# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Januar 1860_S22
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

we want to draw our readers' attention to the conditions that make the
arrival of this new time possible, and for that purpose we return again to
the theology of facts. These are, to be sure, again dark words that Herr
Vilmar speaks here (p. 101). "If the spiritual office," he says, "should
again be grasped and asserted in its true form as an immediate divine
mandate, then the question — once treated one-sidedly, and for that
reason unfruitfully, already raised by the Pietists — will at once attach
itself to it: whether every pastor must not be a converted man." And
this question will then, but only then, be able to be fully answered, once
the doctrine of the office, as a direct and unconditional execution of
Christ's mandate, again stands firm among us; but thereby the whole
doctrine of the spiritual office and the spiritual estate will undergo a
transformation, and that not in the evangelical Church alone. This new
experience must kindle a light in our midst by which we see the face of
the Lord, preparing himself for his second coming, as clearly as
Christendom has not yet seen it up to now, and precisely for that reason
this light will shine like a flash of lightning from us out through the
whole occidental Church. This experience we shall bring about, not the
Catholic Church." —

We do not intend to undertake to explain these dark words fully.
But this much, at least, is made clear from them with certainty:

Herr Vilmar does not tell us here how the question, whether every
pastor must not be a converted man, is to be answered in the case posed;
but it is not hard to guess from what was said earlier. If the clergyman
can only impart the Holy Spirit when he himself possesses it (p. 62), then
every clergyman must also be a converted man, if he is to be able to
work what he ought to work by virtue of his office. The whole future of
the Church rests precisely on this, that the spiritual estate become what
it can become — an estate filled with the Holy Spirit. That is the new
experience which will kindle that light in our midst . . . .

So, before all else, the establishment of the spiritual office, by which
then, in the strict sense of the word, a government over the congregation
is truly set up; for the spiritual estate, which stands quite properly in
Christ's stead, also governs and rules over it in Christ's stead, and to it
belong a ruler's mien and a ruler's tone.

There is no doubt for Herr Vilmar that, if it comes, as he expects, to a
separation of Church and State, the beginning of the transformation of
the Church consists in this, that the whole direction of the Church
passes into the hand of the spiritual estate. Of this he treats at length in
the essay: What Should the Evangelical Church Do in Our Days? (1849).
"The spiritual office," we read there (p. 69), "to which alone the Word
and the sacrament, and discipline, and the powers of these redeeming
and sanctifying means are entrusted — the spiritual office alone still has
a divine mandate, in complete measure and rich fullness, to gather the
congregation and to shape it. No one else: not the world, not the
believing individuals in the congregations,