# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_M rz 1864_S72
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Something on the Doctrine of the Oberkirchencollegium of the Ev.-Luth. Church in Prussia, etc. 72

...of the Lutheran faith (Synodalbeschlüsse, p. 17, §27) would strike glaringly against it. Accordingly, all the pure teachers who stand on its ground are also found, on this basis, in an almost wonderful agreement — provided they are not likewise regarded with preconceived prejudice. The excerpts belonging here from our dogmaticians, especially of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, would fill a space that these pages do not allow. A few decisive passages, which “draw, as it were, the sum of this controversy,” shall be recalled later in a suitable place. For since the church, according to her outward activity and the organs thereof, together with everything that must be added to this, continually reaches over into temporal, earthly relations, and still has to do with, or is touched by, persons and things from this created world, it is natural that elements and forms of the church arising from such relations should have their place in those theological textbooks. But all such excellent works regard this as a matter of no immediate significance whatsoever for the life of the church, however slight; they preserve her essence and maintain her spiritual character, inasmuch as they never let her be an external institution with an intervening form of command, as is the case in the kingdom of the law, but always a fellowship of believers through the Spirit, with an inner equality in the general priesthood and the one official distinction of divine right between shepherds as teachers and hearers; and therefore they place that church power which must unchangeably remain with the office of the former solely in that spiritual governing which belongs to all in equal measure — although they have no hesitation in advocating, as of human right, a certain super- and subordination, namely the addition of governors, helpers, and the like, not only for purely temporal interests and mere matters, but also for oversight over persons, indeed for visitation of the individual parishes — again in contrast to the Calvinists; and even when, in this respect, they sometimes speak of a divine right, they do so with reference either to the territorial ruler's fullness of power, which consistories and visitors had in the background, or to the power of the keys of the church proper, her public office itself in its unity, and general pronouncements of natural law which, without determining the application in particular, form the necessary basis for a religious use.

The ground of all misunderstanding of our Lutheran church doctrine rests solely on this: that one 1) completely overlooks that that public office which alone is of divine right in the sense of the symbolical books — for the reason that it is given for the service of salvation itself, and is consequently specifically ordered, in its realization, by the first table of the law, and is required in accordance with this order; 2) that all remaining offices are just as little ceremonially prescribed by law, but also that they are not immediately grounded in the gift of the Gospel, but can only be given by God and established insofar as they are embraced together with the office of the Word — that is, if they