# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Februar 1864_S42
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

... of the office of the Word into the office of the means of grace and the office of order more closely. The functions of both are supposed to be of divine right, there being no distinction in this respect between those of the first and those of the second; but which persons, and in what relation to one another, are entrusted with the actions of the one and of the other — that is supposed to be of human right; and this view is claimed to be the only one in accordance with the Lutheran symbols (Proceedings, p. 155 ff.). The latter, however, know no other right than that grounded in God's Word. According to it there is, as we have said above (and as the author too, though in a sense foreign to us, would have it), only one single office of the church, that of the keys, which comprises the whole power of the church of the New Testament in itself (Matt. 16:18, 2 Cor. 3:5), and in which all the other offices are contained — just as, indeed, Acts 6 shows the apostolate comprising the diaconate within itself. To this office belongs, from God, and, where several believers gather, at the same time by way of the fellowship, the administration of the means of grace; in which latter case no one is to carry it out publicly without a regular call (2 Cor. 4:5). That, besides the command for it, certain functions here on earth are required or useful for, with, and toward its use — especially also for the purpose of order — is self-evident. But all those functions which Holy Scripture, in 1 Cor. 12 and Rom. 12, reckons to this, are, as such, in their particulars just as little prescribed in Scripture as it is left to the freedom of the church, to its discretion in the Holy Spirit, according to need, in what form a particular office for this is to be realized. That this is not so cannot possibly be made good by demonstrative passages of the divine Word — there are none. It is quite otherwise with those functions of the office of the keys through which men are to be brought to the enjoyment of eternal salvation, on whose account it is called, in comparison with its partial offices, the highest. These follow from the nature and essence of the church (without thereby settling the question, if I distinguish the logical essence from the metaphysical, from the existence, from the name of a thing) — not merely in the sense that they are set in time through the being of the church, as that being is set through them, without God having deemed it necessary to reveal a command concerning the manner of their execution; but rather the 2nd Commandment demands, for its essential fulfillment, the right and abundant use of the divine Word, and the 3rd the order of hearing and teaching, as of the common worship service in general, from which the sacraments may not be excluded — whereas the 4th, which grounds, in the realm of nature, the distinction between those who govern in God's stead and those who are subject, between elders and the younger, suffers its application to the realm of grace with respect to the obedience owed to persons who, in Christ's stead, proclaim the pure doctrine, as such. The 1st Commandment, which demands of man that he have the Lord revealed to him as his God, necessarily includes this: that when God gives Himself, with everything that His unutterable love imparts, none of these gifts is to be