# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Februar 1862_S56
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

56 Something on Collegialism.

nor do they possess it in the manner of a private princely right, and that this kind of church government is by no means juris divini [of divine right], or instituted by the church itself from God. It also seeks to purge the relation of the territorial prince, as ruler of the church, from all the territorialistic elements attaching to him, so that the princes possess and exercise church authority as an office personally belonging to them — not through state organs, but exercised through special authorities appointed by them — and that these authorities stand in an immediate and direct relation to the princes themselves. No one who reads the treatise will fail to recognize how Dr. Kliefoth, in his proposals, is moved solely by heartfelt concern for the welfare of the church. It is all the more regrettable that, as a consequence of his view of the nature of the office, in this substantial treatise, he contends not only against the territorialist system but even more against the collegialist system, and attempts to demonstrate that the latter is of very recent date and first arose with the movements of Pietism in our church — whereas it can so easily be shown that it in fact embraces the original Reformation theory of church polity. In his polemic against this theory, which follows of itself from the pure doctrine of the church and the power of the keys, the church-governing office of the princes — which Kliefoth is unwilling to let arise either from a usurpation born of necessity or from a tacit transfer by the church — then appears like a deus ex machina, without any account being given of whence the princes actually and originally received this office, which remains, after all, an important and unavoidable question, even granting readily that the church government of the princes at present stands, beyond doubt, as historically established by right.

We, too, do not deny, incidentally, that Luther deliberately did not realize the idea of a church and congregation ordered on a collegialist basis, on the ground of the rights of the spiritual priesthood, because he feared, given the condition of the people even in his own time, the worst consequences from doing so. He writes in his treatise "German Mass and Order of Divine Service" of the year 1526: "There is a threefold distinction in divine service and the Mass. First, a Latin one, which we have previously let go forth, and it is called the Formula Missae. This I do not hereby intend to abolish or alter. Secondly, there is the German Mass and divine service, which we are now treating of, which is to be arranged for the sake of the simple laity. But these two forms we must let proceed and take place in such a way that they are held publicly in the churches before all the people, among whom there are many who do not yet believe or are not Christians, but the greater part stand about and gape, so that they too may see something new — just as if we were holding divine service out in the open, in a field or on a public square, in the midst of Turks or heathen. For here there is as yet no ordered and settled assembly in which one could govern the Christians according to the Gospel, but rather it is a public