# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Februar 1864_S37
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Some Remarks on the Teaching of the Supreme Church Council of the Ev.-Luth. Church in Prussia, etc. 37

... as, already in what has gone before, an effort was made to turn it into a visible institution constituted by definite laws and ordinances. Just as this is properly nothing other than teaching that works, as necessary to salvation, are added to faith (see p. 8, 14), and thus the very jewel of justification in the golden chain of Christian doctrines is endangered in the extreme — so it will emerge from the consequences, in a yet wider scope, how human doing is set alongside God's dealing with us through the means of grace in a highly detrimental way. And that the error necessarily connected with the above — that of a church government legally ordained by God apart from the office of the means of grace — must utterly damage and corrupt the precious deposit of the spiritual freedom of a Christian, insofar as the concept of law necessarily requires, as its correlate, that of the distinction between those who command and those who obey, and accordingly a church office in the New Testament increases sin for the conscience instead of being the liberation from the yoke of the Old Testament (Acts 15:10) — this is indeed clear from the outset; but it is indispensable to go into more closely how God's Word contests it. From a comparison of the 26th proposition with the preceding ones it follows that the author regards a visible organism of the church, founded by God, as standing above the individual (cf. p. 10) in such a way that neither is every (true) Christian, in himself, by virtue of his spiritual priesthood, authorized to carry out a service of the church, nor is the living spiritual connection of believers in every place and at every time the enabling cause that an external constitution, with offices, ordinances and customs, can come into being. Already in the 14th thesis he asserts, besides the Ten Commandments, the existence of divine laws in the New Testament generally, which have the organism of the church as their object and which order it — whereby, in the fullest sense, one takes up the standpoint of Judaism and of the papacy; for everything in the New Testament that is supposed to be of divine right must be demonstrable in the natural law of conscience, more precisely determined, of course, by a particular calling, or else it is simply and solely of human right — in distinction from the Old Testament, where there existed, besides this, ceremonial ordinances which are not resolved into the command to accept God's institutions of grace as such, in believing gratitude, as coming from Him."*) Accordingly

... this, together with the sacraments, are the signs with which Article 7 of the Augsburg Confession is chiefly concerned. And when Article 8 has for its heading the question, what the church is — he answers it by declaring it to be nothing other than the assembly of all believers and saints, among whom, to be sure, there also remain members of that hostile assembly which Satan has founded, who together with the former form an outward society. Into the definition of the church given by our symbols nothing enters that is not societas fidei [a fellowship of faith]. The church proprie dicta [properly so called] and late dicta [so called in a broad sense] so little make up the full concept of the church, that the latter is called by the name of the former only because the former is bound to the outward signs — never because a body, together with the filth that festers out of it, is only then the complete body. (Proceedings, p. 70 f.)

*) From Gal. 4:1 ff., compare Col. 2:20, it is clear that outward statutes (elements