# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1862_S104
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

we nevertheless hold it our duty to examine somewhat more closely the doctrine of our opponents, which is set over against ours with great earnestness as the correct one.

We have already, above, characterized in general the standpoint of our Prussian brethren. According to them, the calling congregation acts only as an instrument for the establishment of an estate to which belongs, as its own and inalienable, the right — denied to the congregation itself — of publicly conducting the preaching office. The congregation is an instrument, in that it follows a divine command which bids it establish this estate. But since the church as such does not stand under the Law, it carries out this command not as church, but as a civil community. If we ask: where is this command to be found? we are told: it is contained in the divine commandments that bind every natural man, and the estate itself is a natural ordinance of God like marriage, since from the household there arises, just as naturally and just as necessarily, both the teaching estate and the estate of civil authority. This law, binding upon all men, is modified according to the character of the civil community, in such a way that the people of God under the Old Covenant were obligated to praise and proclaim the name of God, while the people of God under the New Covenant are obligated to confess and preach the Gospel. But since "the theory of transfer" is now rejected, one does not see how the mandate to establish the pastoral office is to be derived from this command to preach, which is addressed to all. We note here in passing that the individual doctrinal pieces of the brethren Crome and Ebert resemble the fabled rocks in the Bosporus Thracius, between which, since they do not hold their ground, the vessel of logic is irretrievably crushed. We attempt only, so far as this is possible for us, to give the doctrine logical coherence. The more, then, the called pastor receives influence in the civil community and in the state through his calling, the nearer he approaches the normal position that properly belongs to him; the less he is "interned within the confines of the church society," the nearer he comes to the ideal of the "full-blooded parson." For which reason Ebert too, from whom we take the cited words, sets up the following classification of pastors: "A territorial-church pastor is, by his call, more than we pastors now are in the Lutheran congregations opposed to the Union in Prussia. An American pastor is, by his call, not nearly so much as we are yet." The ground of division for this classification is given him by the measure of the "publicly regulated relations to those who hold in their hands legislation, the administration of justice, the penal system, the morals police, matrimonial matters, and so forth." For this reason he also addresses the Christian congregation — which, independent of the state's civil community, calls itself a shepherd for the carrying out of its common duties as a Christian congregation — in the following words: "Wretched collegialism, what great and glorious thing has your properly*) called man

*) As a curiosity we communicate what Pastor Ebert understands by rite. He