# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1862_S97
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Lehre und Wehre.

Volume VIII.    April 1862.    No. 4.

On the Doctrine of the Transfer of the Rights and Duties of the Spiritual Priesthood.

The doctrine of the transfer of the rights and duties of the congregation's spiritual priesthood to the pastoral office — which we have received from our teaching fathers, and which we seek to preserve as a treasure of correct knowledge, as a truth entrusted to us by the church of an earlier time — is, to our opponents within the Lutheran church, a thorn in the eye, a stake in the flesh, an object of contempt and hatred, as scarcely any other of the doctrines over which the unity of faith between them and us has been torn. This doctrine has in our time been made so "odious" within the Lutheran church that even those whom we would by no means count among our opponents cannot overcome the odium that has been attached to it, and take refuge in the strangest expedients, only to cleanse themselves of the suspicion of confessing this doctrine along with us. In this rejection of a doctrine so despised, however, there is often revealed at the same time so thorough an ignorance of its essential content that one beholds with regret the spectacle of capable men who, with great earnestness and moral indignation, "beat the air."

An example of what has been said is given us by the fifth number of the Lutheran Synodal-Blatt, published by R. Lohmann. In it, the Reverend Pastors Crome and Ebert reject the aforesaid doctrine with great contempt, and indeed with the claim of having recognized the doctrine of Luther and the Symbols on this point with scientific precision. This correct scientific view, it seems, was bound to escape us, suffering as we do from a certain crudity of thinking not cultivated by "the scholarship of our day"; for, writes P. Crome, "we may not boast of rightly mastering the content of the doctrine which Luther himself, and the truly eminent theologians beside and after him, set before us, if we do not at least take pains to make ourselves masters of the ground of the scientific thought and expression of our time."

When, however, we see that what is here offered to us as an acquisition of the scientific thinking of our age has come about only through a neglect of logical thinking, we may surely