# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_October 1861_S302
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Remarks on the Office. 302

the individual holders of the ecclesiastical preaching office have only a
merely derived power of the keys, and, on the other hand, keeping at bay
the error that the power of God resident in these means of grace rests
upon this divine founding of the preaching office as an institution, and
not solely and exclusively upon the divine founding of the means of grace
themselves — that is, upon the general divine command that the word of
the evangelical promise and the sacraments be administered by human
beings.

To obtain faith, God, as Art. V of the Augsburg Confession says, has
instituted only the preaching office (according to its essential concept),
and, as the author immediately adds (not in order thereby to say
something else, but only to say the same thing in other words), has
"given the Gospel and Sacrament," so that faith can be obtained thereby
— whether someone administers these means of grace as a duly called
servant of the church or by virtue of the universal priesthood. Whoever
assumes a divine institution of the preaching office as an ecclesiastical
institution for that purpose, "to obtain faith," thereby indeed sets up, as
Höfling rightly says, a new means of grace not merely alongside, but
above, Word and Sacrament, and thereby falls irretrievably into the worst
consequences of Roman Catholicism. But whoever merely assumes that
the preaching office, too, as an ecclesiastical institution, was instituted by
God solely for the sake of a God-willed ecclesiastical order, is not touched
by that reproach, and is also in no danger of somehow becoming untrue to
genuinely Protestant principles.

For this very reason I find not only no contradiction, but also
otherwise nothing strange or questionable, in the fact that the symbols of
the Lutheran Church teach such a twofold divine institution of the
preaching office, and I therefore also have no occasion to exert myself,
with Höfling's anxiousness, to wring some other sense out of the passages
of the symbols which, as it seems to me, clearly enough state a divine
institution also of the ecclesiastical office of preaching and administering
the sacraments. Among these passages I count, besides the often-
mentioned Art. XIV of the Augsburg Confession — of which I must indeed
grant to Höfling that it does not speak straightforwardly and expressly of
an immediate divine institution of this ecclesiastical office — in particular
Art. VIII §12 of the Apology (Müller p. 203): Habet ecclesia mandatum de
constituendis ministris, in the German text: "The church has God's
command that it shall appoint preachers and deacons." I confess that I
would not know how to find an express "command of God" of this content
in Holy Scripture, although, on the other hand, it decidedly makes the
impression on me as though the apostles, in that they everywhere set, or
had set, elders in the congregations, acted in doing so in the
consciousness of a manifest divine will, and this same impression is also
conveyed to me by various exemplary ordinances of the Lord and by the
fact of the presence of a special spiritual gift for the preaching office in
individual