# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_December 1861_S383
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Church and Contemporary Notices. 383

...prosperity." Further proof is supposed to be what the Smalcald Articles say: "We do not concede to them that they are the Church, and indeed they are not." However, by this are meant the prelates, the pope, cardinals, and bishops, who presented themselves as the Church — and indeed as the Church exclusively and alone. But otherwise the preface to the Book of Concord has indicated, and all our old teachers have taught on the basis of that very passage in the Smalcald Articles, that wherever baptism and the five chief parts are found, there also, of necessity, one must speak of Church — for there too are the holy believers and the little sheep who hear their shepherd's voice. Even if such communions are false churches because of their errors, still, for the sake of the believers, the one holy Church remains in and among them; and for this very reason we not only recognize their ordination to the church office, we also reject sending preachers into their congregations and making proselytes, because that violates the right of the Church.

I fear that if one pursues the doctrine of the Church so legalistically that only the purely-teaching church is allowed to count as Church, one will be fighting Mr. H.'s error only to set an equally dangerous one in its place. One will then make all Lutheran congregations run the gauntlet that are not entirely sound on doctrine. And where, then, will the protesters themselves, with their own congregations, stand?

The status controversiae in the Prussian Lutheran Church is formulated by Ehlers in his Kirchliches Zeitblatt as follows: Has Christ, for his Church on earth, ordained, besides the service (or office) of the Word — which service consists in this, that through the Word people are taught, admonished, comforted, and rebuked — has Christ ordained, besides this office, yet another, special governing office, an office of oversight over the office of the Word, which, as a matter of divine right, comprises within itself a sum of congregations furnished with the preaching office ordained by God, and to which the congregations, as to a divine ordinance, must render obedience in its arrangements for God's sake?

The Upper Church College answers yes; its opponents answer no to this question.

That the hope of a future general conversion of the Jews works precisely the opposite of zeal for their conversion now is strikingly proven by Pastor Harms in Hermannsburg. He writes in his mission paper for the month of August: "Of late I have been asked about the Jewish mission in a great many letters. I have not had time to answer them; I will do so here briefly, since there is still a little room. After the Jews rejected the Lord Jesus, they were in turn rejected by him and have ceased to be the chosen people of God. The blood of the Lord Jesus, which they themselves called down upon themselves and their children, has come upon them and will remain upon them until they recognize him whom their fathers pierced. They are blinded, and blindness will remain their portion until the fullness of the Gentiles shall have come in (Romans 11). Since, then, the Jews have rejected Jesus and lost the kingdom of God, the Gentiles have stepped into the place of the Jews and entered into the kingdom of God, and this entrance of the Gentiles into the kingdom of God will continue until the fullness of the Gentiles, that is, all the Gentiles, shall have entered into it — or, in other words, shall have been converted to Christianity. When this has happened, says the apostle, then the whole of Israel too will be saved, that is, will enter the Christian Church, so that each of them may be saved through the use of the means of grace found in the Christian Church. When this has happened, the end will come at once, for then the Church militant will have achieved her purpose on this earth — to unite Jews and Gentiles under one Head, under Christ, and to offer the means of salvation to all — and the Last Day, following immediately upon this, brings the judgment, in which it will be shown who belongs to the true Christians and who to the false. Accordingly, a conversion of Israel is not even to be thought of before the fullness of the Gentiles shall have come in. So stubborn and so hardened is the Jewish people that their hard heart can be broken by nothing else except that they see: all the Gentiles have come in ahead of us, we alone are left behind. This terrible thing alone — to be left behind alone, to be excluded and rejected alone — will...