# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_M rz 1864_S69
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Something on the Doctrine of the Oberkirchencollegium of the Ev.-Luth. Church in Prussia, etc. 69

...tive power as authority “can and shall never exist among Christians”; there is no governing in this external sense among them; the sole Ruler remains God; where He does not command in His eternal law, there are only indifferent things, which He does not decree under sin, and with these alone church government has to do, so far as it does not flow directly from the administration of the means of grace; indeed, even as a separate public office in this sense it is an adiaphoron (just as it is a matter of indifference whether a person marries or not); the only thing to be looked to is what is beneficial. No pastor, no bishop, no church-leading presbytery apart from these — whose official independence it is impossible to hold as being of divine right — no consistory, no synod or council, however constituted, has the power to “lay a command upon others without their will and leave” (Luther); but because congregational life, in a greater or lesser compass, cannot be conceived of at all without certain rules, it naturally and lawfully falls to all those who belong to it and are of full-grown male sex to determine matters bearing on this — yet in such a way that they gratefully make use of the gifts which the Lord has given them for the purpose, that is, from among themselves they set persons who are fit for it into an office of human right, to stand at the side of the called preachers in the deliberation and execution of certain regulations and commissions, and also for oversight of the preachers themselves and the preservation of unity, in the name of the individual members, under the sole government of the divine Word. And when pious Lutheran territorial rulers prescribed such church functions and usages, this happened in part through them as representatives of their fellow believers, who were their subjects in civil respects, insofar as the church, in its distress and under the pressure of circumstances, had to direct its nearest appeal for help, its participation and love, to them — as it did through the Reformers — or at least gave its tacit consent to this; in part, too, governmental acts and ceremonial arrangements which, even though they related to religion alone, had nevertheless issued from the authorities as such, could for that very reason only be regarded as edicts of the state, never as belonging to the kingdom of Christ. But that, apart from this proper office of command — to which as such no calling to purely church functions is inherent — the originally most suitable way for ordering the latter was the casting of votes, is proved by the Acts of the Apostles, in that the general moral law forbids resistance, on the part of the minority, to the official measures arising from this, while love ought to yield to weakness in faith and conscience.

It belongs among the characteristic marks by which the false spirit of Reformed church doctrine can be distinguished from the Lutheran that there so particular a weight is laid on outward government and legal discipline to the detriment of the Gospel, and therefore