# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Februar 1864_S36
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

... teach their own origin out of the fellowship of salvation, which thereby invisibly receives life and movement, in that it is one heart and one soul in one Lord, and has but one faith, as one baptism, into the Triune God. Just as it is this fellowship, then, that strives — by virtue of the Holy Spirit continually imparted to it — to gather up and set forth the basic concept of faith and doctrine, in its given articulation, out of Scripture, so as to sift out from itself everything foreign that seeks to force its way in (just as it is also this fellowship alone that, when the spirit of the world lays hold of members, resists it by Christ's command and offers graduated resistance) — so also it comes to an understanding about principles of a constitutional form, grounded on the gospel, which can give outward effect to the being-one in the Lord. But such an institution — which after all only proceeds from the church — may never be made into the church itself, which is an eternal thing, exalted above the limits of time and of the space of the visible world; nor may the Christian's faith be made dependent on institutions which are left to the freedom of those assembled in Jesus' name, to order, through the Spirit of truth, how the task set before them is to be resolved. The more precise particulars of what has been said will emerge from what follows.

Thesis 27: "From the nature of the church there arise, in the first instance, two offices, since it has both heavenly (God's) and earthly (the congregation's) goods to receive and to dispense to those in need: the office of the Word, and the diaconate. The heavenly or divine goods are, however, in turn twofold, since God founded the church partly for salvation and partly as an ordered organism — or, as we can also say with Scripture, since He has given partly the word of salvation and the sacraments, and partly gifts, offices and powers, which are to work in peace for the edification of the church. Just as, accordingly, the church itself has a twofold side, so too does the office of the Word: it is partly an office of the means of grace, and partly an office of order (oversight, government). The two are coordinate with one another and condition each other, just as they condition those two sides of the church itself."

The proceedings of the commission at Berlin pass over theses 11–26, and now deliberate on the 27th thesis, reaching back to the earlier propositions. The dispute here turns on the question whether a church government is to be understood not in the sense of Article 14 of the Augsburg Confession — according to which it comprises within itself the public teaching, preaching or administering of the sacraments, together with the watchfulness and care necessarily bound up with this — but rather, taken as a specially added office of order, oversight or government, must be able to appeal to a divine right (and command) for the functions to which it is validly appointed. The foundation of the doctrine of the government and order of the church is the article concerning the church itself.*) We have seen

*) "The church is a high, deep, hidden thing, such that no one can perceive it, for it is invisible, lives in the Spirit, in a place to which no one can come (bodily). (Luther.) It must be grasped and believed by the pure gospel alone. This...