# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_November 1862_S324
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

visible church, with its spiritual priesthood, shows itself active in and through the visible church, the Dietrich-Lohmann-Crome direction can by no means agree; they decisively reject it. Pastor Dietrich declares outright that the believing Christian, by virtue of his spiritual priesthood, has nothing to do in this world (i.e., also in the visible church), but is only to act before God (say, in worship, prayer, good works). But it is Pastors Crome and Ebert who seem to me to go furthest, who flatly refuse to recognize in any way as "church" what has hitherto been understood by visible church, local congregations, parishes, etc., but regard it instead as a crowd held together by social considerations, by national, family, and local ties, upon which work is done through Word and Sacrament in order to gather and win from it a church, that is, the body of Christ. According to this, for the whole visible, social side of the church, the orders of natural human life are supposed to be the means and forms naturally given by God; the right norm willed by God is thus supposed to be that the secular authority should also govern the church, etc. And the fact that the latter was historically the case in the church of the 16th and 17th centuries, that even some later church teachers, especially Hollaz, ascribe to the secular authority an external church government, is then seized upon as the irrefutable and obvious confirmation of a view that overturns everything hitherto taught and believed about the visible church. How harshly this party, especially Pastor Dietrich, has come out against the Prussian Lutheran synodal constitution has become publicly known and is easily explained from what precedes. Just as decidedly must they stand against all chiliasm. But it is strange how they deal with the doctrine of the holy preaching office. For, naturally, according to their opinion, the spiritual priesthood of all believers is by no means supposed to become active in the visible church; therefore they resist to the utmost the idea of deriving the preaching office from the spiritual priesthood of all believers, of explaining it as a transfer of the functions of the latter. No — that, they say, is sheer nonsense. But how then? Pastors Dietrich, Crome, etc. acknowledge quite decidedly and fully that the keys are given to the church, and rest essentially in faith alone. And how, then, do the keys come into the hand of the preacher, who has to exercise them publicly in the church? Some are altogether silent on this; Pastors Crome and Ebert quickly help themselves with the doctrine of the three estates and say: To be sure, the keys belong essentially to all, but each is to exercise them in the order of the estate in which God has placed him — one as head of household, another as pastor, a third as king. Thus, in the sphere of actual life, everyone stays neatly within his own part, and when the pastor absolves someone, he by no means exercises therein a right and an act of the church, of Christians in general, but simply does only what belongs to his office and estate. That in this way the proposition at first conceded — that the keys belong to the church — is thereby quite crudely and directly nullified again, this they refuse to recognize.