# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Mai 1861_S148
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

148 From the Proceedings of the Rhenish Conference of Lutheran Pastors, etc.

and seem as though keys existed absolutely only where God's gifts, pastors and teachers, are. But that one little word "only" is precisely what is missing; therefore the proposition can and must be understood in an entirely unobjectionable sense, thus: preaching, absolving, etc., is in the New Testament bound to no Levitical priesthood, but in all the world there shall be teaching and preaching, and consequently (not because pastors and teachers are absolutely the only people who can and may preach and absolve, but —) insofar as pastors and teachers are the people who are appointed by God to the orderly public exercise of the office of preaching, therefore the office of preaching is also truly present everywhere, even without the pope's consecration, wherever there are such God-given pastors and teachers.

"But I believe that many passages of the Symbols can, without forcing, be understood only in the sense I have maintained. When, for example, it says (Smalcald Articles, Appendix, On the Power of the Pope): 'Besides this it must indeed be confessed that the keys belong and are given not to one man alone (the pope), but to the whole church,' then plainly the point here is not merely who has the right to call and consecrate pastors, whether pope or church, but the point is precisely the exercise of the whole power of the keys just as the pope arrogated it to himself; and the keys in this whole extent are precisely principaliter and properly a right and calling of the church, that is, of all Christians. And how much more is that meant at just this passage of the Symbols, where immediately before it is said, 'this whole matter has already been diligently treated by our theologians (surely chiefly by Luther), whose writings we would here have recalled' — and it is precisely in Luther's writings that it is so powerfully demonstrated that the power the pope arrogates to himself is a general power of all Christians. — Further, at this essential passage of the Symbols, alongside the proposition that Christ gave the keys 'to the church' there is set as a counterpart the other proposition: 'Christ gives the highest and final judgment to the church, when he says: "tell it unto the church."' In the same way, then, in which the highest judgment is given to the church, so also are the keys given to it. But nothing is more certain than that the words of the LORD, 'tell it unto the church,' are not meant to say: tell it to the apostles or the office-bearers.

"It is just the same, and still clearer, in the following passage, Smalcald Articles, Appendix, On the Power of the Bishops: 'the keys are given to the whole church, and not to certain particular persons.' These words cannot possibly be understood, without forcing, according to the view of our opponents; for according to that view the keys are indeed given only to individual persons, and the whole difference is merely that they wish it to be: not to the bishops, but to all office-bearers, and only insofar to the church, because the calling of office-bearers does not depend on the pope. Yet at all events the opponents can never openly and honestly confess the unrestricted proposition: the keys are not given to individual persons but to the church, so long as in the sharpest opposition to it they say: "the command to preach attaches