmas, symbols of
doctrine), shall no longer contend at all over doctrines; these things are
outlived and lie behind us; but to the new thing that lies before us, only
that man will attain who has also lived through the whole life of doctrine
and bears it within himself