# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_November 1862_S327
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

A Brotherly Greeting from Germany, by Fr. Brunn. 327

but only a few pieces of it. This same thing can also only be the right sense of Article 7 of the Augsburg Confession, namely, that the church, by its essence, is the assembly of all truly believing people on earth; and when it is added, "among whom the Gospel is purely preached, etc.," the Confession does not thereby intend to set up a distinction among believers, as though some of them — namely, the members of the Lutheran church — had the pure Gospel, while other believers did not have the pure Gospel and were therefore also not in the church (as it is asserted almost literally by those who wish to see in the 7th Article of the Augsburg Confession only a definition of the visible Lutheran church); but rather, just as the Holy Spirit calls people only "through the Gospel," so too there can nowhere be believers who do not have the one true Gospel purely and truly, although often only in fragments, not in its whole extent. To touch this basic concept of the church as the body of Christ is truly to touch the foundation of our salvation.

Also as regards the concept and essence of the visible church, I confess myself, together with your Synod, beloved brethren, entirely in agreement with what Prof. Walther states in his theses on the church. I agree with you that the Lord also wills to have a visible church on earth, which He forms and preserves through His Word and Sacrament, as the means of grace through which alone He gives us the Holy Spirit and all grace; and likewise, that among all the particular churches, the Lutheran — which possesses Word and Sacrament purely and wholly according to the will of Christ — is in this sense the right or true visible church, to which we ought to hold fast according to Christ's command. I can therefore regard it only as an empty slander when Pastor Grabau charges you with wanting only an invisible church and denying the visible one. Yet just as clearly and firmly I stand with you against everything that fails to distinguish properly between the invisible, purely spiritual essence of the church and its earthly, visible appearance and form. To this I reckon especially the notion of an organism of external constitution, church government, etc., instituted for the church and therefore essentially belonging to it. By this, the Word of God is necessarily robbed of its honor as the sole power that holds and governs the church, and the staff of a falsely legalistic, papal driver is introduced into the church. When it is so often said in the fourth article of the Apology that the hypocrites and wicked who are in the church stand only in the "fellowship of the outward signs," that is, of the Word and the Sacraments, it is thereby definitely and sharply declared what binds and holds the visible church, namely precisely this fellowship of the "outward signs" and nothing else — neither an organism of any other kind, nor natural orders of life in state, people, or family. The church, which everything ought to serve and be useful to, prince as well as subject, may indeed make use of the services of secular authority for its purposes, as the Lutheran church of the