# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Januar 1864_S9
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Some Remarks on the Teaching of the Oberkirchencollegium of the Ev. Luth. Church in Prussia, etc. 9

notion — taken over from the papal one — of the Church. According to this, the true Church is the assembly of teachers and hearers who, baptized in the name of the triune God, unanimously confess the whole teaching of Christ and the Apostles and enjoy the lawful administration of the Sacraments. (Bossuet, Bishop of Meaux, Collatio cum Claudio; compare on this Buddeus, Institutiones ... Dogmaticae, p. 1208 sq.) If Christ is the Head of the Church as a visible assembly, so that he must also count as the Head of the Pharisees sitting on the seat of the Apostles, etc., then He has — this follows irrefutably — originally instituted such an assembly of teachers and hearers as the Papists define it. But if this is the case, then Christ has indeed, with Word, Sacrament, and other gifts besides, of necessity given himself to this visible Church — whereas we Lutherans, confessing Christ alone and exclusively as the invisible Head of His invisible believers, bind His gracious presence in their midst solely to their being assembled, in His name, through Word and Sacrament — believers who cannot individually be picked out by men; only for their sake, and through them, does Christ remain graciously present with Word and Sacrament; were their faith not to be found, the latter would be withdrawn; through them alone is it possible for Word and Sacrament to be handled by hypocrites and the ungodly, whose head, however, is Satan — for without faith, Word and Sacrament would not be on earth at all; Christ gives himself, with all his gifts, only to believers. (1 Cor. 3:21–23.) Cf. Luther, "On Councils and Churches": "God's Word cannot be without God's people; conversely, God's people cannot be without God's Word. For who else would preach it, or hear it preached, if no people of God were there? And what could or would God's people believe, if God's Word were not there?" Everything that a visible assembly of the Church does in handling the Word and the Sacraments, it does only "on commission," as Luther puts it — that is, through the working, through the invisible moving power, of the believers who cannot individually be recognized. —*) Therefore this invisible Church alone, out of herself, in the freedom with which Christ has set her free, is also to establish and order her outward form, lest the inward life, which springs from the fresh breath and blowing of the Spirit, grow rigid in works of the Law. The acting Church shall not be a whole produced by spiritual compulsion and held together outwardly, but a free organism (which stands opposed only to mechanism), which asserts itself in living spiritual unity through mutual interworking. If we do not hold fast to this, then the spiritual essence of the

*) Melanchthon, in his Loci Theologici, ed. Detzer, p. 283 sq., by no means calls this a mute Church, but rightly warns us not to conceive of her anywhere else than under the visible company where the voice of the Gospel is heard — for otherwise I am indeed altogether unable to recognize that she has spoken. It is the invisible Church that I hear in the confession of the holy Christian faith, in rightful excommunication, and the like; the outward assembly is only the medium. (Verhandlungen, p. 70. More on this further below.)