# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Mai 1861_S141
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

From the Proceedings of the Rhenish Conference of Lutheran Ministers, etc. 141

articles say of those two in the little ship, "one had become the other's pastor," in that he baptized him.

I may confess that I have tried, with honest earnestness and heartfelt zeal of love, to put myself wholly into the way of thinking of my opponents as it is set forth here, and to make it my own; but as often as I compare it with the Symbols and the fathers, I come ever more decidedly to the overall impression: this is not the symbolical, not the Lutheran view of the ministry and the keys, it is a wholly and thoroughly different way from that in which Luther, namely, expresses himself in all his polemical writings against the papacy. The chief differences between the view set forth above and that which Luther in particular expresses most strongly — which is without doubt also the foundation from which the Symbols proceed — are:

1. One grasps the antithesis against which the Symbols contend altogether one-sidedly and incompletely when one says: the church, that is, not the pope, has the claves, merely in the sense that the ministry and its holders are not bound to the pope's ordination, but only to the church and to the vocation proceeding from the church. On this view it remains entirely and altogether fixed — what the Romanists likewise teach — namely, that only the clerical estate, the officeholders, are the ones who have, wholly and absolutely, calling and command from God to exercise the claves; the whole difference is only this: it is not the pope but the church that makes the officeholders. But it is a wholly manifest and essentially different antithesis that Luther in particular has in view when he contends against the Roman doctrine of the papacy and the ministry: there he has always and only, as his counter-position, the false Roman principle of the clerical estate and priesthood. And what this is, Luther describes most plainly: namely, that the Romanists teach that by virtue of their priestly ordination a special priestly estate arises, and that the essence, the character, of this priestly estate consists in this, that it alone has the right and the power to absolve, to administer the sacraments — in a word, to exercise the keys. Against this Luther maintains: no, there is not a twofold priesthood, but simply and only one kind, which all Christians have. Accordingly (this is Luther's ever-repeated conclusion) the priestly power which you Roman priests arrogate to yourselves belongs to all believing Christians; the priestly functions which you priests suppose you alone have the right to perform are all of them merely functions which all Christians can perform by virtue of their priesthood. At length, in many places, Luther enumerates the priestly functions that constitute the priestly office, which accordingly all Christians are in principle called to perform, and shows that preaching, absolving, administering the sacraments are nothing other than pieces and works of the priestly character which all Christians possess. Luther triumphantly exclaims that the Roman priests should show him just one piece of their priesthood that does not belong just as fully to all Christians. And all this is not said by Luther in some isolated instance; it is the fundamental view that is found, unchanging, throughout all his writings, both in the earliest