# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Mai 1862_S139
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

A Strange Assertion of Dr. Huschke.    139

evangelical or un-Lutheran, to assert that a fellowship within a churchly constitution is just as much a structure of Christ and of the Holy Spirit as a single Christian congregation is. For this latter, insofar as it consists of believers, is indeed a work of the triune God, or of the Holy Spirit, begotten through the divine seed of the preached or sealed Gospel (that is, Baptism), and bound together spiritually with one another through the same faith in Christ and the same spiritual union with Him, and likewise gathered spiritually before God at all times together with all other believers out of every tongue and people. Such a local congregation, then, like the whole body of believers, or Christendom — the one holy Christian Church — is indeed a new spiritual creation, and far more glorious and wonderful than the creation of heaven and earth. Nor can it be denied that the public administration of the means of grace, the preaching of the Gospel and the giving of the sacraments, that is, the churchly teaching office, the office of the keys, is a divine institution and ordinance, commanded by Christ first to the apostles, and after them, through the call of the congregations, to His and their servants for its exercise.

But apart from this divine ordinance, everything else is a human ordinance — and so also "a fellowship within a constitution." For no command of God is to be found in the Gospel for the New Testament church that the individual Christian local congregations must be governed and constituted in this or that particular manner. God's Word alone, as it reads and as it resounds out of Scripture through the mouth of the orthodox preaching office, is the sole governor of all congregations on earth. But it is entirely free to them, in sole obedience to Holy Scripture, what form of constitution they wish, according to human ordinance, to set up among themselves. It is by no means at all a matter of faith and confession that a constitution of individual congregations should be brought under a common order; rather it is solely a matter of free love that orthodox congregations, on the foundation of the divine Word and in accordance with a common churchly confession, join and unite themselves in this or that form, in order thereby the more powerfully to carry out the works of faith and the labor of love for the preservation and spread of the church.

It is therefore altogether a matter of Christian liberty, and merely a human ordinance, whether the congregations that so join together (that is, teachers and hearers, shepherds and flocks) — each one of which, according to the Gospel, has the full right of self-government according to God's Word — transfer certain rights and powers, given to them, the congregations themselves, together with the Gospel, and belonging essentially to them alone, to a single person from among their number (episcopal constitution) or to a smaller or larger committee as representatives of the teaching office and of the hearers of all the congregations (presbyterial, synodal, collegial constitution), for administration in their stead, for the common benefit of the church — yet in such a way that all their