# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_December 1863_S375
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

The Discords in the Lutheran Church of Prussia. 375

preaching office. One proceeds on the assumption that the office of the Word was undoubtedly instituted by God. Now one concludes further: the office of the Word has two parts — it is, on the one hand, a teaching, preaching, and administering of the sacrament, and on the other, a governing; both functions of the office of the Word are equally divinely instituted, the one coming to fulfillment in the pastor, the other in the church government.

Against this view the opposition party rightly urges, as the fundamental principle of genuine Lutheranism, the doctrine of the Symbols, that the evangelical office of preaching or bishop (Augsburg Confession, Art. 28) in no way includes a legal power of command, given by God, to establish and administer church orders, but that the office of the Word consists only in the power to preach the Gospel, to administer the sacraments, and to forgive and retain sins. One rightly emphasizes faith as the fundamental principle that governs everything and from which one must proceed in all things; therefore one stresses the essence of the church as the congregation of the believers or saints, which is wholly and absolutely removed from all rule of the law and in which nothing holds sway or governs except the Gospel alone, the Word and Spirit of Christ.

But it is precisely here that lies the gap which, to this day, most of those who stand against the Breslau Supreme Church Council are unable to fill, and which has hitherto robbed their opposition of the necessary strength and unity: namely, the proof is lacking of how the church, as the invisible congregation of believers, comes to a visible constitution and to a church order — the proof of how the church, granted that it has the power to give itself an order, is able to exercise this power. Here the opposition party divides into two different camps. Pastor Diedrich and those most closely associated with him have evidently fallen into an extreme opposite to the Breslau doctrine: Diedrich emphasizes so one-sidedly the invisible, purely spiritual essence of the church, that one may well say that, over the invisible church, the visible church is entirely lost to him; the church, as the congregation of true Christians, known to God alone, remains for him always hidden from human eyes and therefore incapable of appearing in human life as an acting community; hence Diedrich shuts himself off entirely from the idea that the church, insofar as it visibly and outwardly gathers around Word and Sacrament, as such likewise has the power to order, constitute, and govern itself. So Diedrich, in his view, never arrives at conceiving of a synod as a representation of the church in which the church's power to order and govern itself comes to fulfillment and is then, in simple consequence, transferred to a representative body. Diedrich recognizes no other church officers than the pastors, and no other manifestation of church authority than the preaching of the Gospel. Therefore it may not be wrong when one lays it to his charge that he pays homage to a one-sided spiritualism and, in the end, must in practice fall into the hands of a naked hierarchy