# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Mai 1861_S150
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

ny with those utterances of Luther in which he so often and so powerfully testifies that the power of the keys rests in the general priesthood of all Christians.

2. As the Roman antithesis to the Lutheran doctrine of the ministry, Kraussold takes not the absolute and exclusive prerogatives of the clerical estate as such — according to which the right and duty of exercising the claves belong in principle and exclusively to it alone — but rather the Roman doctrine of an interceding sacrificial priesthood. Very excellently and instructively Kraussold shows how the doctrine of the sacrifice of the Mass underlies the Roman doctrine of the ministry: only the mass-priest has power and calling to offer the sacrifice of the Mass for the sins of the congregation; consequently he alone also has power and calling to absolve from sins on the ground of this sacrifice of the Mass. By removing this sacrifice of the Mass, Kraussold thinks he has sufficiently banished everything Roman from his doctrine of the ministry. But how close at hand lies the simple conclusion: that this whole view — according to which the calling and command to exercise the claves rest absolutely and in principle upon the clerical office and estate alone — is nothing else than merely a consequence of the Roman doctrine of the sacrifice of the Mass, and that consequently, with the Roman sacrifice of the Mass, all its consequences must fall as well. So it is throughout in Luther; I have found in none of his writings any discussions to the effect that the Roman idea of sacrifice is indeed to be removed from the clerical estate, but that otherwise the absolute claims of that estate to the keys might remain. Rather, it is precisely these latter claims that Luther constantly combats together with the Roman leaven of the sacrifice of the Mass — a proof that for him the two are inseparable, that the two stand and fall together. — How clearly it appears in Kraussold himself that, given the Lutheran view of justificatio, of the general priesthood of all Christians, etc., it is nothing but sheer inconsistency to vindicate the keys quite absolutely and in principle to the clerical office alone. Kraussold clearly demonstrates that it is a Roman inference that the priest alone has power and calling to accomplish the sacrifice of the Mass, and that consequently he alone also has power and calling to exercise the keys; whereas it is the doctrine of the Apology that there are two kinds of sacrifice, sin-offerings and thank-offerings; that the former were completed once for all with the one sacrifice of Christ on the cross, and that thank-offerings alone remain, and these are the sacrifices and works of the priesthood of all Christians, among which belong the praedicatio evangelii etc. Accordingly Kraussold acknowledges that "in the New Testament all offering belongs to the general priesthood of all Christians," and yet he maintains that preaching, the exercise of the keys, which pertains to the clerical office, is not meant by this! Is this preaching, then, no sacrifice — or are there two kinds of sacrifice?

Further: while in the first half of his treatise Kraussold seeks to show at length that the calling and command to exercise the keys rest upon the office alone, and while from this thought he lets himself be driven to the utterance (truly appalling to me in the mouth of a Lutheran theologian) that "the power of the keys belongs (scil. absolutely and only) to the teaching estate," he yet cannot do otherwise: his Lutheran consciousness of the priesthood of all Chris-