# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Februar 1864_S34
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

34 Some Remarks on the Teaching of the Supreme Church Council of the Ev.-Luth. Church in Prussia, etc.

— characterizes it (Eph. 4:4–16, 2:19–22, 1 Cor. 12, Luke 1:33, 1 Pet. 2:9, 1 Tim. 3:15, and so forth); and to be this too is essential to it, since the God with whom it, as His people, enters into fellowship through Christ, is a God not of disorder but of peace, and wills that in this fellowship too everything be done decently and in order (1 Cor. 14:33, 40).

*1. The separation from everything else, which every organism presupposes, took place from the beginning through the preaching and baptism of both John and Christ. — 2. The inner articulation of those thus set apart consisted in this, that John and Christ stood over against their disciples as prophets, and the latter in turn called the apostles and the seventy disciples, Matt. 13(:10). As such an organism the church was born with the outpouring of the Holy Spirit."]

On the basis of the first of these two [theses] it is asserted, 1. that the word "assembly" [Versammlung] in Art. 7–8 of the Augsburg Confession — which is not a church that "consists properly and truly merely in its believing members," but which these alone constitute, and which, as a sign that it truly exists on earth, has the gospel and the sacraments in accordance with the same as outward things that presuppose the inwardness and invisibility of the matter they signify — must be referred, in a special sense, to a visible, pure church given together with the existence of a visible church in general; whereas the Apology and the Smalcald Articles teach the opposite. 2. That, accordingly, the public confessional formula of such a visible assembly must already be that which Article 7 sets up as sufficient for the true unity of the Christian church (Proceedings, p. 135 ff.). Whoever accepts both of these — the necessary result of an unfortunate drawing of legal elements into the kingdom of grace — will naturally also acknowledge, without objection, the 11th thesis: that the church, from its origin onward, was likewise at the same time an ordered, constituted fellowship in the sense of visibility, that is, an outwardly emergent and perceptible organism, to which the expressions "body, house, people, kingdom" (of Christ and of God) essentially belong. Now since these latter expressions are ascribed, by the symbolical books and by all pure teachers of the following centuries, exclusively to the church in the sense of invisibility — so that, when a visible church is so called, hypocrites and the godless are to be most definitely excluded from it, and this happens chiefly in opposition to the defenders of the papacy — it is beyond question that the author belongs to a tendency of the age which, at present and already from earlier on, presses toward breaking through the biblical-Lutheran concept of the church and transforming it, together with the arch-enemy of Christendom, from a fellowship of faith into an institution for the administration of preaching and the sacraments. That wherever a visible assembly exists, some kind of constitution is also necessary — even if quite simple at first — who would deny this? This is the bond of order which, out of the New Testament understanding of the Third Commandment, out of the natural law, of itself