# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Februar 1864_S44
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

... of the right of fellowship, and factious behavior, also creep in a good deal here.*) This office of the Spirit is thus not a divinely legal institution, as though some other law were still supposed to hold besides the holy Ten Commandments, but rather, together with its bearers, a fulfilled promise of the gospel, and its highest exercise and fulfillment takes place precisely in the particular calling to public service within the fellowship of those who believe. Indeed, in true freedom — the freedom with which Christ has set them free, free from all compulsion of a law, not because they are obligated to, but because God's eternal and good will, already revealed in conscience, has, by virtue of His thoughts of peace and gracious counsels through the preaching of righteousness, of the overflowing clarity in the face of Jesus Christ, become their own — the organs of the Holy Spirit in the church act, whether they appoint the servants of the Word or are themselves appointed to this. What the Lord Jesus Himself did and commanded — to entreat, to recognize, to choose workers for the harvest of His heavenly Father (Luke 6:12–13, 17; Matt. 9:38, 10:1; Mark 3:13–14) — the congregation of believers follows; and the fulfillment of its request, "to give pious servants of the church, to endow them, and to preserve them by His Word," would itself be impossible if the self-limiting humility, arising from such recognition of those appointed by the Lord, did not adorn its invisible assembly. — And now, just as it is He who divides His congregation, member by member, into hearers and instructors, through the instruments marked out for it by the Holy Spirit by virtue of the equipping and bestowal of certain requirements especially serviceable for the office, and thankfully accepted by it — so He also gives that distinction of gifts and powers which condition the distribution, to be set up in Christian freedom after the pattern of the apostolic church, of the one service of the church into several branches and individual offices. And this is indeed the reason why, just as the teachers who are distinguished from one another by a higher and lower order of rank can, in this respect, take comfort in a divine calling within the kingdom of grace, so too can those governors set into corresponding offices; for they are given a share in an office —

*) By virtue of the promise and the institution accomplished by the mouth of God, all this transmission of office within outward Christendom is, down to this very day, from heaven, even though those who call and those who are called lie for the most part in doctrines of the devil, in sin and disgrace; for the gates of hell may not overpower the spiritual body of Jesus Christ hidden beneath it, and He will be with it here until the end of the world, and there from eternity to eternity; let the installation into the office of the Word happen however it may (unless indeed by those who have no power for it, and are therefore not accepted) — a divine calling lies at its foundation; let it be ever so profaned by unworthy servants, for whom it is only outward, and ever so dishonored and disgraced by godless despisers — because the Lord is in the ship of the church with His own, to whom He has given the preaching office and lets all things serve for its eventual glorification; at every time and in every place this office is of continuing validity, and only according to the revealed will of God Himself shall the calling of the individual appointees be, here and there, in order to produce thereby more fruit in His kingdom, altered in its locality, or, indeed, in case of persistent harm, be abolished and brought to nothing.