# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_November 1862_S329
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

A Brotherly Greeting from Germany, by Fr. Brunn. 329

and speculation. Why else does one resist so stubbornly the simple consequences that follow from the doctrine of the spiritual priesthood? Why do these seem to many almost like a smell of death, which appears to fill them with a secret dread, instead of being to them like the sweet balm of life that flows from justification through faith, from the cross of Christ? — Because, through faith, I possess Christ with His whole merit, all His right and His power: only in this sense do I, together with our symbols, believe and confess that "the church has the keys," and likewise that "the church, because it has the priesthood, also has the power to call church servants, etc." But if these propositions stand firm in their full sense, then it is nothing but the utterly simple, clear, and almost self-evident conclusion which every childlike, simple faith must draw from them on its own, and which only a falsely renowned art of theological speculation can seek to render doubtful: namely, that, first, if the church has the keys, then obviously the pastor or church servant can only be appointed and installed by the Lord Christ in His church for the public and orderly administration of the power of the keys; and since our old fathers so often say, and hardly anyone disputes, that the pastor is only a "servant of the church," that he stands and acts "in the name of the church," I can never wrest from these expressions any other sense and meaning than precisely this: that the pastor, in his office, exercises only rights and acts that originally belong not to him but to the church, so that he only does and exercises them by commission and in the place of the church, that is, by a transfer of the church's rights and powers of attorney. Now even if the expression of a "transfer" used here be only a human, earthly one, the matter it is meant to clarify is nevertheless only the heavenly, divine one, namely the question: does the pastor, in what he does, administer his own rights or the rights of the church — does he act in his own name or in the name of the church? That is the sole dilemma on whose answer, in the end, the whole question of the ministry ultimately turns. And should Lutherans, of all people, be at a loss and in doubt over a plain, straightforward, simple answer? — The other, equally clear and childlike-simple conclusion from the doctrine of the spiritual priesthood of all believers seems to me, second, to be its application to the government of the church. If our symbols say, "the church, because it has the priesthood, must also have the power to call church servants," then who, in the first place, will forbid a group of believing Christians who gather together in one place for the exercise of Christian worship, from calling a pastor for this purpose; and secondly, when they do this, by what means am I then to notice and be certain that this newly appointed pastor was really called by Christians who have the power and right to do so? From what else but from the marks of the church, as Luther says, which make me certain where Word and Sacrament are,