# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juni 1861_S174
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

174 Dr. Reynolds and the Lutheran Observer, on etc.

in a different spirit than the one in which they were composed. The
chiliasts have an entirely different spirit, and therefore also call faith,
hope, and love something other than we do. What good can it do to
bind ourselves ever so firmly together, in good intention, by human
contrivance, if inwardly we nonetheless go apart in different directions?
What do we care for acknowledgment of the Confessions? We have
often enough seen and heard people say their solemn Amen to the Book
of Concord who did not have even a spark of the spirit of our
Confessions. ... What matters, after all, is heart, spirit, and mind. ...
Our church never crumbles. But it is good for her if whatever is not of
her also does not remain in her and with her once its time has come ...
Honest, open, impartial, wholly turned to the pure word of God, as our
dear forefathers were — so it becomes us to be ... We do not wish, in
this way, to have condemned the political cohesion of the Unionists,
without unity in doctrine, only to want, at the same time, merely to
hold our own fellowship together in the same way, once again at the
cost of pure doctrine. Truly, that is not how we have wagered. Wherever
the sign "Lutheran church" is hung out, there we must demand that
unity and purity of doctrine be, and remain, the first condition of
fellowship. Otherwise one plays a false game, and has already lost
against the Union."


(Communicated.)
Dr. Reynolds and the Lutheran Observer, on the
Preaching Office.


The Evangelical Review for April of this year contains an essay by
Dr. Reynolds on the ministry, in which he sets forth, on the whole, the
pure doctrine of our church on this article, and supports it both with
statements of Scripture and with passages from the Confessions, from
Luther, and from other approved theologians. He teaches that church
government is to be exercised by the whole church, by hearers as well
as by preachers; that all Christians are of spiritual estate, and that
preachers are therefore distinguished from hearers only by their office;
that this office consists only in the transfer, on the part of the whole
congregation, of those rights and powers that originally belong to all
Christians: it is through the congregation that Christ gives all the
offices of the church. Accordingly, the body of hearers has a share in
church government, as is the case in the synodical constitution — a
thing that, to be sure, never came about in Germany and the other
countries of Europe, where the influence of the power of the state
prevented it, but did come about wherever the church enjoys partial or
complete independence: in Hungary, Transylvania, Russia, and above
all in the United States of America, where it was already introduced
by Mühlenberg in 1748. Dr. Reynolds accordingly declares himself
decidedly against the order of the General Synod, according to which
the ministerium, that is, the body of preachers, alone, to the exclusion
of the rest