# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_M rz 1864_S73
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Some Remarks on the Doctrine of the Supreme Church Council of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Prussia, etc.   73

appear as distinct in the church, their divine dignity, their divine standing, the honor owed them for God's sake, is confined to nothing further than this: that they have been given from above so that they may display and adorn the glory and power of the Word, its richness, and may help to govern by means of it or arrange matters outwardly according to it; whereas their official activity as such — not itself commanded by God specifically — proceeds solely from human, congregational authorization. Whoever has received one of the gifts of the Spirit, as God distributes them for the common good, possesses it, so long as he is not called to share in the public office of the church, only within the bounds of the spiritual priesthood; but in that other case, beyond those bounds, that is, publicly, so far as his calling extends, he is to exercise it. Obedience owed for God's sake in the kingdom of grace belongs to the Word of the Lord, and to no other on the ground that it proceeded from offices that were themselves divine, whose form would be a matter merely of human command and law — as our opponents suppose*) —

*) When our forebears, for example, trace the diaconate back to Acts 6 as resting on a divine right (Proceedings p. 193 ff.), they do not mean, by their own explanations, that particular congregational arrangements for the care of the poor and the sick (or for the collecting and administering of the salary paid to the church's servants, or the administration of a so-called spiritual income in general, etc.) are divinely sanctioned in the same way as public preaching; but only that the Christian church always has among it poor and needy persons, and others to whom it owes a share of what it has, whom it must help as a church according to the commandment of love, etc., and that the concern and oversight over this belongs chiefly to the public preaching office. In saying this, however, they say at the same time that the church must reject utterly, as contending against God, only whatever openly transgresses that commandment; everything else is left to conscience and to free will. Just as little can the office of episcopal oversight apply Christ's word, "He who hears you," etc., to itself for any other reason than when it truly holds forth God's Word. (Proceedings p. 236 ff.) It is only because such offices are branches of the one church ministry instituted in and with the gospel that their holders share in the special calling of those whom the Holy Spirit has set to be shepherds and pastors — even though they are placed over these by human right, as are superintendents and the like. Just as the apostles were sent immediately by Christ himself (who are distinguished from the other New Testament presbyters in that they had been witnesses of the visible revelation of God in the flesh, had been taught by him personally, had been deemed worthy of the immediate inspiration of the Holy Spirit, of high gifts of miracles, and of a singular power in church discipline, and whose missionary activity remains reserved to the church of all ages), so he and his Spirit set these latter, mediately through those former, upon the apostles' seat, to that extent as their successors — not that they should go out among non-Christians (for that requires no call from a congregation, but only the inward call that comes from the Spirit of love), but that within the flock which has been committed to them, and to which they themselves are committed by the Holy Spirit through the setting-apart and election that has come to them from men (cf. Acts 20:28; 1 Peter 5:2), they should administer Word and Sacrament. This divine institution, to be understood in a wholly special sense, belongs to pastors alone, and to deacons and overseers only insofar as they themselves are called to administer the means of grace. These latter two, when they have been chosen by the church, likewise have, each according to his branch, a due share in the divinity of the church office in general; but such a share never extends to the individual acts, so far as these do not deal with God's Word, nor to a personal singling-out from the rest of the flock that would make it God's own delegation — a delegation whose duration, rather, can be limited at discretion (which, to be sure, would in several respects be unwise); this follows from the nature of their branch-office,