# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Mai 1861_S146
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

among you, cobblers and tailors have the right of the keys," etc.'" I answer: who will deny that in a case of necessity every believer can baptize, absolve, etc., another? But apart from a case of necessity this is granted only to the called ministers of the church. Nonetheless every believer retains, unimpaired, his right which he has from Christ's bestowal of the keys. For just as the citizens of a city, although they have equal liberty, choose a mayor to whom they, for the sake of order, hand over the keys of the city so that he may hold them in the name of all, so do the citizens of the city of God . . . The believers possess everything under one head, Christ, who by his bloody merit has won everything for his church and for every member of it: and yet they choose, for the sake of order, certain persons to whom they entrust the administration of the keys." — Of such and similar striking passages from the fathers I could cite still many more. Let one say what one will against citations; principles so simply and clearly, so strongly and strikingly expressed, remain always the same, whatever context they otherwise stand in and wherever they please; misunderstanding is not possible there. And it is just as certain that the fathers, who express the above principles so strongly, cannot elsewhere teach the contrary. But I must very decidedly point out how such statements as: "the keys are given to the church, namely for her benefit, and — the church has the keys, but exercised and wielded through the officeholders," are, almost word for word, the very same grounds that the Roman Bellarmine himself already brings against Lutheran doctrine and in defense of the Roman church — thoughts, that is, which the fathers refute and reject with deliberate awareness, though in refuting them they would in any case have had to proceed quite differently had they set out from the same principles as Ebert and Crome.

If it is certain, as regards the Symbols, that we can understand them only in principled agreement with Luther and the fathers, within the context of their time and of the whole church, then the correct grasp of the relevant passages of the Symbols follows quite easily and surely. The matter comes down simply to the question: whether the distinction that is found so clearly and sharply in Luther and the fathers — namely, that the exercise of the keys, preaching, teaching, absolving, rests in principle equally with all the other priestly works (praying, offering) in the spiritual priesthood of all Christians, but that the officeholders are called to the public and orderly exercise of the power of the keys — is also found again in the Symbols? — I am convinced, in part, that all the passages of the Symbols dealing with the keys can be understood quite simply and according to their wording in agreement with this distinction, and, in part, further, that the whole manner in which the Symbols express themselves about the keys can, without artifice and without constraint, be understood in no other way than in the sense of the above distinction.

First, it is plain that, if the exercise of the power of the keys is a calling