# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Januar 1864_S4
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

4 Some Remarks on the Teaching of the Oberkirchencollegium of the Ev. Luth. Church in Prussia, etc.

should he then be so foolish as to give keys for it, so that one should bind his kingdom with outward gestures? Should he, at the same time, banish every outward gesture from his kingdom, and yet give keys for it and command that it be ruled within by outward gestures? For he calls them the Keys of Heaven, which serve the kingdom of God; for which no outward work or law avails, as Christ says."

It is a contradiction, a thing impossible, to include within the concept of the Church the aspect of church order (in the temporal sense).

2nd Thesis: "(A. The Church according to the aspect of the order of salvation.) The order of salvation — concerning the immediate, eternal relationship of man to God — rests upon God's saving Word (the moral law and the Gospel) and the Sacraments, which God has revealed for this purpose: that men, by receiving and using them in faith, may obtain forgiveness of sin and be saved."

The moral law, that is, the natural law knowable by reason, does not belong to the divine saving Word. Hence it is quite correctly stated in Luther's Small Catechism, in the explanation of the Third Article: "The Holy Spirit has called me through the Gospel," etc. The excellent Danish theologian Wandalinus says in his Hypotyposes, p. 301: "The question whether God calls to the Church through the word of the Law is to be denied, because this calling comes about through the word of grace, for Christ's sake; but the Law, after the Fall, is a word of wrath and a ministry of death, Rom. 4:15, 2 Cor. 3:7; of itself it preaches nothing of Christ — how then could it call to the congregation of Christ?"

3rd Thesis: "Through the believing reception of the Word and the Sacraments the Church arises among men, and through its exercise she preserves herself. The Church is thus the assembly or congregation of the saints, in which the Gospel is rightly taught and the Sacraments rightly administered. C. Aug. art. 7, 8."

The Third Article of the Lutheran Catechism ascribes the preservation of the Church, as a gift of grace, to the Spirit of Christ. Now the author certainly does not wish ever to deny that this is God's own work upon man; but why does he, in the following thesis, extend this self-preservation to a visible aspect? By no means may it be denied to the renewed will of believers that, in every divine working of good within it, it cooperates through faith — Formula of Concord, fol. 234a. But if I do not stop here, that mode of expression, as in Thesis 2, may well be the seed of later erroneous propositions. We mean the advance in the course of the theses, until one arrives at the point where one is no longer far removed from the tendency of the age which understands by "Church" an objectively legal institution of Christ, conditioning spiritual fellowship, which (as a third means of grace) would only then reliably secure the preservation of Word and Sacraments, through divinely given ordinances and the works conforming to them.

4th Thesis: "Both this coming-into-being and this self-preservation of the Church