# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_M rz 1864_S70
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

...office instituted by God is maintained.*) That our confessions — whose right sense, should it be obscure and disputed, is most safely

*) The author of the theses does not deny the essential unity of the office of the church, see Verhandlungen, p. 208f., because he rightly opposes the at least very unclear, if not absurd, conception of the mutual relation of the invisible and visible church, and consequently of the spiritual priesthood and the pastoral office, which those of his opponents who do not proceed from the pure ground of the Gospel maintain — but he extends this much further. His error lies in this, that he reckons the aspect of church order as belonging to the essence of the church, and from this infers an inner sameness of the various, several official activities. We hold as the essence of the church, and as the essential unity of the office of the church, this in strict exclusiveness: the former is and remains the assembly of all believers, the latter the administration of the means of grace; the effects and consequences arising from this do not belong to the essence. The official functions distinguished in this respect, transferred to one person or another (according to the theses, through the organs of the constituted church, whose effectiveness we derive from the church proper itself), are therefore also not essentially of the same kind; rather, what is taught in Art. 14 of the Augsburg Confession is commanded by the Lord, and included in it is that of a governing with the Word; indeed, when someone is appointed in a congregation to preach the Gospel, this is at the same time a special act of God; but functions of order, which God wills in general, do not constitute an equally divinely commanded office. (Cf. Bericht, p. 179f. and elsewhere, where the Oberkirchencollegium makes known its own view. When an office of oversight is established over several pastors and congregations, so that it may watch over doctrine, etc., that is a human ordinance; but its judging according to the word of truth is, even in an official sense, of divine right — not as though this office were so in itself, that is, as though God had commanded that such functions be carried out in this particular manner, but because it is His command to the whole church, namely to those who are truly spiritual persons, to judge public words and deeds by His Word — a command which they fulfill in particular partly through the public preaching office, partly through the free manner of its execution in a special service flowing from it. Not to hear its voice in the rejection of what is false is disobedience toward Christ. But to examine candidates otherwise, to ordain ministers of the church, and to order such external matters, remains only of human right. When assistant preachers are set beside pastors, they speak and act in God's stead in the administration of the means of grace, exactly as those whose office they share; but the branching of that office into such a service is only churchly ordered, the unified office being at the same time God's.) If I take the office of the Word, according to the 27th thesis, indeed rightly as one comprising the whole power of the church within itself (into which also the diaconate, or the care for the bodily poor and needy, belongs as no small part of it), yet I do not, in doing so, distinguish the essence from what follows from it — that is, what the public bearers administer in the name of God and of the congregation from what happens only in the name of the latter — but rather set both as equally essential components into the one office, this as genus, the office of the means of grace and the office of order as species; then a distinction in essence has thereby arisen, which by its specific difference essentially separates the two offices from one another, whether they be carried out by one person or by several, whereas in truth the one flows only from the other, and they are neither coordinate with, nor conditioned by, one another. And since the heavenly and divine goods, according to the opposing view, are themselves again of a twofold, equally original kind — on the one side the law and the Gospel together with the sacraments, on the other gifts, offices, and powers for the ordered edification of the church — while both nevertheless fall within the essence of the church itself (although the one conditions its existence, while the other is only conditioned by it), even though the one is meant to be the ground and basis of the other, so that the latter will always show itself more recognizably outward than the former: then one needs