# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Mai 1861_S144
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

to pray, etc.; as the one belongs to all Christians and to the church as a communion of believers, so does the other. With this, the whole basis one might wish to draw from the distinction of law and gospel, faith and works, falls away in principle. To this it would be simple to reply: when the pastor stands at the altar, where he alone, as liturgist, has the right to lead the congregation in prayer, the whole congregation and every believing Christian nonetheless retains the right and the duty to pray in principle for himself, and just as it is with this one piece and function of the spiritual priesthood, so it is with all the others. It would therefore first have to be proved that Luther and the ancients err when they declare the exercise of the claves to be a work and piece of the general spiritual priesthood. Indeed, it is a discussion frequently recurring in Luther that brotherly admonishing, rebuking, comforting, etc. are essentially and altogether nothing other than an exercise of the claves; over against the Roman priesthood he appeals, as he consistently does, to Matthew 18: "let him be to you as a heathen," and concludes from this that every Christian in principle exercises the keys therein, in that he holds the excommunicated person to be a heathen. Entirely in keeping with all this, it is accordingly one of Luther's ever-recurring fundamental views that the officeholders exist only "for the sake of order," that it is only "in the public congregation" that they are to do what in itself every Christian may and is able to do. Here one finds a host of Luther's statements which flatly and literally contradict the assertions that consistently follow from the opponents' view. Whereas Luther at one point demonstrates that every Christian, as a spiritual priest, has calling and command to preach the gospel, to exercise the keys (I intend to bring forward many such passages quite literally from Luther), one sets against this, verbotenus, the claim that the general priesthood includes nothing of this calling and command to preach. Whereas Luther explains at length and often that the officeholders are nothing other than mere servants, agents of the congregation, executors of the congregation's authority, who have nothing else to perform publicly than what belongs in principle to the congregation — so that it is only the principle of public order (assuredly, indeed, an order instituted by God) that distinguishes laymen and officeholders from one another — while Luther, in several places, cites for this quite literally the simile (already used by me as well) of how, among citizens of a city who possess equal freedom, one is chosen mayor, who in the others' stead publicly administers the common property of the community, etc.: the opponents nevertheless declare all the thoughts that follow from such a view to be downright reprehensible, in part absurd and nonsensical. Whereas, finally, Luther in countless passages (I assert only what I myself have read with my own eyes in the original of Luther's writings) proves that the passages Matthew 18 and John 20 establish beyond contradiction that the keys were given not to Peter alone, but to all Christians, that is, to all who, like Peter,