# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_August 1860_S241
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

The Struggle within the Prussian Lutheran Church. 241

officeholders of the Word also have first of all the duty to make determinations about this, which the others are to follow in love. (Cf. Augsb. Conf. 28.) But where others are to follow in love, there they may also deliberate and help decide together, and so this matter was left to the (Lutheran) civil authority, since it belongs to church affairs only in the lower sense (circa sacra). Here, then, another obedience is set up than the obedience of faith, namely obedience to all the "determinations" that the preacher makes for his congregation in such matters as God has left free; and such a "fullness of power" is allotted to the preacher, entitling him to demand obedience outright, even without the congregation's first being convinced of the rightness of his course of action. "Such conduct, forbidden by Christ and all the Apostles, which our Symbols accordingly also decisively condemn," Räthjen here introduces into the church through the back door of the jus humanum, in order thereby to endow the preachers alone. And what is this jus humanum here? Not that authority which arises in individual cases from the congregation's leaving to the preacher alone the right to order all external matters — an authority which accordingly is also not present where this cession has not taken place — by no means; but rather such an authority as reason must in all cases acknowledge as the preacher's right, because "a heap of people cannot as a heap make order for itself," and is thus comparable to a heap of sand, for which reason the preaching office, as the only office instituted by Christ in the church, must take the matter upon itself alone. According to Räthjen, therefore, the prohibition of commanding given by Christ in His congregation, as soon as one extends it also to the preachers, is something contrary to reason and therefore not to be heeded! The special case in Article 28 of the Augsburg Confession — where the bishops and parish clergy already possessed that power by human right, and where the congregations, for the sake of love and peace, were to leave it to them, yet only so far as was necessary to prevent offense, and among other things on the express condition that it not be held a sin if members of the congregation, without giving offense to others, break the ordinances flowing from such power, so that there is no talk at all of an obligatory obedience due to them as preachers — this case is elevated by Räthjen into a general rule ("the preachers shall, etc.") which includes an obligatory obedience that the congregations are to keep in love. That understanding of Scripture and the Symbols, according to which it belongs to the God-appointed overseer of the congregation, by divine right, to make the necessary ordinances, but in such a way that he does this in fellowship with his congregation, so that "when the church, as one body with the bishop, is of one mind, they may together impose upon themselves whatever they wish, provided only that godliness does not suffer thereby, and may also again set the like aside as they please" — that understanding is set up precisely so that the congregation of God, in which all true members are kings, priests, and brothers, may not be transformed into a worldly