# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_October 1861_S300
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Remarks on the Office. 300

of the Gospel, to communicate it, without intermediary, to the individual
who desires it (ecclesiae principaliter et immediate) — that is, not, as was
asserted by the papal opponents, originally and immediately to Peter, or
respectively to the Pope as his successor for the time being, and only
through him to the church, but on the contrary in such a way that the
individuals regularly called to the preaching office are to have the
authorization to communicate the evangelical promise only as a mediate
one, to be derived from the power of the keys of the church. Evidently in
exactly the same sense Luther himself had already written, in the
Smalcald Articles proper (Part III, Art. VII, Müller p. 321): "The keys
are an office and power of the church given by Christ, to bind and to loose
sin."

By this, then, the doctrine of a divine institution of the preaching
office is indeed most decisively excluded — the doctrine that it came about
through the immediate bestowal of the power of the keys upon particular
persons as a power belonging to them exclusively, to be transmitted by
them further to others with the same exclusiveness, and thus to be
propagated forever within a closed, privileged class. But by no means
excluded thereby is the doctrine of a simultaneous divine institution of
the preaching office in that particular, other sense: that, according to a
divine will made known and not merely presumed, particular persons are
always to be exclusively obligated and at the same time authorized,
through a regular ecclesiastical call, to administer the preaching office or
office of the keys in the name of the church. And with this, it seems to
me, the true relation of this proposition in the appendix of the Smalcald
Articles to Art. XIV of the Augsburg Confession has been found. The
former states whereby the preaching office, according to its essential
concept, is instituted by God — namely, through the immediate bestowal
of the keys upon the church as a whole; the latter states whereby the
preaching office, as an institution for the regular exercise of the office of
the keys of the church, which the church as a whole cannot exercise in
person, is instituted by God — namely, through the ordinance that
particular persons shall always be regularly called by the church to teach
or preach publicly and to administer the sacraments.

So, then, this doctrine of a, so to speak, doubled divine institution of
the preaching office stands in the finest harmony with the doctrine of the
universal priesthood, as Luther developed it so clearly and sharply right
at the beginning of his reformatory career, chiefly in his tract "To the
Christian Nobility of the German Nation" of 1521 (Erlangen edition of
Luther's Works, vol. 21, p. 281 ff.).

The nerve of this doctrine lies wholly and entirely in this: that the
spiritual capacity, even for the holiest ecclesiastical functions, is obtained
through baptism, and that by virtue of it, in every (believing) Christian
there already exists a higher consecration than the consecration of a
bishop — were he even the