# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juli 1860_S202
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

202 The Struggle within the Prussian Lutheran Church.

as a kingdom of grace and truth, so inward, spiritual, and heavenly a thing that, just as it came into being here solely through the Holy Spirit and not through human authorities, institutions, and the like, so too it can only be maintained, again and again, through the Holy Spirit, in Word and Sacrament. It has only to build itself up through these, and it is also made manifest as the true church only through them, amid the various antichristian communities. Our works of love must not be lacking; but these are always too imperfect and too tainted for us ever to point to them and say for their sake: we are the true church. That we have the word of grace is what alone makes it so, not our works. If we have the word of grace, then we are every day as blessed as sinners can ever become before eternity, and we hope for and long for nothing further in this world than to die in blessedness. —" "The church is one body, and thereby one organism. But it is this so utterly that no man first makes it so; it is this in so high a measure and in so exalted a manner that everything men do toward this, and undertake in order to make it so, becomes mere disfigurement of the divine, heavenly organism. Or how could men first make the church into an organism? Men live in a time, in a place, and are born spiritually through the ministry of the church. She is, before them, what she is: one body and one Spirit (Eph. 4). And now hold fast only to this one body and Spirit, which reaches through all times and lands from the day of Pentecost to the Last Day. — But what is the organism of the church? It is not a humanly made, temporal one, although a great many men belong to it. Nor is it an organism similar to that of a state (as Prof. Mejer asserts in his Institutions of Church Law — ""statelike""), for that is very similar to a machine, and indeed all the more similar the further it departs from the patriarchal state. The state must indeed have something machine-like about it, for it stands within the realm of nature as an order given by God for natural man. But the church is a higher fellowship; it is a true and real organism. And what sort of one? That, we say, one must discern from its Head, and not determine according to human fancies. As the Head is, so also will the rest of the body be. And the Head is the God-man, Jesus Christ, the Lord, who is the Spirit. This Lord makes His church into an organism. That He has always done, before any man learned to speak of organism, and that He still does even now, until the Last Day. He gave the church, at the very moment of her coming into being, her chief ribs and chief pillars, the holy apostles, and these remain in the church always and every day the very same. Likewise the apostolic fathers and martyrs and church fathers and reformers remain — and besides these the many hundred hymn-writers (men and women) and a thousand times a thousand other saints, all of them always the same for the church. These are the organism of the church with their thousandfold gifts: and it is not an invisible