# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juli 1860_S203
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

The Struggle within the Prussian Lutheran Church. 203

organism, or, as one mocks it, ""an organism without members""; but an organism with a Head and members, and indeed such as make themselves heard and felt through all ages. We, however, have not made them and never will make them; rather, if we will hear them, they can at most make something of us. But this is so spiritual and free a realm that here all fine "making," however excellently one may intend it, becomes and must become intolerable manufacture, as experience amply confirms. — It is very sad for us to hear it said: The church must have an organism; therefore we hold synods and set up church governments for ourselves. That means, in truth, falling altogether out of the divine, heavenly realm of the church back down onto this earth; it means completing in the flesh what was perhaps begun in the spirit. — Now, should one then have no synods, no consistory? That we shall see. — We maintain: if someone says, first the church must have the pure Word and Sacrament, but that does not suffice for her to be church, she must also constitute herself as a unity — then he is not Lutheran and teaches falsely concerning Christ, the Word, and the church. If it were so (as some would have it), then Word and Sacrament would be a mere precondition of the church, while the ones actually working and acting would be men, insofar as they have made, or still make, an order for themselves, calling themselves now pope, cardinals, synod, or consistory. That means simply turning our whole doctrine on its head, and it amounts to roughly the same thing as if someone said: faith is indeed necessary for salvation, but for it actually to save, the works must, after all, do the best part. No — Word and Sacrament make the church so completely that they have at once brought about, along with themselves, the very organism that matters. Whoever truly receives the pure Word and Sacrament and lets them work upon him is thereby at once also incorporated into the eternal and heavenly organism of the church, and he cannot first wish to seek it out or make it. If men were first to make the organism through some special doing of their own, then Word and Sacrament would already be crowded out of their place, whatever one might choose to say in words about it. Such are empty words. — So we maintain, then: where the pure Word and Sacrament are, there the church certainly is, and there she is also present as an organism, for that is what she always is."

Let us further add what Räthjen states in his polemic against the party of Pistorius: "Alongside this, this party denies in every way the name ""church"" to all false churches — the Roman, the Reformed, and the Union church — for it is not baptism, nor other pieces of apostolic doctrine, that make the church, but the pure doctrine and the organism around it. The baptized children, together with those who baptized them, in the Roman church, for example, are not yet to be regarded as parts of the church, even if both were heartily believing in Christ. Here the sum total of those who are truly believing and, through faith, incorporated into Christ, and who are therefore one day to triumph with Christ in eternity, is without doubt something other than what this party wishes to have called church — for even this party admits that many out of the heretical sects will be saved."