# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juli 1863_S213
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

The Riddle of the Breslauers. 213

God's word brings, and so far as it brings that word, it too is of "divine right," and cursed is he who would not hear that word from him, would not obey him. But this does not come about because the church government says so, and because the church government were of "divine right" in itself, but because the church government in this instance carries out a function of the divine office of preaching. Therefore it is stated also in the Apology, Article 7:

"Obey those who are set over you. This saying requires that one be obedient to the Gospel. For it gives the bishops no dominion or lordly power apart from the Gospel." And the Apology, in the same article, somewhat bluntly calls those "coarse asses" who extend the divine command beyond the Gospel to their own human ordinances as well. — Even what a pastor, who indeed in a quite special sense is a bearer of the divine office of preaching, says or does, is by no means therefore all done and spoken by divine right. When he builds schools and sets up building funds, he does that only by human right; but if he demands that one obey him in this for conscience's sake, because his office, even where it does not bring God's word, were of divine right, then he does that only by the right of the holy Roman Pope-Father and of the devil.

The office of the church, then — to make this clear once more by means of the "billet of beechwood" — is not like a billet of pure beechwood, but like a billet of mixed wood, say of beech and oak, and now the comparison holds admirably, whether the whole billet be split into logs and chopped small, whether the pieces be many or few, whether they be made large or small, whether the splitting of it happen in the evening or the morning, in summer or in winter — all the parts still are and remain only pieces and logs of beech and of oak, never becoming logs of birch or alder, but just as little do they become a mixtum compositum of beech-wood and oak-wood, for dividing and chopping small does not mean stirring together and mixing; nor does the beech-wood swallow up the oak-wood so that all becomes beech-wood, since a transformation cannot properly be brought about through splitting. It is just the same with the office of the church: whether it be divided into large or small offices, whether the division happen sooner or later, what is divine remains divine and what is human remains human; through the division neither a mixing nor a transformation takes place. — But because the pastoral office ex officio has to do with preaching and the administration of the sacraments, it is and is called of "divine right," and because, on the other hand, the office of governance, the church government, has nothing to do ex officio with preaching and sacrament, it is and is called of "human right," although the whole office of the church, of which the pastoral office and the office of governance are only individual parts, is designated as of "divine right" — for that happens only in a synecdochical way, because the chief matter and the core of the office of the church is the