# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_September 1863_S284
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

284 Miscellany.

evangelical light he is as far removed as night from day. Despite his tireless, spiritless, repulsive prattle about the blood and wounds of the little Lamb, he knows nothing of the way of salvation through the merit of Christ, through justifying faith, through the forgiveness of sins; he wants to attain life through his own virtues: his ''piety of the heart,'' his faith active in works, his ''love'' for the Savior. He grounds himself not, with St. Paul, on grace and the Gospel, but, with St. Pelagius, on nature and the law. He has an altogether different spirit from ours: that dark, legalistic, Calvinistic spirit which teaches: Thou shalt not touch this! Thou shalt not taste that!"

Church. It is an error widely spread at this time, that the rightly-believing pastoral office also belongs to the concept of the church. In order to justify this error as a Lutheran truth, the marks of the church given in Article 7 of the Augsburg Confession are reinterpreted as constituent parts of its essence. Prof. Harnack of Erlangen seems to do this as well, in his work: The Church, Its Office, Its Government, 1862. Against this, Dr. Dickhoff writes the following, among other things, in the Mecklenburg Theological Journal for May and June of this year: "Everything else which cannot be separated from the church, without which the church cannot exist, which thus of necessity belongs to the church in this or that sense, nevertheless does not fall within the Lutheran concept of the church as such, does not belong to what constitutes the church, the communion of saints, Christendom as such. Thus man cannot live without air and without daily bread, yet air and daily bread do not belong to the concept of man; mankind cannot exist without the earth on which it dwells, and without the heaven that arches above it, and without the sun that rises upon it, shining and warming, yet the concept of mankind is nevertheless distinct from all this, and does not coincide with the concept of the universe. Christ, the head of the congregation, is inseparable from the church, which is his body; the existence of the church would be annihilated by separation from the head, from the Lord who dwells in it and works through the means of grace — and yet Christ does not belong within the concept of the church, which is precisely the body distinguished from the head. The same holds true of the means of grace, of the Word and the sacraments. Through them the church receives its life from the head; without them the church lacks the ground of its existence; and yet they do not fall within the scope of the Lutheran concept of the church; inseparable from it, they are nevertheless distinct from it. To the church the means of grace are given by the Lord; the church has them, uses them, lives through them; in the church they are administered in the service of the Lord, so that the working of the Lord through them, increasing and perfecting the church, may go forward continually; but they are not themselves the church in any way. For this reason the rightly administered means of grace are also called the notae of the true church. They are so called not because in them, as it were, a