# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juni 1861_S166
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

166 On the Question of the Ministry and Its Consequences.

of Christ in the year 1414. The true church, it is said, judged and burned
the Bohemian John Huss ... It seems to us that here the organism is
placed first and the pure doctrine second. For what, then, does one still
live and fight, if one declares such opposite doctrines as chiliasm and
Lutheranism to have equal rights, and lets oneself be driven, for the sake
of chiliasm, to deny the clarity of Holy Scripture? But although the
first-named party denies the heretics any churchliness whatever, we still
see in it, alongside and beside the pure word, the organism standing as
a second ground, that is, an earthly church constitution and the like —
and this we consider, at bottom, to be just as much a union. The
organism is there too the church, but it must carry the pure doctrine as
a device on its banner; at least it must be mentioned at the ordination
of candidates: wherever that alone still happens, there, it is claimed,
must be the true church of Christ. I ask: what is the pure doctrine there
but a law — and indeed a law that afterward, in some cases, is not even
kept, in catechism, sermon, hymnal, and liturgy, so long as the legal
obligation still applies in some way to the confessional writings? This
tendency will, in theory, certainly not approve of any false doctrines (as
it regards them), but in practice it will close its eyes to them as much as
possible, in order at least to maintain the supposed blessing of the
organism. We maintain: if someone says, the church must first have
the pure word and sacrament, but that this alone is not enough for it to
be church — it must also constitute itself in a unified way — then he is
not Lutheran, and teaches falsely concerning Christ, the Word, and the
church. If it were so (as some would have it), then word and sacrament
would be a mere precondition of the church, but the thing that actually
works and acts would be human beings, insofar as they have made, or
still make, an order for themselves — call it now pope, cardinals, synod,
or church council. That is nothing less than turning our whole doctrine
on its head, and amounts to about the same thing as if someone were
to say: faith is indeed necessary for salvation, but for it really to make
one blessed, works must after all do the best part of the work. No —
word and sacrament so completely constitute the church that they have,
at the very same time, already brought about the organism that matters
... Now let us also come to church order, and to what our opponents
call their organism and their church government. But we want to come
to it in due order — namely, how it was the custom in the Lutheran
church, according to all its old church orders, and must remain the
custom, if our Lutheranism is not to become a lying name. The old
church orders place the pure doctrine before all else, first of all. It was,
of course, already present in the confessional writings; but it was
repeated once more, freely, in all the church orders of the individual
countries and cities. What was the point of that? Well, one thereby
first acknowledged the one holy catholic church in its eternal organism,
as it is confessed in the third article, and then wished, in one's own time
and in one's own land, also to belong to this one eternal church and to
remain in it. Through this pure doctrine, so repeated, the particular
churches confessed themselves