# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1848 05 24_S179
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

—wardly, the unity given to her inwardly in the Spirit sought also to be represented outwardly. The only question is whether the solution of the task set before the church, like her doctrinal and confessional form, does not develop with freedom out of herself, as an indestructible fellowship of believers in Christ of all ages, toward an ever more fully formed consciousness, on the basis of the written Word left behind, now that the immediate apostolate has ceased. For did not the episcopal synodal constitution collapse into the papacy, and after it was reformed in the sixteenth century according to the course of history, did it not turn a second time into caesaropapism, until at last — after perhaps the rule of the plebeians (not of the holy Christian people) has carried off the victory — the Lord Himself will winnow His threshing floor? In place of apostolic decision in doctrine there comes the endeavor, by virtue of the Holy Spirit continually imparted to the church, to grasp and set forth the content of the confession out of its grounds in Scripture, so that by such exposition everything foreign that intrudes may be separated from the church; likewise she comes to an understanding concerning the principles of a constitutional form, grounded on the teaching of the Bible, and only from the idea of the oneness of all through Christ and His Word — in whom the Father richly and gloriously discloses His thoughts of peace — can a church polity conform to the divine pattern, which it ought to manifest outwardly, although it never attains it, because an obligation without limit is inconceivable; still less, however, may such an institution be made into the church itself, which is an eternal thing, exalted above time and space and every limit, the fullness of the body of Jesus Christ — nor may the faith in the apostolic genuineness of a congregation be made dependent on institutions which the Lord has thus left to the free development of the whole through the Spirit of truth.

If ancient canonical church laws — human, though venerable, statutes, on which alone episcopal succession is grounded and of which Scripture knows nothing — possessed an obligation necessary to salvation equal to God's commandments, then in fact all the Latin and Greek churches contradict themselves, since in England, Rome, and the East alike, many ordinances established in the general councils, indeed ordinances deriving immediately from the apostles, have long since been abolished. And what a conception of the church it would be, if the character of true shepherds (or "princes of the church") were ascribed to prelates void of faith and love, who gorge themselves on benefices instead of on souls, and who, proud, hand over to hired vicars an office that will fall to them for the strictest reckoning — while it were denied to the ablest evangelical preachers, in whom the image of the self-sacrificing Master is mirrored from glory to glory (2 Corinthians 3:18) — even though we do not thereby wish to bind the office to particular persons? But as for the testimonies of the church fathers that are cited in favor of episcopal succession: a conscientious comparison of the most eminent of them shows unmistakably that at bottom they had in view, more than anything, doctrinal succession — that is, a succession in the public office of the Word which presupposes and requires an exact agreement of the form of doctrine with the apostolic one. (And what the ancient Christian witnesses understood by tradition, or paradosis, was nothing other than the fundamental content of faith and doctrine [regula], such as the Lutheran Church set forth three hundred years ago under the biblical name of the Gospel — standing high above every personal succession of the [universally shared] teaching office and alone decisive, insofar as it rests upon the word of the prophets and apostles. Its limited, finite forms are precisely the confessional symbols. To be sure, so far as the planting of this evangelical body of doctrine extended in those days from place to place, so far, almost, did the episcopal constitution extend as well; and in both cases the authority of the church was not always properly distinguished from the divine canon.) Thus Irenaeus, Against Heresies III.3, IV.26, approves only that succession by which the apostolic faith is propagated, and writes that one must obey those who preside over the church, who, together with the episcopal succession, have also received from the Father the unfailing mark of the truth. Tertullian, On Prescription Against Heretics 32, even says: Should the heretics also appeal to episcopal succession from the apostles, they would still gain nothing by it, so long as their doctrine does not agree with the doctrine of the apostles. John Chrysostom, Homily 6 on Matthew, declares: Where the true faith is, there is also the church; but where it is not, there the church is not either. Epiphanius, Heresies 55: One must ask not after the succession of persons, but of doctrine. And Augustine, On the Unity of the Church 16, strikes the Anglo-Catholics and the Romanists in the face when he says: We wish to appeal neither to episcopal succession, nor to the authority of councils, nor to the multitude of miracles, nor to frequent visions, but to Scripture alone, when we would state the marks of the true church; for our Redeemer Himself directed His disciples to the written Word of God. When Cardinal Robert Bellarmine was confronted by our theologians with these notable authorities — though by no means to be placed on a level with the divine Word — he himself conceded, in De Controversiis I, 2, 4, 8, that although without the succession of bishops there is no church, it does not follow that a church must necessarily exist wherever a succession exists; by which he actually answered next to nothing. For if succession can exist somewhere without a true church existing, then the decisive factor is not succession in the first place, but doctrine; and from the doctrine of Scripture we prove that the church itself cannot be any visible institute of Christ, nor therefore bound to any hierarchical body. If everything depends on doctrine when I wish to know where the true church is, then the church which, as visible, boasts of catholicity in the proper sense has thereby rather pronounced sentence of condemnation upon herself: for the Roman church does not recognize the English and the Greek as true churches, although they have the succession, on account of their heresies — how then, if Cardinal Caesar Baronius, in the Ecclesiastical Annals, volume 10, year 1412, no. 8, himself calls the Roman bishops in part pseudo-pontiffs, or if the divisions within such churches, those schisms, obscure everything to the utmost degree?

(The uninterrupted continuance and preservation of a congregation of apostolic succession in doctrine, which never mingled with the papacy as a division of the church, has been demonstrated by the Württemberg theologian Dr. G. Konr. Rieger, in his Salt-Covenant of God, etc., as a glorious testimony to the divine truth, as follows: The Lutheran Salzburg martyrs and emigrants of the past century were remnants of the deeply hidden so-called Valley Church, descendants of the inhabitants of that land who at the time of the Reformation confessed the Gospel; whose fathers in turn descended from the Hussites who had immigrated from Bohemia into the Salzburg region; these in turn are plainly offshoots of the Christian church planted, around the middle of the ninth century, by the excellent Greek bishops Cyril and Methodius — missionaries like those of an earlier age — from Bulgaria across the Danube into Moravia and Bohemia, in which, under a holy discipline, the form and character of a Christian people were most recognizably preserved throughout the whole Middle Ages. What great boasting, then, can the English church make over against such a succession — a succession which, were it useful according to the Spirit, the writer of these lines, himself of Salzburg blood, could commend to his kinsmen as a far better crown than to be a mother-church [ecclesia matrix apostolica] defiled by the beast of the abyss and stained with the blood of the witnesses of Jesus!)

With everything that hangs on it, the pseudo-catholic opinion of the necessity of an episcopal succession, as we have already indicated several times, comes down to the cardinal error of false Catholicism — whether one asserts outright the infallibility of ecclesiastical tradition, or at least sets it beside Scripture as the interpreter of the Holy Spirit within it — to the cardinal error, I mean, that eternal Wisdom, in order to ensure that the truths of salvation would always be rightly grasped and repeated with one interpretation and one meaning until the end of time, left behind, through the Spirit of Christ, to a so-called apostolic teaching body — an uninterruptedly continuing succession of fathers of the church who visibly represent her as a visible congregation — a spoken word of God, or the Christian ideas, whereby the dead letter of the prophetic and apostolic writings (just as, through the general