# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juni 1861_S168
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

168 On the Question of the Ministry and Its Consequences.

deny it? Our order in Prussia was made in 1841, and every four years it has
been patched up again. Now what is that, higher than a contract social? It
is untrue if anyone wants to give it out for something else, something that
is even to bind consciences. But the church orders of the Roman church too,
which there are indeed given out for something higher, are likewise nothing
else. They were put together by the popes, cardinals and councils, and the
princes and peoples, each according to his power, also helped out with more
or less patching, although the popes for the most part did the cutting and
the threading, as such things always go. Only a blind man can deny it, since
to this day the pope concludes such contracts with princes and lands, which
they call concordats. Is such patchwork to be the organism of the church of
Christ? No, it is her beggar's coat and nothing more. On that, then, a man
may show his tailoring art as best he can, but he is not to give it out for
the body and the substance. This beggarly stuff we must indeed drag about
with us and spend money and trouble upon; yet we shall never let ourselves be
persuaded that it is a special spiritual glory .. If we are to see in this the
cohering, organizing power of the church, then we say: stop, no. Christ
organizes us through his word and through the preaching office as servant of
the word — not into three or several ranks, as church princes, preachers and
laity, but into a thousand different gifts, powers and offices, through which
all serve one another in love without display. The organism of the church is
therefore also something other than the preaching office, something other
than clergy and laity. For unhappily many a preacher is himself not yet a
member of the organism at all; he is rather often a limb of the devil and not
of Christ. So neither do the preachers make the organism of the church;
rather the Holy Spirit makes it, the word makes it; and to this the preaching
office is a servant, and indeed the only one appointed to it by Christ and
made answerable to him for it. So St. Paul teaches, Ephesians 4. With that
we leave synods and church councils and the like in their dignity, if only
they will serve the truth. In themselves, however, they make neither the
church nor its organism. Whether any one of them really belongs to the church
their confessions must show. Whether they have true gifts of the Spirit from
God and are living members of Christ's body, that the almighty God alone
knows. — — The second weighty question of the day concerns chiliasm .. The
doctrine of the thousand-year kingdom ... we hold .. to be full of
significance for our time ... The territorial-church or church-government
ideas are woven into it in many ways; and one sees how closely chiliasm is
related to the so-called neo-Lutheran, but really merely neo-unionist view of
the glory of church government ... The Christians then form a great community
of nations, an intimate league of Christian states and national churches, at
whose head stands the Christian Jewry in Palestine, which will have a quite
peculiar hierarchical constitution, roughly after the manner of the present
Papal State, with the unity of both swords,