# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Februar 1864_S43
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Some Remarks on the Teaching of the Supreme Church Council of the Ev.-Luth. Church in Prussia, etc. 43

... in shameful ingratitude to despise. (Cf. Apol. fol. 94a: "The greatest, holiest, most necessary, highest service of God, which God, in the First and Second Commandments, has demanded as the greatest, is to preach God's Word, for the preaching office is the highest office in the church." Gal. 6:6, always reckoned by Luther and the old theologians to the 3rd Commandment, points unmistakably to the divine sanction of the teaching office.) If this cannot be denied, it follows that, when the Lord bestows on His church on earth the gospel, (absolution,) baptism and the Lord's Supper, and for this purpose also instruments — formerly apostles, prophets, evangelists, and now still pastors and teachers — these latter are to be appointed for the administration of the means of grace. They are given for the public conduct and exercise of the prophetic office as the inalienable foundation of all the glory of the priestly and royal saints, namely so that the Word of Christ may produce its full benefit, and that its efficacy may spread widely in due order, and show its power for conversion and preservation among a great many people, at the same time and often. The one and only way by which the heavenly good of the mouth-message of salvation — the office that preaches reconciliation — is placed into those who are called, that is, reaches them, is and can be none other than the transmission — "through every living member of Jesus Christ, who has his share and right to everything that belongs to the service of the church"; and yet this transmission, when it is put into effect by those set apart for it, for the dispensing of the means of grace, is no mere service of the congregation, no mere congregational authorization, but rather the institution and full authority of Christ, who has subjected His kingdom of grace to nothing other than the feeding of it with doctrine, Matt. 28:20, John 21:15–17 — from whom also whatever divine quality is found in the servants is given, together with the Word itself, preached and heard. Into their official service there flow together, as into a single center, all the manifestations of that spiritual and invisible organism which the living unity and freedom of the members forms in the Holy Spirit, each in the communication that has come to it from God. The spiritual body of the Lord Jesus, created and built up through the Word and faith, is, in another respect, the soul of the bodily, outward Christendom that appears in manifestation, and which dies away to the extent that that spiritual body threatens to vanish from it; what this outward Christendom does is grounded in the spiritual power of the inward; the office, in its proper realization, always remains in itself the glorious fruit of the activity — bearing on this too — of the Head who, invisible and exalted, continues this activity in and through His congregation; as such it comes forth out of the hidden womb of its generative source; only that, the more mortally sick the body is, the less the soul can manifest itself, whereby it must indeed then come to pass that preachers often hang merely as offenses upon the outward body, to its greatest harm — indeed as apostles of wrath — or, with more or less pure doctrine on their lips, to a far weaker benefit, and that all manner of disorder, fault, abuse or violent suppression of the