# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juni 1861_S183
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

From the Proceedings of the Rhenish Conference of Lutheran, etc. 183

Luther, on the other hand, says: the keys are always efficacious,
because the church, as the true priestess, herself stands there acting
and speaking through the mouth of the servant she has called, so that
the person of the servant does not matter — even if, in a case of
necessity, the church were to absolve me through a layman, or (were
it possible) through a piece of wood or stone. It is not necessary to
give further excerpts from Luther's writings, or to prove by the
statements of the other teachers of the church how these agree with
Luther, often quite literally. — As a token of how Luther, wherever he
speaks of the keys at all, invariably returns to the fundamental view
he attests, I would like finally to cite just one more testimony of his,
from the Church Postil, on Peter and Paul: "As you have hitherto
remained in the simple understanding, so remain in it now as well. The
keys are given to him who stands on this rock through faith. Now one
cannot look to any person as one who remains standing on the rock;
for one falls today, another tomorrow, as St. Peter fell. Therefore no
one in particular is appointed to whom the keys belong, except the
church — that is, those who stand on the rock. The Christian church
alone has the keys, no one else; although the pope and the bishop may
use them, as those to whom it has been committed by the
congregation. A parish pastor administers the office of the keys —
baptizes, preaches, administers the sacrament, and performs other
official acts — thereby serving the congregation, not on his own
account; for he is a servant of the whole congregation, to whom the
keys are given, even though he be but a knave. For when he does it
in the congregation's stead, it is the church that does it; and if the
church does it, then God does it, for one must have a servant. For if
the whole congregation wanted to fall to and baptize, they would very
likely drown the child, since a thousand hands would go after it — that
would be good for nothing at all. Therefore one must have a servant
who attends to this in the congregation's stead." — One sees how all
of Luther's statements run out to this fundamental principle: the
church has the keys — the church that stands on the rock through
faith — and indeed in such a way that she, the church, stands there
as the one who acts and forgives sin, as the one who, principaliter and
immediate (as the Confessions say, and as they surely say it only in
the sense here attested by Luther), has the calling, command, and
authority of the keys; and the church does this work of hers through
her servants and messengers.
I do not understand why anyone should wish to resist Luther's view
of the keys. For every unwarranted encroachment by laymen, every
degrading of the pastoral office, is fully and sufficiently guarded
against by the fact that all public and orderly exercise of the power
of the keys is, and remains, committed by God's command to the
called servants of the church. And how sublime and glorious, in and
of itself, is Luther's view of the church as the royal priestess, who
stands there in ever-equal heavenly power and beauty, binding and
loosing, without regard to the kind of instruments through which she
does it; what