# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juni 1861_S172
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

172 On the Question of the Ministry and Its Consequences.

present when we grasp the word of grace in faith; we have Christ in the most
bodily manner in the holy sacrament; so long as we are sinners we will know
nothing of anything else, and nothing else is promised us either. But the
chiliasts hold this to be poor and paltry, and teach lofty things of new
miracles and revelations. Merely to make souls hanker after such things we
already hold to be sinful. Honest chiliasts will accordingly grant us that we
have a great difference with them; and in the man who does not yet recognize
this, neither side, we think, can recognize a calling to mediate between us. At
Trent, whenever anyone wanted to enter seriously upon questions of doctrine,
the cardinals were always in the habit of saying: what are these wranglings and
trifles? remember that we are here to hold the church together against the
Lutherans. Let us take care today that we do not suppose our first task is
merely to hold together some crowd or other! Whoever thinks so acts in a Roman
way, or at any rate a thoroughly unionist one. We hold that the conservative
church-government wisdom, as it flourishes at Rome and in the Union, is first
cousin to chiliasm. Was it not the Pharisees, notoriously the fathers of
chiliasm — was it not they who mistook and crucified Christ? And now are those
who today flatter the Jews again with the old Pharisaic hopes of a Messiah to
be the very true Christians? ... Ehlers .. publishes an extract from a Bavarian
essay by a friend of Löhe, entitled: Dangers which threaten the Lutheran church
from her own midst and from her most faithful friends ... Those must be
peculiar friends, or a peculiar church, which calls the people who threaten her
her friends. This title shows that we have to do with a conception of the
church which we flatly reject as an outward, worldly one that looks first at
the crowd of men comprehended here and there under one name. In that Bavarian
essay .. it is said: never was the Lutheran church so .. universal (that is
presumably meant for praise) in her endeavors as now. Therefore, it goes on,
there are also different tendencies in the Lutheran church, all of them at once
strictly orthodox and united in all points of doctrine, excepting the doctrines
that have only in our own days become the object of controversy. In particular,
it goes on, these tendencies differ .. 1) in respect of church polity, and 2)
in respect of the development of doctrine, in that one tendency regards it as
closed with the sixteenth century, while the other pays homage to progress on
the ground of Holy Scripture and of history. This second difference alone, it
says, should come into consideration. And there orthodox would stand against
orthodox; and here is the danger that the best friends of the church bring
about her ruin ... Here we must .. protest .. It is not true that the matter
concerns things that have only in the most recent times come into dispute;
rather they are things about which, on the one side against the papacy and on
the other against the Anabaptists and the tendencies akin to them, there has
been constant contention since the Reformation down to rationalism —