# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_October 1861_S296
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Remarks on the Office. 296

the presumption speaks for this: that wherever the word "Amt" occurs in
such passages, it is simply used in the sense of an "assigned doing," without
any further secondary meaning, because that is precisely the sole essential
concept of Amt in German usage, as we have shown above. Incidentally, I
wish here also to draw attention at once to a passage of the Smalcald
Articles (Part III, Art. X, §2, Müller, p. 323), in which — as in the passage
cited above from Luther's Large Catechism — this meaning of the word is
indisputable: "Now since they [the papal bishops] are not true bishops, nor
wish to be, but temporal lords and princes who neither preach, nor teach,
nor baptize, nor administer communion, nor perform any work or office
of the church, etc." Here Amt is plainly synonymous with Werk [work];
the activities of preaching, of baptizing, and so on are designated as
"offices" of the church. And so this passage* then also serves at once to
explain the one shortly preceding it (Part III, Art. VIII, §2, Müller, p.
321): "since private absolution derives from the office of the keys, one
should not despise it, but hold it in high honor, like all the other offices of
the Christian church" — and this proves quite conclusively enough that
here, under "the offices of the Christian church," are not meant institutions
whereby particular, duly called persons are to be exclusively obligated and
entitled to certain activities, but simply the various churchly activities
resting on divine command, considered in and of themselves.

How, then, I ask, are we now to understand — bearing in mind what we
have so far brought before ourselves — the famous words of Art. V of the
Augsburg Confession: "To obtain such faith, God instituted the preaching
office," and which explanation of them shall we at least take to be the most
obvious one? I think it is this: God instituted preaching, he commanded
that preaching be done, and thereby made preaching into an office, that
is, into a task assigned by commission. One need only recall again those
words of the Large Catechism: "the proper office of this day is the
preaching office."

On the other hand, however, the conviction that this is the correct
explanation of this passage does not take us any further than this: that it
then stands fixed for us that the Lutheran Church has not here stated that
it holds a divine founding of the preaching office in a narrower sense of the
word. That it denies any such thing is by no means thereby established.

—————

*) One may compare with this also the following passage in the appendix to the
Smalcald Articles (§34, Müller, p. 335): "There (at the time of the great schism) the
preaching office was allowed to fall, and the doctrine of faith and of Christ's spiritual
kingdom was quite extinguished, etc." — That the preaching office was allowed to fall
as an institution is certainly not the meaning here, but rather that the preaching of
salvation in Christ was allowed to fall.