# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1862_S98
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

may surely reject what has been offered, when we appeal to Melanchthon, to whom Pastor Crome himself pointedly appeals as the man of learning who says that what is condemned by the common laws of logic is condemned by the voice of God himself.

If, now, we are to subject the offered substitute for our odious doctrine of transfer to an examination — which we are obliged to do according to 1 Thessalonians 5:21 — it would be necessary, for a correct understanding of the matter, first to know the point which our opponents still hold in common with us, from which, however, the doctrines then diverge. "There is no dispute among us on this," says Pastor Crome in his "Answer to Brunn," "that the keys of the kingdom of heaven belong to the whole church, and indeed not merely according to their effect or their fruit, but precisely as what they are, as power and authority. Nor is there dispute that this church is not an abstract concept, not some mythological being hovering above all, not a moral or juridical person, nor yet the clergy, but that by it is to be understood the actual congregation of all believers — so that what belongs to the church belongs to each individual believer, indeed that anything can belong to the church at all only because it has been given by Christ to each individual believer, and is so given." And Pastor Ebert says in his essay, "Preacher and Pastor," in the same number of the aforementioned journal: "The preaching office commanded by the Lord Jesus to his disciples, of which Augsburg Confession 5 speaks, all believing Christians have." Further, Pastor Crome says: the pastoral office is "a distinct office for the public administration of the keys" and is exercised "by virtue of the commission from the congregation," and "the object of its administration of the keys is this congregation and each individual within it as a member of the same"; and Pastor Ebert: "The public or congregational call is the demand that the potentia of preaching become a public actus, and that the congregation make itself the object."

In this, then, there is complete agreement: the preaching office, which all Christians have, and the pastoral office, which falls to only a few within the Christian church, are essentially the same office — that is, both offices designate the same functions. The difference between the two consists only in this, that through the pastoral office these functions are exercised on commission of a congregation and toward that congregation, that is, in a public manner; that the pastoral office in the first place comes into being only through an external association of persons, whereas the preaching office is laid upon a person simply and solely by virtue of the faith incorporated into the church, without any fixed limitation of the object toward which it is to be directed. To the question: what occasions Christians, alongside the preaching office which they all have as members of the church, to establish the pastoral office? Pastor Crome answers: "A gathering, assembly, and congregation which has God's