# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_M rz 1864_S80
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

into which he was engrafted by holy baptism; he breaks not merely a human contract, but directly his covenant vow against God; he despises him who has said, "He who hears you hears me," etc., cf. Matthew 18:17; he exposes the fellowship to which he belongs to the slanders of its enemies, and makes himself guilty, so far as it lies with him, of a tearing apart of the children of God — for that is what a division, a schism, is. Whoever, moved by anything other than false doctrine or an unjust excommunication, separates himself from a Christian congregation and its preaching office, turns away not merely, in an unloving manner, from an outwardly constituted body; he renounces a house and temple in which the Lord, with his grace and salvation, is to be found dwelling. That the minority yield to the majority, or that both, by their own freely willed representation and the obligation they have imposed upon themselves, submit willingly and gladly, for the sake of the order of the whole, in matters indifferent that remain such, ought to happen not merely as a matter of mere contract, but as the indispensable fruit of faith, in service to the ineffable gift of God in the gospel; at least this must always be held fast in doctrine. Every offense given is directly against the commandment of love.*)

Not only when a church ruler commands something against God's Word, but also when he commands something apart from God's Word, must he be as good as dead to me. (Proceedings, p. 228 f.) When persons are recognized for gifts of leadership, are singled out, and are entrusted with the exercise of functions that order things in a way pleasing to God and are necessary for the continuance of the fellowship, this is indeed a fact of organic differentiation within the church, as is the pastoral office; but when such power is transferred to the holders of that authority in a valid way,

*) The church is a spiritual kingdom of God on earth, in which Christ is King, and believers are his subjects according to the gospel, not according to the law — that is, not by compulsion, but with delight and love, which the certainty of joint heirship in Christ's inheritance has poured out within them. But they are at the same time visible human beings; they gather around the Word and Sacrament, the administration of the gospel, visibly mixed with hypocrites and the ungodly (for whose sake, and for the sake of the old man in general, the teaching of the law must also be applied), which, given the condition of this world, cannot be otherwise — and that is the visible church. Nonetheless it remains essentially a kingdom not of this world; it is only the use of the means of grace that brings it about that it is at the same time an outward society, one, however, that can never be separated from the inner essence, although it does not by itself constitute that essence. The church, then, has nothing further to do with the kingdom of nature than that it consists of visible creatures who, according to their outward humanity, are subject to the ordinances found there and to the laws of the kingdoms of this world; but the ordinances proper to it, even without presupposing directly the institutions contained in God's Word, are of a different kind from the mutual agreements of private societal associations, still more from the commands of the civil state. The word, "Let all things be done honestly," etc., is applied, precisely as an apostolic word drawn from the general moral law of nature, to the service that church order is to render to the gospel, and is useful for the betterment of souls in spirit and in truth (only that it should first show itself active out of the establishment of the kingdom of heaven in the heart, and not itself serve to bring that kingdom about), insofar as it removes outward hindrances of disorder, whereas in those other two respects it pertains to bodily welfare.