# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juli 1861_S198
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

198 God's Word and Luther's Doctrine.

is set by God in the public congregation and acts on God's behalf, not to
exercise a work commanded to him and his estate, but one commanded to the
Church. And this truth I will believe and hold fast, without any twisting and
construing, in a simple sense, as it has been expressed out of God's Word so
countless times, literally, by our Symbols, by Luther and by the old fathers,
in defiance of the Roman Antichrist and of all the false overstrainings of
the concept of the ministry that derive from him.

May God in grace help us all thereto.

Thus far Brunn. Against his essay there has already appeared, in the May
number of the periodical named, a critique by Pastor Crome in Rade vorm
Walde, in which the latter declares, among other things: "We are agreed that
the congregation of believers has the keys, that every believing Christian
has the office of the keys. We will be agreed that accordingly there neither
is nor may be in the Church a separate estate for the office of the keys of a
sacramental significance. But you violate this truth, because you will
explain the existing reality of the public office by a supposed
command of Christ . . ., instead of recognizing the natural order
in the world which rests upon God's creative arrangement, out of
which God does not lift His Church, but rather in which He seeks us through
the Gospel. I owe you so much thanks with respect to the first point, because
it is you who called me back in it from the Romanizing byway to my earlier
correct understanding, that I would gladly, with the help of the LORD, win
you for my view in the second, and lead you back out of the unnaturalness and
legalism into which you have let yourself be constricted here, against your
own kind, to the right evangelical freedom and truth." Crome derives the
preaching office in concreto so earnestly "not from a special New Testament
command" that he writes: "The teaching congregation under its teacher forms a
proper moral relationship, and the office of teaching in it is one grounded
in God's (namely natural) order, just like the political congregation and the
office of magistracy — that is enough." . . . "I do not shrink from the
confession that everything that pursues and teaches science shall, according
to God's will and the true nature of the matter, be an estate and an order,
and that its summit and crown shall be the teachers and shepherds of the
Church." This is plainly nothing else than Höflingianism raised to a higher
power. Still more glaringly, moreover, in an essay following the critique in
the same place, Pastor Ebert in Danzig develops the proposition: "That the
pastor rightly called according to Augsb. Conf. 14, in his distinctness from
the bearer of the preaching office intended in Augsb. Conf. 5" (i.e., the one
all Christians have), "is nothing but a product of natural relationships."
To this monstrous essay "Lehre und Wehre" will perhaps soon return.