# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Mai 1862_S136
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

second confusion of concepts as its support. He confuses the call itself with the occasion, in individual cases, for carrying out the call. He says: "You may not answer me that the call is the same for all who hold the office of the keys, and simply amounts to doing what belongs to this office's business — testifying the Gospel, forgiving sin, administering the sacrament, and so forth. For the call never comes to a person in a general, indeterminate way, but always in a determinate, concrete manner. It is precisely by this that it is a real, perceptible call to be obeyed, like an intelligible utterance of articulate speech, whereas without such concrete particularization it would resemble a mere tone or noise without any distinguishable, intelligible sound. Also with respect to the office of the keys, the call to its exercise is in every case a concrete one, and precisely for that reason a differing one. If the difference does not lie in the material of the activity itself — which is obviously not the case here — then it must lie in the difference of its object. And this is indeed plainly enough the case. A Christian is not to wield the power of the keys at random, but is to exercise it upon particular persons assigned to him by God for that purpose." The merciful Samaritan in the parable of our Lord did not first receive, from the Jew who had fallen among robbers, the call of love to show mercy; he brought this call with him as he approached the wounded man, for he was bound by the divine commandment: Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. If, on the other hand, it were correct that only a call individually determined as to its object is a genuine and true one, then the priest and the Levite were right to pass by the unfortunate man, provided he did not belong to the object of their particular calling — say, if he had been a Samaritan; for "whatever is done beyond this," says Pastor Crome, "is presumption and cannot please God." Underlying this view is also the logical error that the individual or "concrete" determinacy of the object — which is obviously a mere accident — is taken for an essential property of the call.

Furthermore, the difference between the two offices, the spiritual priesthood and the pastoral office, is not supposed to consist in this, that the pastor acts in the name and in place of the whole congregation while the layman does not, but rather in this, that the object of the acting differs. "The object of the keys-administration of the office-holder is this congregation, and every individual in it as a member of it, whereas he who does not hold the office, being himself an individual, deals only with individuals. The moral relationship on which all human dealing with and toward one another rests — and thus also this dealing with the keys — is here a different one. In the one case it is a relation of individual to individual, which wants to be rightly recognized, judged, and observed; in the other it is a relation to the whole congregation." According to this, then, the individual member stands in no moral relationship to the whole congregation; he has no more right to believe that he has duties toward the whole congregation than he has a right to regard his brothers as fellow members