# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_M rz 1861_S86
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

86 Report on Preaching the Right Doctrine of Justification.

and holy ones, and ascribe to them communion with Christ and salvation
and declare them children of God, whereas through their prevailing
unbelief they are, before God, children and members of the devil. But
how, through this excluding of the believers and this including of the
unbelievers, the pure Lutheran, that is, evangelical, doctrine of
justification is twice corrupted in its innermost ground and essence, and
that such teachers are lying and apostate Lutherans and no longer truly
evangelical Christians, is clear enough from what has been said.

Now as regards the doctrine of the preaching office, that is, the pastoral
office, or the public ministry of the Word, or the ecclesiastical teaching
office, these false Lutherans likewise deny, directly against God's Word
and the confession of the Church, that this office of the keys belongs to
and has been given, "not to one man alone, but to the whole Church." For
just as the promise of the Gospel, "certainly and without means" (that is,
without the mediation of definite officeholders set directly by God
Himself), "belongs to the whole Church, so also the keys belong without
means to the whole Church" — that is, not merely to the totality of all the
individual congregations, but to each single one, even should it consist
of only two or three believing Christians gathered somewhere locally in
Jesus' name. Matthew 18:17-20. "for the keys are nothing other than the
office by which such a promise of the Gospel" — that is, the promised
forgiveness of sins for Christ's sake — "is imparted to everyone who
desires it." Luke 24:46-47. These apostate Lutherans thus also deny,
against 1 Corinthians 3:21-22, that Christ, the heavenly Bridegroom and
husband of His bride and beloved, namely His believing and holy
congregation, has so given her — together with the Gospel and the
Sacraments and with the heavenly treasures and goods contained in
both, the forgiveness of sin, life and salvation, as well as the stewards
and administrators of these divine mysteries (1 Corinthians 4) — that
their authority, office, power, and calling essentially inhere and are
rooted, through the immediate transfer and gift of Christ, in the Church
as the housemother of Christendom, so that they are called by Christ
only through the congregation, and administer the means of grace in
public ministry and office, in her name, by transferred authority and on
behalf of the community.

Against this, these Romanizing Lutherans maintain, in flat contradiction
of this evangelical truth and of the spiritual nature and glory of the
New Testament Church, that the Church, essentially and properly, has
the Gospel and the Sacraments — together with all the spiritual goods
and treasures that these means of grace bring — only through the
instrumental service of the ecclesiastical teaching office; and thus, in a
Jewish and papist manner, they set the steward over the mistress of
the house and a kind of priestly estate over the estate of Christians.
And accordingly they cannot escape the consistent conclusion that the
churchly officeholders form, through ordination, as it were one