# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_M rz 1864_S75
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Some Remarks on the Doctrine of the Supreme Church Council of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Prussia, etc.   75

fundamentally, in accordance with the gospel, kept strictly distinct; but because these necessary distinctions are not further repeated in practice, whoever holds a teaching that departs from them often supposes his own teaching to be confirmed by that distinction. How wrong this is, when he does it knowingly, his own conscience tells him. What a strange perversion, indeed, it is to be doubtful oneself about the very nature and character of the so-called presbyteral office of the New Testament, and to turn it into an open question, or flatly to assert — as is done nowadays by celebrated teachers of German theology — that it was not the pastoral office in the sense of Article 14 of the Augsburg Confession, but rather a governing office without any properly teaching calling! We shall not pursue this further, because the opponent with whom we are here chiefly concerned does not divide the matter this way at all.

Over against him we must above all hold fast to this as Lutheran doctrine: 1) that a single church office, the office of preaching or of the keys in the wider sense, was instituted by God with the gift of the gospel and of the sacraments, by which faith is to be obtained, Augsburg Confession, Article 5, etc.; 2) that this office was given to the church together with the power that necessarily flows from it, by means of the divine Word, to judge other teaching, to ban it, and likewise to order everything needful and useful for its wholesome use; 3) that this one church office is now exercised by her who has received the keys of her husband — in general, by virtue of her spiritual priesthood; in particular, on the one hand, through the establishment of a standing pastoral office of divine sanction, of which Article 14 of the Augsburg Confession treats, together with what is set forth there

[Formula], which in his Examination of the Council of Trent, on the sacrament of orders, explains Ephesians 4:11 precisely, is in the Proceedings, p. 161 ff., in part not sufficiently cited, and in part made to bear a meaning that he directly contradicts in Article 10 of that confessional book. Balthasar Meisner, on whose statements in his work De legibus the Proceedings, p. 238 ff., relies — statements we too could just as well cite in confirmation — is so far from grounding the distinction of the ranks of the ministry in a divine ordinance that he flatly insists on letting it count only as an indifferent matter, standing within Christian liberty (Collegium adiaphoristicum, disp. 10, p. 9 sq.); and consequently the "obedience required by church order" that he demands (see p. 241) can be none other than the very limit we ourselves set for it. How Calov and Hülsemann are to be understood on 1 Corinthians 12 (Proceedings, p. 228) the former himself shows in an authoritative way in his Systema, VIII, 288.

To the whole general power of the church, granted by God the Lord — in which, to be sure, the mission in Christ's stead also originally rests — belongs, without exception, whatever it does with respect to the transferring of offices, according to the direction of its spiritual head (just as the same holds true, for instance, with respect to certain marriage ordinances, disciplinary procedures, etc.); this can never be a matter of human right so far as it has a divine command — (even where such a command is not expressly stated, God's congregation has, by virtue of the general moral rule of 1 Corinthians 14:40, a power to make order, only that everything it is authorized and able to establish for itself must count merely as an indifferent matter, and solely for the maintenance of propriety, of decorum, as that which, in otherwise free arrangements, our church's teaching always requires to be observed) — yet, as shown above, it is no ceremonial prayer, but is grounded in the law of nature (which speaks in such a way that it at the same time allows for that freedom of church ordering), dictated indeed by a church government, but that of a kingly ruler who is exalted above all the kingdoms of the world, and who appoints his congregation to carry it out, because he has given it the gospel and the sacraments.