# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_M rz 1864_S86
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

the Christian family of a single household is already church, so that husband and wife, as in paradise, can constitute such a church, in whose midst Christ is present with his promises. How much more, then, does a local congregation possess the whole church power required for it — the authority to arrange everything that the care for pure doctrine and the commandment of love, according to the first and second tables, demands, which follows from the keys of the kingdom of heaven — keys that belong to the Christian church in general only because they have been given to the individual believer who has been absolved, for the sake of his neighbor, and thus also to every congregation for itself, out of which the church universal must first have arisen. All arrangements necessary for achieving the purposes of a fellowship are, self-evidently, made only by the general will, in which the individual gives himself up as a mere unit. In this way the inward, single disposition of faith reveals itself, through outward action, in the bond of perfection that durably founds peace (Ephesians 4:3, Colossians 3:14). If the Smalcald Articles, with Jerome, maintain that the distinction between bishops and parish priests arose from human ordinance alone, then they undoubtedly derive an oversight office standing over several congregations from the same source in the same way (see fol. 156b, 157a); and the tenth article of the Formula of Concord decisively gives the congregation of God in every place the power to determine for itself what is most conducive, etc., for it, since it alone can best know that. Out of the inward man of each individual, redeemed to freedom in and under Christ through the word of truth, must come the outward coming-together, on the basis of, and within the bounds of, the divinely revealed pattern of wholesome doctrine; and if every believing soul, on pain of the loss of its own salvation, retains the right of independent examination of all human ordinances — even governmental ones — as to whether or not the nature of things indifferent applies to them, how much more should a congregation remain, in this respect, wholly independent of any regard for persons, and never allow the representative organs of the outward body to which it belongs more latitude than is compatible with the duty entrusted to it, of seeing to what is beneficial and wholesome for it — indeed, the freedom must remain unimpaired for it, if it should seem more advisable, to abstain entirely from participation in the whole — without thereby forfeiting its claim to call itself orthodox, provided that its own public teaching is otherwise kept pure. "You were bought at a price; do not become slaves of men!" But this is always the case when one lets oneself be entangled with church laws that displease God not only insofar as they are wrong, but already insofar as they assert themselves as necessary commandments, and therefore belong to the kingdom of Antichrist; for God alone wills to set up such things in his temple — unless the Christian, who may not acknowledge himself bound to obedience toward anyone other than the one to whom God has given command, in his own stead, to require it of him in the prescribed manner, imposes them upon himself entirely without compulsion, with no self-chosen clergy involved; otherwise he robs of his glory the one who will give it to no idol. (Isaiah 42:8.) If it were not that the spiritually dead