# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juni 1863_S178
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

178 Dr. Hengstenberg's Position on the Questions of the Office and Church Government.

draws near and says: "Christ there holds the stars in his right hand, as proof that he stands in a direct relation to the office, one not mediated through the congregation. The strictness and majesty of the demands which are made in the Apocalypse upon the office personified in the angel of the congregation presuppose the majesty of his dignity. Likewise, that in the person of the angel the address is throughout to the congregation, that he is unconditionally regarded as its soul, and that its condition is treated as dependent on his repentance and on his faithfulness —" this is truly quite terrifying. Is the repentance of the members of the congregation supposed to depend on the repentance of the preacher?! Then the preacher would indeed be lord over life and death, over the blessedness and damnation of the congregation. This, unless it is an empty rhetorical flourish, goes even beyond papal teaching on the office. —

As with Scripture, so also experience is supposed to be against the Lutheran doctrine of the office. H. says: "As with Scripture, so the doctrine of the office as a product of the congregation also stands in contradiction with experience. The beginning, as a rule, is that God sends faithful workers into his harvest; the usual course is not that the congregation first becomes believing on its own and then calls or requests a faithful pastor, but rather that the faithful shepherd gathers the flock about himself. Even where the matter at first appears otherwise, one will, upon closer investigation, usually come back to the office as the ultimate ground." To make the point really striking, one commonly adds the example: the apostles existed before the congregations did. This objection, apparently so plausible and yet thoroughly mistaken, arises from a confusion of the preaching office with the pastoral office. It is not merely no usual course for the congregation first to become believing on its own — it is no course at all; no man becomes believing on his own. The "ultimate ground" is not merely "usually" the office, but there both is and can be no other ground at all than the office alone. Article V of the Augsburg Confession teaches us whence faith comes, and only where there is faith are there Christian congregations. "To obtain such faith," it says, "God instituted the preaching office, giving the Gospel and the sacrament, through which, as through means, he gives the Holy Spirit, who works faith, when and where he pleases, in those who hear the Gospel." So no Christian congregation can come into being without the preaching office, because God gives no faith without the preaching office, and the Holy Spirit works only through the preaching office, that is, through the Gospel and the sacrament. Everyone who proclaims the Gospel and administers the sacrament exercises this preaching office — a child who tells another the birth of Jesus, a midwife who baptizes an infant, applies the means by which the Holy Spirit works, and thereby exercises the holy preaching office. For the preaching office is Christ's command to proclaim the Gospel, quite apart from those who administer it. Article IV treats of justification through faith; the Lutheran Church now shows, in the article that immediately follows, in