# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Mai 1862_S137
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

On the Doctrine of the Transfer of the Rights and Duties of the Spiritual Priesthood.    137

to treat them. This is a godless doctrine, and a senseless one at the same time. For if the individual members stand over against one another only as individuals, then the pastor too has, facing him, no congregation, but a crumbled heap of individuals, comparable to a flock of sheep, but not to a fellowship of human beings. Now this may indeed often be the case, but to teach the congregation that this is precisely the right relationship, and that whoever wished to change it would thereby be establishing an immoral relationship — that can only have its ground in a great confusion of thought.

We would be putting the reader's patience to too hard a test were we to go on illuminating the rich store of failed thoughts on offer. Only one more thing must we single out, lest the reproach be made against us that we had bypassed precisely the main proof on which our opponents' doctrinal structure rests, and which is supposed "irrefutably" to overthrow our doctrine to the ground. Here it is: "It is very important to hold fast to this, that the pastoral office does not spring from the sancta ecclesia, the church in the specific sense, but from the externa societas, and that its (sic) object is not that — the true church or a part thereof — but rather some crowd of called people. Whoever fails to recognize this and carries the pastoral office, or public preaching office, over into the sancta ecclesia has thereby fatally injured the concept of it. Need I still demonstrate this? If it is unavoidably to be acknowledged that the preaching office in the narrower sense, the office of the rite vocati according to Article 14 of the Augsburg Confession, lies within the domain of the externa societas of the church, then it follows irrefutably that it cannot result from a transfer of the priestly powers of all believing Christians, with respect to the power of the keys, onto one or several persons." It is indeed certain that the outward fellowship of Christians, as it exists in the various particular congregations, is not that bond which unites true believers into the fellowship called the one holy Christian church. For this bond is faith alone. The outward fellowship therefore does not belong to the essence of the church. But it is just as certain that this sancta ecclesia is acting when believing Christians gather into a particular congregation and establish the pastoral office among themselves. How one fatally injures the concept of the church by teaching that the church, for its own upbuilding, makes use of the externa societas of Christians in order to establish the office that is to plant and strengthen the faith which unites people to the one holy church — this we are unable to see. Crome's proof runs briefly as follows: The sancta ecclesia is not an externa societas. But now the pastoral office springs from the externa societas. Therefore it does not have its origin from the church, but is a "natural order" of civil society. Now this is a conclusion rather like this one: The patriarch Abraham is not the patriarch Jacob. But now the children of Israel are descendants of Jacob. Therefore they are not descendants of Abraham.

We hereby take our leave of our opponents with the remark