# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juni 1861_S180
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

180 From the Proceedings of the Rhenish Conference of Lutheran, etc.

to voice extreme principles otherwise foreign to him, and to be swept
along by them. However, I have convinced myself, by my own
examination, that these principles are nothing but the simple
principles that are found taught and testified everywhere in Luther,
from beginning to end. Let us take, for example, in order to prove my
above theses from Luther — besides his direct polemical writings
against the papacy — Luther's treatise on confession. There Luther
first proves from John 20 that no one can forgive sin unless he have
the Holy Spirit. "Here it is settled that no one can forgive sin, unless
he have the Holy Spirit." "Where, then, are the pope's keys? I think
they must fall from his hands, since it stands so clearly here: he does
not have the keys unless he have the Holy Spirit." In these words,
then, Luther expresses quite clearly, in the first place, the principle
that the keys do not rest, in principle, on any mandate of office —
whether the pope's or anyone else's — but depend rather on this, that
the one who absolves have the Holy Spirit. "Yet again," Luther
continues, "should I then have no forgiveness of my sins unless my
confessor had the Holy Spirit? How, then, would I be certain of my
absolution? Answer: there is no doubt of this, that no one forgives sin
except him who has the Holy Spirit — so certainly that you and I may
know it, as Christ's words here convince us. But that is no one except
the Christian church, the assembly of believers; she alone has these
keys, of that you should have no doubt. And whoever appropriates the
keys to himself apart from her is a true, hardened Sacrilegus, a robber
of the church, be he pope or whoever he will." Here, then, he explains
quite plainly in what sense he understands the saying eccl. habet
claves — namely in this way, that the church is the subject that stands
there as forgiving sin in the act of absolution, insofar as I am certain
only of this concerning the church, that she has the Holy Spirit; and
quite consistently, for Luther, that man is a robber of the church who
robs this authority and activity — belonging, in principle and in this
way, to the church alone (that is, to all believers) — and places it
instead in a mandate of office held only by particular persons, be it
pope or parish pastor, "whoever it may be!" In what follows, Luther
now discusses the relation in which the absolving pastor stands to the
church that possesses the keys. "So you should do as Christ says,
Matt. 16: whoever receives a righteous man in the name of a righteous
man shall receive a righteous man's reward. Thus, if a stone or a piece
of wood could absolve me in the name of the Christian church, I would
accept it; but again, if the pope, in the name of his own power, were
to set me among the highest choir of angels, I would stop both my
ears and hold him for the greatest blasphemer. He is a servant of the
keys, as are all other priests; but the keys belong to the church alone.
A lord may allow his servant to bear his coat of arms, so long as the
servant does not presume that the arms are his own, to be borne
before all other servants and everyone else. So it is not true that the
pope has the keys, but the church alone, and not he; rather, she alone
binds and absolves, and in this he is her