# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_M rz 1864_S67
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Something on the Doctrine of the Oberkirchencollegium of the Ev.-Luth. Church in Prussia, etc. 67

...falls within this domain, and to judge it — of which two latter things each individual Christian is already, entirely on his own, capable according to his measure, and as far as teaching and proclaiming are concerned in this connection, these belong in particular, by virtue of public office, to the called preachers, in God's name. The manner, however, of carrying out these and the other powers first arising from them, which are not of that divine necessity, can rest on free agreement alone — such matters as: to set forth the confession in a fixed form and, accordingly, to embody it also in hymnals, agendas, etc.; to order the liturgy and the cultus in a definite shape; to possess and administer whatever might be allotted to the church, through human arrangement, as property of this world, and the like. That all these rights, derived from the Gospel, have been exercised — through transfer that is, even if only tacit, and thus, with the exception of divine preaching, of human right — for the most part only by actual officials, who either arrogated them to themselves or to whom they were entrusted, indeed often by the secular authority as such, which nevertheless, by its very nature, has no character other than political and civil, and which was never permitted to withhold from the ministers of the church the right of consent and of counsel decisive by its goodness, nor, any more than the papacy, to displace members of the congregation from the position rightfully theirs in public church life — who would wish to deny that this has been so exercised? But that these rights were, in theory, ascribed even at the time of the territorial system to the whole church, as in the first centuries of the New Testament, is proved by the subjects, cited by the church's dogmaticians, of the legislation belonging to councils and existing out of, and together with, the freedom of Christians — that is, the establishing of certain norms — in which, besides the spiritual and political officials who performed the church's governing service, they also ascribe seat and vote, in due order, to private persons from the so-called lay estate.

Now, the assertion of divine right — not in the sense of a warrant for the church proper to arrange, by free agreement, matters left to itself, as its task entails, but of divine authority for the functions of the organic members of a church government, who are the bearers of the office of order, which, besides the one administering the means of grace, is to be laid upon the general directing government of the Word — its defenders ground on the rule already implanted by nature in the human spirit, 1 Cor. 14:40, cf. 33. They do not hold that it is of divine command to call persons distinct from the actual preachers to this office; that, rather, is of human right, like the appointment and restriction of pastors to certain congregations (which we grant only insofar as, within some particular churches, definite parish boundaries must be drawn); but the acts of both offices, in which persons are set, according to human — yet, within the church, Spirit-borne —