# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_M rz 1864_S68
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

...bearing order are set, are of divine right — the acts of the one office as of the other — so that even officials clothed only with the office of governance acted in God's name in their ordinances. For their only concern is to demand, on God's behalf, the subjection of one's own will and action to the pronounced decisions of the ecclesiastically appointed governing organs as being, for that very reason, already binding before God, even in matters which He has expressly left to the consent of Christians, notwithstanding differing views about them. (Verhandlungen, p. 38ff., 155ff.; Bericht, p. 92 below; Synodalbeschlüsse, p. 17, §§27, 28.) What? A driving power of the law in a domain where it simply has no business at all, where the one scepter is the preaching of righteousness and salvation sent out of Zion, where faith, without compulsion, of itself does all things and more than any human right could command, working through love, whose commandment knows absolutely nothing of any middle ground, where all are equal, insofar as each is to have the whole Christ, where the Holy Spirit alone, through the diversity of gifts, creates a setting-apart for the work, and also various degrees and branchings of the one office (1 Tim. 3:13), which originally, in common, and eternally belongs to all (2 Cor. 3:11)? Must it not, to the utmost harm and ruin, come into contradiction with the spiritual form of a state of God, whose citizens do not constitute a people as in the kingdom of nature, which is governed, regulated, and held together solely by legal forms, even though, in its historical development, it finds the conditions of its own peculiar existence? In the hearts is the kingdom of heaven on earth erected — which by itself can be brought about or increased by no human means; but because Christians as outward human beings form an earthly, embodied fellowship, from which even hypocrites, etc., cannot be excluded, legal institutions are also necessary within their congregation, whose forms, however, are not to be reckoned as belonging to its essence, nor may they be contrary to the Gospel, according to which no “shall” can coexist with the inner life in spirit and faith. To lead to this alone, and to preserve it therein, God has given the maternal bosom of the Church and her holy ministry; whatever belongs to the latter, call it what one will, she has therefore never offered to souls in the ordinances of a legal institution, but as a proffering to souls who are called to become spiritually free unto a willing mutual subjection conditioned by unity in the Spirit (Eph. 5:21) — though at the same time earnestly bearing witness that the self-government of the Christian congregation is grounded in freedom from the guilt and bondage of sin, to which an undisciplined rabble, no less than hierarchical ambitions, are only hostile. To hearken to venerable antiquity and its pious example, with an enlightened understanding, for the establishing of church usages, is so little unevangelical in this that it is rather only a service which that antiquity renders to later generations through its tradition. But a legisla-