# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_M rz 1864_S84
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

would plunge into unforeseeable confusion and danger, and that even the eternal treasures of grace themselves would thereby be lost (Report, p. 93, 182 f., cf. 35) — then it can be no wonder to us that our teaching appears as an abomination. We indeed also say that, with the abolition of order as such, only a desolate condition could stand in place of the kingdom of Christ (cf. Augsburg Confession, Art. 28) — but what a monstrous leap it is to conclude, from the holy will for order in general, which God has revealed in the law of nature (1 Corinthians 14:40), to the historically necessary realization of a constitutional church, willed by God, with a legislative ecclesiastical authority of divine right! Just as God has commanded no ceremonies of worship, no fixed forms of liturgy — even the Lord's Prayer and the Psalms being given as models for free use of that kind, as the examples of the saints in the Old and New Testaments show, along with general instructions in Colossians 3:16 and Ephesians 5:19 — so too he has given only the authority to constitute and govern itself, together, for this purpose, with the pattern of apostolic times and the promise of gifts granted to the church by grace. Outward unity is a self-manifestation and outflow of the inner unity, and the historical development of forms is regulated not by any other new commandment, but by the eternal law of order, which indeed rests on God's own nature. Without doubt the Christian church is such a unity and intimate spiritual bond of its members with one another — founded on a power of the divine Word wholly independent of human instruments — that each member acts in service and mutual assistance to all the others and to the whole body (Romans 12:5, Ephesians 4:16 — words that are to be understood of an original, visible organism; to turn the inner law of the free, organic unfolding of that organism into a mere letter of outward statute is an incomprehensible, remarkable blindness). This hidden power permeates and moves the whole bodily Christendom, and this is the reason why even baptism performed in the name of the Triune God, in a false church, must still be a reception into the kingdom of heaven; why a just excommunication, pronounced according to Christ's own order, must still be an exclusion from the fellowship of God and of all his saints; and why the installation of a local pastor must still be a calling, by the church universal, to service toward a flock committed to him and thereby to the church itself. When a congregation establishes and ordains something within the bounds of God's Word, it is that number — known to God alone — of those who gather under it in Christ's name, that is, in faith in his promise and command, who speak and act through it; the evil persons mixed in among them, who can have no right in or from Christ, whether they hold church offices or not, are here merely the instruments of that true number. This follows unanswerably from the words of the Lord, where he says, Matthew 18:17ff.: "If he does not hear the church (that is, the visible church), treat him as a heathen and a tax collector; truly I say to you, whatever you bind on earth shall be bound also in heaven," etc.; "further I say to you, if two of you agree on earth concerning whatever it is that they wish to ask," etc.; "for where two or three