# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_October 1861_S299
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Remarks on the Office. 299

special weight is placed on these words, and that they are thus perhaps
meant here to express the same thing that "publicly" (publice) expresses
in the Augsburg Confession.

Accordingly, then, as it seems to me, what is said here is this: the
preaching office is instituted by God in the sense that, according to his
revealed divine will, only those regularly called shall publicly preach or
administer the sacraments, whereas in Art. V only the divine institution
of "preaching" was taught, that is, the divine command that the message
of salvation be proclaimed. Even without the expression "preaching
office" being used, there would, in point of sense, indeed be talk in Art.
XIV of a divine institution of the preaching office — but in such a way
that "preaching office" there meant a perpetual institution, a standing
commission, passing from hand to hand by virtue of the "regular call,"
for public preaching and the administration of the sacraments — without
thereby also at the same time the immediate divine founding of the
preaching office as a legal order being asserted.

But what, now, is "public preaching (publice docere)"?

Certainly not preaching in a public place, but rather: "on behalf of
the community, in the name of and for the service of the community, the
church" — since, as is well known, publice in good Latin can only have
this meaning. But if the publicness of preaching has this sense, then,
just as we expressed it above as a conjecture, "preaching in the church" in
the Apology can amount to the same thing as "preaching publicly."

Let us now hold fast only to this: that, accordingly, in Art. XIV of the
Augsburg Confession only the divine institution of the preaching office, as
the office of preaching on behalf of the community, in the name of and for
the service of the church, is taught — so that the way is already paved for
us to arrive at the correct understanding of the relation of this doctrine to
the proposition always particularly emphasized by Höfling, and indeed
certainly rightly so, that is found in the appendix to the Smalcald Articles
(§24, Müller p. 333): the keys belong, without intermediary, to the whole
church (tribuit Christus principaliter claves ecclesiae et immediate).

"The keys," it says immediately afterward, "are nothing other than
the office by which the promise of the Gospel is communicated to
everyone who desires it." Under the keys, then, is here understood the
main content of the preaching office in the sense of the calling or
commission to preach, that is, to proclaim salvation in Christ — the
preaching office according to its essential concept. The keys, or the office
of the keys, is the preaching office of whose divine institution Art. V of the
Augsburg Confession speaks, according to its main content. With that
Art. V, then, we can quite properly connect this confessional passage so as
to gain the more complete statement: God has instituted the preaching
office in that he has given the command and the authorization to preach,
and above all the promise of the Gospel