# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1862_S99
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

On the Doctrine of the Transfer of the Rights and Duties of the Spiritual Priesthood. 99

has God's word among themselves and hence also possesses the true church, has the right and the duty, the mandate, to ordain for itself preachers of the Gospel for the whole congregation." Now if a particular office is formed by persons entering into association and jointly entrusting to one person a complex of functions through a call to this office, only two cases are possible. Either the calling community itself has the right and the duty to perform the functions of this office, or it does not have this. Here our ways part.

If the Christian church, because the keys belong to it, thereby also has the obligation to exercise the office of the keys wherever such exercise is needed — which no one can deny, for from him who does not have the keys their exercise cannot rightly be demanded — and if "something can belong to the Christian church at all only because it belongs to each individual believer," then the individual believer, and he alone, also has the duty to exercise the office of the keys whenever the founding of a Christian congregation, or the life within it, demands the exercise of the power and authority of the keys. For every member of the Christian congregation the obligation remains to exercise the preaching office enjoined upon him, as a work of the spiritual priesthood, toward the brethren as well, who together with him make up the Christian congregation. In this case, however, since a whole congregation becomes the object of the administration of the keys, a modification of the exercise necessarily takes place. They, who all have, or ought to have, one mind, who ought to have in view the one and the same purpose of their fellowship — namely, the building up of the body of Christ by means of the Gospel or the office of the keys — ought therefore also to act as one individual. The wills of the individuals are here fused into a common will, which now makes the arrangements needed to attain the purpose of their fellowship; arrangements which the Lord of the church himself has foreseen, and for which he has therefore given, by endowing individual persons, shepherds and teachers for this special calling in the church. The Christian congregation now chooses and calls these men, equipped for this by the Lord, by entrusting to them the object of its common will as a special work of vocation, and thus carries out, through instruments and servants fit for the purpose, the duties which it has as a fellowship. And because these servants act in the name and on behalf of the whole congregation instead of the congregation itself, the congregation also has and retains the right and the duty to remove them as soon as they no longer carry out the purpose of the fellowship. But the Christian church is such a unity, and so intimate a connection of its members in spirit and in faith, that not only what a Christian congregation does in the Holy Spirit is done in the name and instead of the whole church, but the very same must also be said of the churchly works of every individual believer scattered locally. For in this spiritual body, as the Apostle says, each is always a member of the other; each individual member acts as the member and instrument of all the others