# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_November 1862_S323
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

A Brotherly Greeting from Germany, by Fr. Brunn. 323

from this overestimation of the visibility of the church, the equally one-sided overstraining of the doctrine of the Christian preaching office, as well as the fondness for everything external in the church — constitution, liturgy, church discipline — as the Löhe-ian direction openly displays to us; and no less consistently there follows from this the other, final step to which Löhe came and had to come: namely, that the defective and unsatisfying shape of the visible church in the present time must drive the heart to seek the realization of its ideals of church, and of church constitution, discipline, and liturgy, in the future. This seems to me quite unmistakably the path by which Löhe became a chiliast. Indeed, Inspector Bauer, in a well-known speech at Neu Dettelsau, once openly declared that this must give us courage and joy in these troubled times to gather and prepare the building-stones for the church of the future — building-stones, that is, in constitution, discipline, and liturgy. But in this it is also attested, in an open and dreadful way, how far in this spiritual tendency the goal is displaced — the whole goal of this present age of the New Testament, in which we no longer have anything to work at and prepare for a church of the future, but in which there is only one goal and one work, namely to win souls for the Lord Jesus, solely through the preaching of the Gospel, in faith; and where Word and faith are, there is everything — there we have nothing more to seek in a church of the future, but only to hope for the blessed time that will transform our faith into sight.

In the churchly circles more closely connected with me, I have in recent years encountered less and less the false conception of the visible church described here. I have found almost everywhere that people willingly acknowledge that the essence of the church, as the body of Christ, does not consist in visible, external things — that the church is essentially the congregation of the saints, of true believers. But despite this, real clarity in the view of the relation between the visibility and invisibility of the church seems to me rare. In our Prussian Lutheran church there stand, in this respect, two parties presently sharply opposed to one another, at the head of which, on the one side, are Pastors Dietrich, Lohmann, Crome, and others, and on the other side, the members of the Supreme Church Council (O. K. College) in Breslau — Director Huschke and the church councilors Nagel and Pistorius. The Dietrich-Crome party is one-sided and inadequate in its conception of the visibility of the church, that is, they emphasize the essence of the church as the spiritual body of Christ, which is formed only through faith and has Word and Sacrament as its marks; and, standing fast on this point, they hold that "Word and Sacrament" alone, without qualification, is the one thing in which the visibility of the church consists. For this reason they will absolutely have nothing to do with a synod that is supposed to be any kind of representation of the church, or with congregational elders, churchly superiors, in whom a power and activity of the church, or of the spiritual priesthood of all believers, shows and carries itself out. In the thought that the in-