# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1862_S100
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

the other members. This is shown, among other things, in Baptism, as the reception into the whole of Christendom; in the ban, as the exclusion from the whole of Christendom; in the readmission of an excommunicated person into the brotherly fellowship of all Christians. Compare, among other passages, the words of the Apostle in 2 Corinthians 2:10: "To whom ye forgive any thing, I forgive also. For if I forgave any thing, to whom I forgave it, for your sakes forgave I it in the person of Christ." Therefore the congregational call, too, is a call of the whole church, and the pastor of an individual congregation is a servant of the whole church.

We hold, then, according to the guidance of the scriptural doctrine concerning the church and the churchly office, two things at once. First, that the pastoral office is the authority transferred by the congregation to exercise the rights of the spiritual priesthood in a public office on behalf of the fellowship; and second, that this office is not a human ordinance but an office instituted by God. This office is a divine institution, for it is essentially, that is, as to its functions, nothing other than the office, laid by God upon the whole church, of administering the keys of the kingdom of heaven. But even insofar as it is distinguished from the preaching office of all Christians, it is a divine institution; for it is undeniable that whoever gives a servant to someone, equips him for the service and makes him willing, thereby also institutes the service itself. And since this service has the purpose of building up the body of Christ, that the congregation may thereby become a perfect man and be filled unto all the fulness of God — and since this is the will of the Lord, the head of his congregation, which would cease to be such if it were unwilling to hold this will as its own — the congregation, too, is bound to the office, though not by compulsion, until the end of the days. This office, then, is not a human ordinance, and its establishment is not left to human caprice.

The apparent contradiction — that the functions of the pastoral office are, by divine ordinance, the rights and duties of the pastor, and yet these same functions are and remain, by God's will, the rights and duties of the calling congregation — is resolved quite simply by the fact that the pastor as such is a servant of the congregation; for since, as one who serves, he carries out the will of him whom he serves, he thereby makes both what the will of the congregation may do, that is, its rights, and what the will of the congregation ought to do, that is, its duties, into his own at the same time, by taking on the service.

Let us now consider the second possible case: that the rights and duties of the pastoral office belong neither to the calling congregation, nor therefore to the individual believers within it, nor therefore to the church, since "what belongs to the church belongs also to the individual believers" — then it follows of necessity that the pastoral office (for an office consists, after all, only of its rights and duties) is not a churchly office at all, that its functions are not churchly but worldly functions; that, because the pastoral office "is a distinct office for the public administration of the keys,"