# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juni 1861_S181
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

From the Proceedings of the Rhenish Conference of Lutheran, etc. 181

servant, as are all priests." Thus Luther states in the most definite way
what the above theses say: the church is the properly and principally
standing subject that forgives sin; the officeholder is only the mouth
and agent of the church. The antithesis, however, that Luther has in
view here is clearly not that one wanted to make the calling of the
officeholders dependent on, say, the pope's consecration; but rather
this: that the calling and power to forgive sin should be held to lie in
the office-mandate of one or several individuals, instead of in the
church. But so long as one insists that Christ's command,
"whosesoever sins ye remit," is spoken, in principle and absolutely,
only to individuals, to apostles and officeholders, what Luther
combats remains essentially unchanged: namely, that it is not the
church that absolves, but that, once and for all, the officeholders
remain the subject of whom, and to whom, it is said: "whosesoever ye"
etc.

Toward the end of the little book on confession, Luther argues from
the sayings: Matt. 18, "if he hear thee, thou hast gained thy brother";
Matt. 10, "where two or three are agreed as touching any thing that
they shall ask," and "where two or three are gathered together in my
name" — why every word of comfort, every absolution, spoken among
two or three Christians gathered together, is as powerful as if Christ
himself performed it. For because Christ is present, the word spoken
is thereby acknowledged by him, confirmed and ratified, as though it
were his own word. In a similar way, and in the same sense, Luther
speaks in his letter to those at Prague, after he had first, from the
saying "where two or three are gathered together in my name,"
demonstrated the right and validity of an absolution spoken by laymen:
"Unless, indeed, we should wish to deny to Christ himself the right
and use of the keys, when he dwells in the midst of two." Here Luther
lets us glimpse the deep inner ground of his view of the keys: in the
church, in the congregation of believers, Christ is present — he who,
by virtue of faith and justification, dwells with all his rights and goods
in his believers, and speaks and acts through them. This shows, at the
same time, in what sense the Confessions ground their thesis, that the
keys are given to the church, on this same saying, "where two or three
are gathered in Jesus's name" — namely, that the keys depend,
principaliter, solely on the presence of Christ immediately promised
to the church, without regard to by whom they are exercised — it can
happen, in due order, through the officeholders, and, failing these,
through any member of the fellowship in which Christ is present,
speaks, and acts.

That Luther, however, is quite far from ascribing the right and
power of the keys to the church merely as an "ideal" person or unity,
is evident from all those of his statements in which he ascribes to
every individual believing Christian the capacity and the right to
absolve, as well as, further, from his ranking the exercise of the keys
equally with all the other parts and works of the spiritual