# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_October 1861_S297
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Remarks on the Office. 297

On the contrary: precisely when we convince ourselves that here
something is stated only about the preaching office according to its
essential concept, that is, without any regard to any particular
determination of this concept, we must acknowledge that thereby room is
left just as much for the same, as, indeed, also for an opposite statement
about the preaching office in a particular, narrower sense of the word.
Logically it would evidently be equally possible that the author of the
Augustana, if he understood those opening words of Art. V as we have
just assumed, had immediately appended either the sentence: "and in no
other sense has God instituted the preaching office," or a sentence such as:
"and at the same time God has also made the institution that only those
duly called shall administer the preaching office" — by which then
precisely a divine institution of the preaching office would be stated in a
double sense, one less determinate and one more determinate.

Let us ask first: what different meanings can the word "preaching
office," according to German usage as we set it before our eyes above,
have at all, beyond that nearest one?

It could evidently, first, mean a commission to preach, that is, to
proclaim the message of salvation, as one given only to a specific person or
to individual specific persons, whereby again the further variation would
be possible that this commission was given only for once, for several
individual cases, or generally, for all time. It could then, second, mean a
commission to preach which exclusively bound the specific persons but did
not exclusively authorize them to preach; but, third, also a commission
that authorized them exclusively, just as much as it bound them, to attend
to preaching. In the case of the second and third, however, there could
again at the same time be a considerable difference of the sense in which
the word "to preach" was taken — in the sense of preaching in general, or
of a particular kind of preaching, for example, public preaching. Further,
fourth, "preaching office" can mean a commission to preach that is meant
to pass from hand to hand, so that it is given in advance, for all future
times, to those in whom certain factual conditions will occur, by virtue of
which it then applies precisely to them — whereby afterward, of course,
very different determinations of these factual conditions would again be
conceivable in themselves. Finally, fifth, "preaching office" could also
mean a legal institution, a legal order, according to which an exclusive
legal obligation to preach (with or without an exclusive entitlement
thereto) would continually belong to those called to it in a definite order;
whereby, again, very different determinations of this order of calling could
likewise be conceived.

So it has now been brought still closer to us how easily it is possible
that different people equally assert or deny the divine institution of the
preaching office, while meaning something entirely different by it, and
that without their being chargeable, on that account, with an arbitrary
use of language.