# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Januar 1864_S12
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

ment as Church at the same time in the original sense, and thereby places himself quite undeniably on the standpoint of the Tridentine Council. (The Church, properly speaking — that is, not figuratively or synecdochically speaking — is not the company where Word and Sacrament are administered; rather, she IS there; when the Apology says that the Christian Church consists not merely in the fellowship of outward signs, but chiefly in the inward fellowship of eternal goods in the heart, etc., it thereby distinguishes two things that are to be wholly kept apart, of which the one must be regarded as falling outside the logical concept of the Church, Verhdl. p. 70 — although, without the exercise of the Word and the Sacraments, neither a being-gathered together in Christ's name nor, without the Gospel, the Church herself can be conceived.) Had he meant that Word and Sacrament — which on earth can be nothing other than given to faith, and handled by it in the first instance — constitute the invisible and thus also the visible Church, would he not have been unable to add, in explanation of his thesis, p. 125: "that individuals become Church through Word and Sacrament (in a sensibly perceptible manner, Thesis 4) is something I regard as what constitutes and produces the unity among these individuals"? That means, in other words, that the Church is to be posited from the outset as an outward unity that has come to be through Word and Sacrament. Hence he must, on p. 126, consistently arrive at the assertions that the unity of the Church — which as such also stands above the individual — is not merely a unity in Christ, but, through Him, also a unity in herself, as an organism, as a body — naturally on the side of visibility, and indeed as that on which the weight is to be laid — whereas in truth she is only the thing generated, and a consequence. The spiritual body of the LORD, the invisible Church, is a spiritual organism, herself exclusively the object of faith; her members are not an aggregate, held together outwardly, but the life-giving Spirit, the LORD — 2 Cor. 3:17f. — by whom they are permeated, constitutes them as a unity, thereby realizing Himself, who as Head cannot be conceived without members. The outward, visible organism (of a church) is not a unity founded by Christ, but only an effect of that unity, which belongs to Christ and to His own; should it wish to be that founding unity — an original workshop and organ which the Son of God created for Himself for the purpose of His further activity on earth — then the Word of the Spirit becomes a merely positive truth given from without, one that need not be taken up into the spirit and will of the hearers in order that a holy Christian Church may always be and remain; the visible fellowship then has to hand down the teaching of Christ, to fix the understanding of the Word, wherein the faith of the one so acting is a matter of indifference; and should sickness then set in within this process, the existence of such a church as a true one is necessarily endangered in the extreme, indeed must at last go out and pass into decay. — With the 5th Thesis, for all the correct matter it otherwise contains, the ground is laid for a great falsehood, which Luther's Reformation had already overcome and destroyed,