# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juni 1861_S167
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

On the Question of the Ministry and Its Consequences. 167

of one age to the great organism of the church. They did not imagine that
they were the church, or that they had to make it. The church stood firm in
any case and remains standing forever; everything depends only on this,
that you and I, that my congregation, that (God grant it) my city and my
land also belong to it and remain in it. By our confession we are joined into
it, provided it is not a confession commanded, or obtained by stealth, or
feigned. The confession of the truth, and that men be of one mind in it, is
the first concern of our old particular churches. Of that their church orders
treat first and chiefly. Afterward comes very little of what is today called
church order. Our synodical resolutions, however, begin (after the treasury
statement of 625 Thlr. 7 Gr. and 8 Pf.) with the Upper Church Council and
go on from there through 65 paragraphs. That marks them out plainly
enough as stubble, to be revealed and dealt with according to 1 Corinthians
3. On doctrine they have made the secret article concerning chiliasm ...
The church in its essence is one; but you and I must daily become one in it
again, and that at bottom. That happens through God's word alone and not
through the prescribing and commanding of an authority. Further, in this
world one must indeed fix a time and a place where God's word is taught and
learned and God is worshiped and the sacraments are celebrated. That is
something temporally necessary, and therefore a necessity in a lower sphere
than the necessity of the pure word and sacrament ... That such matters are
settled uniformly, and allowed to be settled, in provinces and lands for
certain times, and that men are also appointed who preserve as far as
possible the uniformity agreed upon in these matters — that does not make
the church an organism; for what constitutes its organism consists in far
higher things, namely in the gifts of the Spirit through all lands and all
ages. Church order and so-called church government do not make the unity
and the organism of the church of which Paul speaks when he says: one body
and one Spirit, or: one body with many members; rather these human,
temporal orders are a contract social and nothing more; and to give them out
for something higher is idolatrous and contradicts the Confessions and the
Scriptures. Do we then wish to make the church into a contract social? Only
feeble-mindedness or slander can charge us with that. The contract social is
there, but it is precisely that which we do not call the church and its
organism; rather our church and our organism is far higher, has its head and
its king in heaven, and is always heavenly, although it is for the most part
on earth. Quite the reverse: those who reckon earthly church orders and the
like to the essence of the church are the ones who wish to make the church
into a contract social, however little consciousness of it they may have. All
the church orders after the Reformation were made as an entirely express
agreement of the preaching office, the civil authority and the household
estate, even though in many cases the greater part proceeded only from the
authorities and the clergy. Who can or will