# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Februar 1864_S35
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Some Remarks on the Teaching of the Supreme Church Council of the Ev.-Luth. Church in Prussia, etc. 35

... flows, and is written together with it upon the fleshly tables of the heart of believers. But that it should be included already in the origin of the church from above, in its heavenly derivation through the life-giving Word of Christ and of His Spirit — this we must reject with abhorrence. A constituted church did not bring forth the Pentecost of the New Testament in such an original sense; otherwise blessedness would in the end be bound up with that constituted church as well. (Compare on this also the Report, p. 98, and the Proceedings, p. 70 below.) Is not all law deadly to the new man, and given as a demand only to the old? What is begotten of the Holy Spirit is in turn spirit — the gospel (2 Cor. 3:6), the new man (John 3:6); faith is the power, imparted to the heart, of that imperishable seed of the Word, which only from there first opens the mouth to bear witness to what has been planted by the Holy Spirit into the soul of the believer and lives there. Under such a condition arose the gathering and the calling of the first bearers of the New Testament office, and out of this a public fellowship first took shape — a fellowship which, even while comprising a traitor within itself, was governed by the spiritual power of the believers, that is, by the full concept of the church. Hidden beneath this, the holy congregation continues, further and ever anew, to exercise the office recognized as abiding to it, as God's will requires, through instruments always given afresh — instruments which, however, insofar as they sit on the chair of the apostles by a calling of the corrupted visible church and belong to Satan's kingdom, hold that office only outwardly and lawfully. Had the church, as an outwardly rightful organism, been born with the outpouring of the Holy Spirit — just as, from Sinai downward, it was introduced by Him for wholly other purposes, not "in order that it might retain its existence" — then it could not perish as such either. And, to be sure, no constitution of orthodox particular churches can be conceived without a fixed rule of doctrine formulating the eternal confession of all believers, just as their mutual connection with one another is most powerfully preserved and furthered thereby. But for the invisible union of the saints on earth there is no bond embracing them all except that which God Himself has tied according to Eph. 4:4–5, and only the 7th Article speaks of this proper church. If this church expresses its appropriation of the pattern of the wholesome words, of the good deposit entrusted to it by the apostles, through the concordant content of its doctrinal tradition, especially through public symbols — then thereby, to be sure, one total body of faith, present in outward historical testimonies (a truly catholic doctrine), is established for the church through all the centuries. It is also far from claiming that the unlimited arbitrariness and independence of individual local congregations in church government, liturgy, discipline and the like represent the freedom that the gospel teaches. Rather, it recognizes the commandment of love as the sole law immanent in faith, according to which only the outward representation of the unity given to it in the Spirit may take place. If the well-constituted patristic church, already quite early, made admission conditional upon commitment to the baptismal confession, what could more clearly