# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juli 1860_S206
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

206 The Struggle within the Prussian Lutheran Church.

church nevertheless — for we can distinguish them from the other children in the congregation — even here the only correct answer is: I see only that they are children, not that they are children of God; for I do not see the faith, the Holy Spirit, that makes them so; I only believe the divine Word, that they are children of God, and thus here too I only believe, on the strength of God's Word, in the presence of the church, because the outward marks to which it is attached are present.

Instead, then, of confessing the churchly doctrine that the church, in the proper sense of the word, is invisible, Räthjen prefers to entangle himself in contradictions and to confuse what has long been clearly set forth. He says: We shall see the church fully once we have come from faith to sight — although the very opposition between faith and sight (since faith is a certain confidence, since one does not doubt what one does not see) demands the opposition between not-seeing and seeing. Now I see that she is present, he says, so far as the pure Word is present; and yet he does not admit that hypocrites and the godless, who have the pure Word, are the church. And again: not so far as the pure Word is present, but so far as one hears and sees that the Holy Spirit is received and, through the confession of Jesus Christ the God-man, unites men — so far can one see the church; — yet insofar and so far as one merely hears of this unity in the Holy Spirit, one does not see this unity, but at best believes it, even where Räthjen supposes himself able to see it. Further: I can never know for certain whether other people are right — that surely means: are members of the church — so that even he only believes where he supposes himself to know and to see. And the certainty that I am a member of the spiritual body of Christ I likewise have not through sensory perception, but solely in my faith in Christ.

The stubbornness with which Räthjen clings to the visibility of the church, this spiritual body of Christ, even prevents him from perceiving that he condemns himself when he says of his opponents — who let the church herself arise only through the outward, visible connection of the members of the church — that they turn the whole Lutheran doctrine on its head, which amounts to roughly the same thing as if someone said: faith is indeed necessary for salvation, but for it actually to save, the works, after all, must do the best part; and then for his own part maintains: "the church stands forever; it depends only on this, that you and I and so forth also belong and continue to belong to her. Through our confession (that is, through our good work) we are joined to her" (so that we become members of the church and are saved — for he is not speaking here of a visible, outward congregational union, but of the eternally abiding church, which he nevertheless confuses and mixes up with the congregational union, thereby doing justice to neither the one nor the other), unless it is otherwise something commanded, or obtained by stealth, or feigned!!

A second error, closely connected with the first, but one that