# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_M rz 1864_S85
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Some Remarks on the Doctrine of the Supreme Church Council of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Prussia, etc.   85

are gathered," etc. — all of which promises, however, can hold good only for believers, so that only those on earth remit and retain sins who have received the Holy Spirit, not the world, John 20:22f., 14:17; and of whom can I be certain of this except of the church which lies hidden in the Spirit and is believed in alone — that is, the invisible church? For this reason Luther writes to the council and congregation of the city of Prague: "Therefore you should not doubt whether the church is among you, even if there were only ten or six who thus had the Word; for whatever these did in this matter, even with the joint consent of the others who do not yet have the Word, one should certainly hold that Christ himself had done it, provided only that they handled the matter in humility and with prayer, as we have said." And it is wrong to say: "If the church is a mother only in a merely mystical sense, as the invisible church, then she cannot speak in such a way that I could recognize that she has spoken." (Proceedings, p. 70.) Now when several congregations, guided by God's providence — which has placed them within certain bounds of land, language, nationality, etc. — are, through the distribution of the gifts granted for the building up of the body of Christ widely among them, pointed toward an outward union with one another as well, one that is beneficial and corresponds to the will of the one Head; when, through a unified leadership, they put to service the combined resources present in each of them according to its need, and are, in this way too, zealous to maintain the unity of the Spirit for a richer and more effective pursuit of the highest purposes of the kingdom of God — then this building of a general fellowship, far from being of divine right or a constitutive element for the forming of the church, arises rather out of the invisible fellowship in faith and the Holy Spirit. This consciousness, in the believing hearts of a local congregation, of its connection with the communion of saints — not merely within its present constitutional fellowship, but also at every time and in every place on earth, from century to century — is what essentially distinguishes us Missourians from Independentism, with whose self-willed, isolating restriction, tearing away, and breaking off from the holy mother, by means of a mixture of reformed rationalism and fanaticism, we have nothing to do — although we do not deny that, within it, there is much that is in keeping with God's revealed Word, mixed in among its human errors. But even for such a union of a general church one must not forget that the church, according to Luther's words, "would indeed continue to stand even if a village pastor alone were at once bishop, archbishop, and pope, and the individual congregations were bound to one another merely by concord, as Cyprian says, and as was the custom of the early church" — just as he declares the best way of chastising sins to be "when every pastor, in his own parish, binds and looses the penitent." (Leipzig Disputation, 1519. Cf. the Smalcald Articles, Appendix, Of the Power and Primacy of the Pope, etc.) The holy apostle Paul, in keeping with Christ's own words in Matthew 18:19f., calls