# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Januar 1864_S10
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

Church is denied, membership in a visible assembly already brings with it, in itself, a fellowship with Christ at least outwardly; such fellowship, however — possible without faith only as a work of the Law — then cooperates together with faith toward salvation; through this externalizing concept of the Church there steps, in place of the predominant invisible influence of the living members upon the general consciousness, an outward, legislative, ordering power, like the institutions of a natural legal community — and this of necessity: the Church becomes secularized.

The most important "interest for us, churchly, on earth" is this: that the handling of the Word and Sacraments be recognized as a consequence of the fact that Christ is the Head of His invisible believers — inasmuch as we must say that the handling of the Word and Sacraments is the inseparable and necessarily following effect of the fact that believers in Christ already exist. To them the Word comes (and with it also the Sacrament) directly from the Son of God, who finds them at first still wicked and unbelieving, as with the couple in Paradise, and through them all men by nature, even the Twelve disciples of the LORD. Invisibly it impresses faith upon the heart, and faith itself is something invisible, as no one denies; out of such faith the (true) Church arises, according to Lutheran teaching, and through it and in it Word and Sacrament remain on earth, and are administered; and such administration is never fruitless. Thus a visible Church arises and propagates itself, one which therefore comes from the original invisible Church, which always underlies it. Since, moreover, all the gifts of Christ, given to the invisible Church as such, are of invisible, heavenly origin, I can neither see nor hear, in the human instruments, whether they carry God's Word — I must believe it. That such a thing can happen even through hypocrites shows us the necessity of limiting the concept of the Church to its logical essence, lest the outward side of the Church be taken for the Church herself, which lies hidden beneath it. Apol. fol. 63b. It is therefore not justified by the Apology, "on occasion of the discussion of the definition of the Church given beforehand," in what partial respect the Augsburg Confession and the Apology "speak merely of living members" — the symbolical books were concerned solely and exclusively with this: that, according to them, invisibility belongs exclusively to the essence of the Church. Likewise with all the dogmaticians who follow them. The danger which the framer of the thesis sees is sufficiently guarded against by the 8th Article. Should an outward organism, embracing believers and unbelievers — that is, essence and appearance — belong to the nature of the Church as well (that is, be part of what distinguishes her concept from every other), which is at the very least a complete misunderstanding of the Lutheran teaching concerning her, and stands logically altogether unjustified — otherwise indeed the ground of existence, or the marks, or the effects of a thing, and not merely its specifically distinguishing properties, would have to fall at the same time within its pure concept; see Verhandlungen, p. 70 f. — then it is indeed thereby already said that the coming-into-being of the Church