# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_August 1860_S240
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

240 The Struggle within the Prussian Lutheran Church.

That would have no room in God's church." And "to want to occupy oneself with a legal church-dominion under the name of "love" is an unfortunate attempt, because it lies in the nature of love not to enforce dominion and obedience without conviction by means of statutes." Further: "We would really need to say nothing here at all, if we only wished truly to confess the Augsburg Confession, the Apology, and the Smalcald Articles . . . Article 14 says: The church discipline or jurisdiction of the bishops does not extend to sins against their new laws (in church ordinances), but solely to such sin as is against God's commandments, for the Gospel (which the church alone has to bring) establishes for them no government outside the Gospel — that is indeed clear and certain . . . Quite similarly the Smalcald Articles also confess that one may not again set up in the church, by statutes, a dominion after the manner of civil authority — that which the jurists nowadays call church government — but rather that governing in the church is: purely to teach the Gospel and to hold souls together by that same preaching of grace and through it." Would that Räthjen might only let all this be said to himself as well. But he believes himself (or at least gives that appearance) exempt, for himself and his friends, from the acknowledgment of the truth that he demands of his opponents. To cite an example of the latter, we note only that in the very same pages in which he utters these sentences, he lets the doctrine contained therein, and the practice conformable to it in America, be branded by his friend Grabau as "Anabaptist libertine delusion." As for his own teaching on this point, it can be sufficiently recognized from the following passages. He says: "The preaching office alone is the proper and supreme church government and holds the power of the ordo and of the jurisdictio, that is, the administering of the means of grace and church discipline. The preachers exercise it well or ill: it is committed to them by Christ; from them God will also require it. They can do nothing to anyone, and are not to act otherwise than with the Word; and if they preach falsely, then let everyone forsake them" (— so that only the church and the parsonage remain to them). "Besides, secondly, since order must be kept and a heap of people cannot as a heap make order for itself, the preachers are, de jure humano, to make the necessary order . . . which all are to follow for the sake of love and good custom. Such customs the congregations of Christ have; so our Symbol teaches. Yet we add (out of special favor toward the poor laity, of whom the Symbol cannot boast?): concerning this one may come to a brotherly understanding with the civil authority and discerning members of the church, since it concerns human matters." "Further, one must indeed, in this world, determine a time and place where God's Word is taught and learned and God is worshipped and the sacraments are celebrated. That is something temporally necessary, and a necessity of a lower order than the necessity of the pure Word and sacrament. But since Christ, in the first instance (what then?), instituted only the office of the Word, therefore the