# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Mai 1861_S143
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

From the Proceedings of the Rhenish Conference of Lutheran Ministers, etc. 143

doctrine as one of the principles of Roman error against which the whole struggle of Luther and the Reformation was directed must be rejected in the extreme. The great antithesis which Luther — which the whole Reformation era — has in mind when it states, as one of its chief achievements, the proposition ecclesia habet claves [the church has the keys], is, on the contrary, this: not the clerical estate, as a special priestly estate, alone has the authority to exercise the claves. Hence, although at individual points the Symbols may speak specifically of the pope's supremacy, and, over against it, assert the principled equal right of all officeholders, or the church's absolute right to the vocation and ordination of her servants — in any case the Symbols are misunderstood and violence is done to them if, in all their passages about the keys, one wishes to understand the antithesis one-sidedly as directed only against the pope, and not against the Roman priestly estate in general. Propositions of the Symbols such as: "Christ has given the keys not to individual persons at all, but to the church" can, without any forcing, be understood simply and only as an antithesis against the Roman priestly estate, in the sense of Luther's described above. Likewise, only this sense can underlie the Symbols when, everywhere they speak of the church's principled right to the keys, they use as the standing biblical proof-text 1 Peter 2 — that is, the spiritual priesthood of all Christians — and thereby the Symbols undoubtedly confess the very thing that Luther maintains concerning the rights of the general spiritual priesthood over against the Romanists. It would indeed truly be impossible to wish to understand the Symbols apart from the whole context of their time.

2. The second chief difference of my opponents consists in this: proceeding from the distinction between law and gospel, faith and works, they arrive at the conclusion that the officeholders are undoubtedly the persons appointed by God to exercise the keys, to preach, and to administer the sacraments; the claves are then nothing other than such a work or function, and accordingly belong solely to the officeholders — the church, as the communion of believers, as such has nothing to do with the claves.

Let us grant that the claves are nothing other than a work, an activity, by which forgiveness of sins is imparted to us (or, respectively, withheld); then the whole matter would come down simply to the question whether the exercise of the claves is, absolutely and altogether, a work commanded only to certain particular persons, or a work commanded to all Christians. This is how the question is put and answered in Luther. There is no question that praying, offering spiritual sacrifice, confessing Christ, doing good works are all things that belong to the sphere of action, of the law (according to Ebert's distinction); but it is certain that to the church, as the communion of the saints, that is, to all Christians as such, praying, etc., is commanded. Luther now shows, often and at length, how the exercise of the keys is no different a work and function than the other works and functions of the spiritual priesthood, than