# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juli 1860_S207
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

The Struggle within the Prussian Lutheran Church. 207

at the same time leads to the sin of injustice against many members of the church of Christ, is this: that Räthjen lets only the whole complex of pure doctrine, containing no error whatsoever, count as the mark to which the presence of the church of Christ is tied for us men. "We too say," he states, "like Pistorius: only the Lutheran church is to be called the church of Christ; but by this we understand the congregations that really have the pure doctrine, and we say: so far we see Christ's church; but it extends further before God than we can see and name it in time, and many a thing calls itself Lutheran that is not." According to Räthjen, "the pure doctrine" gives the congregations the name of church. But how can a thing lend a name to something else when it does not itself have, and cannot have, the name? For pure doctrine is not the church and is not called the church. Men receive the name of the church either because they are the church, that is, truly believers, or because they appear to be the church — in the latter case, then, by those who are the church, because they are taken for such. — Then again, when Räthjen admits that the church of Christ is present even where "the pure doctrine" is not (she extends further before God, and so on, as he himself says), yet Word and Sacrament still remain essentially present, and nevertheless maintains that we cannot then call it the church of Christ — he thereby gives and takes away the name in a single breath; he calls it there the church of Christ and yet says: he cannot call it there the church of Christ. Who, then, gives us the right to withhold the name of the church of Christ from those of whom we know that they have it before God, that it therefore belongs and pertains to them? — It is therefore unjust arbitrariness, and in Räthjen's case moreover a self-contradiction, to say: only the Lutheran church is to be called the church of Christ. — That we, however, may not take part in the outward church intercourse and congregational union of falsely believing churches happens not because we cannot see the church of Christ there — for indeed we do not see it in rightly believing congregations either, but only believe that it is there; nor because we might not be permitted to believe in a presence of the church of Christ there — which Räthjen himself rejects — but because we flee and avoid false teachers and falsified worship, and are not to make ourselves partakers of the sin of a churchly union through which false doctrine and falsified worship are upheld; through which withdrawal from outward intercourse, however, the true inner unity of faith, so far as it is present, is not dissolved.

We see from all this, and say it with great sorrow, that Räthjen, in the doctrine of the church, does not fight under the banner under which our rightly believing fathers fought, does not wish to speak the same language with them, does not wish to hold together with them in one mind and the same accordant opinion; but that he, half friend, half opponent, prefers to raise a flag of his own, and thereby, for his part, renders the unity of doctrine in the Lutheran church impossible.

(To be continued.)