# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_M rz 1864_S83
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Some Remarks on the Doctrine of the Supreme Church Council of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Prussia, etc.   83

"not over others, without their will, but only over itself" — which can mean nothing other than that the willing agreement of the self-standing members of each individual local congregation, by majority vote, is required for this, and that to break it is wrong only when one of the Ten Commandments is thereby also despised at the same time. "The spiritual government," he also says — meaning thereby none other than obedience within the church of God — "is set over sin alone; where sin is at issue, there this government is also to be at issue, and not otherwise; but here we speak of sins that are real and true sins, which no man has invented, but in which we are born, which are against God's commandment and against which God's commandment testifies, and not merely the commandment of men." Rightly, in the passage cited above, he further calls "the Christian church" "the number or company of the baptized and believing who belong to one parish priest or bishop, whether in a city, or in an entire country, or in the whole world" — for hypocrites and the ungodly cannot be separated out so long as they are not manifest as such and remain so, or so long as church discipline is prevented from taking effect. Yet from precisely setting these statements side by side and comparing them, it follows that, according to his teaching, a ruling office is indeed instituted in the church, contained within the preaching office itself, out of which all the other offices within it organically arise on the basis of the gifts conferred — an office that, however, moves with divine authority only there where sin against one of the Ten Commandments can occur, and to whose functions of outward order — let whoever will exercise them, provided only that he is lawfully or validly appointed to do so by the church — there must, quite simply, be added, as a condition required by the Head himself, the agreement of the fellowship itself, which, however, either a single congregation by itself, or several together, can form.

The reproach of Independentism has been made against the teaching of our so-called Missouri Synodical fellowship, because we deny the divine right of an outward union of several particular churches under one and the same church government — that is, deny that God commands such a union in his Word — a right that is asserted in Theses 17, 31, and elsewhere. This is unjust, yet it is a consequence of the oppositions which we have found, and have discussed up to now, between ourselves and brethren across the sea with respect to the certainly highly gifted leadership of the Prussian Lutheran Supreme Church Council. If one goes so far as to assert that God has given his church, together with the gospel, the various outflows of the one office in organic form so that, through them, that one office might be preserved — not merely for its adornment and useful demonstration — that, without the outward unity established by means of it, the inward unity too could not have been preserved, and that the lack of a higher church government, through which the congregations would necessarily develop in an independentist direction, would mediately bring about much great harm to the salvation of souls of individuals generally — the church