# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_October 1864_S291
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Two Documents from the Prussian Lutheran Church.    291

The doctrine of the Church, insofar as it comes into question here, together with the Lutheran doctrine of the holy Sacraments and of faith — according to which, without faith, no benefit of the Sacraments whatever, and hence also, without faith, no membership in the body of Christ effected by Baptism as opus operatum, can take place — this doctrine is for us no longer a disputed one, but one long since and finally decided by our Symbols, and indeed so clearly decided that no theological controversy over it is any longer possible for us; rather we must simply persist in branding and rejecting, with our Symbols, every counter-doctrine as false doctrine. Whereas our Symbols say:

Augsburg Confession, Art. 7 and 8: the Church is "properly" the assembly of believers; and the Apology, Art. 4: "therefore, in whom Christ works nothing through his Spirit, these are not members of Christ .... And Christ thus teaches us, that the ungodly, although they be in outward fellowship in the Church, are nevertheless not members of Christ, not the true Church, for they are members of the devil .... This we hold ought to suffice to maintain and to safeguard the definition, since we have said what the Church is; and since the true Church is called in Scripture the body of Christ, it is simply not possible to speak of it otherwise than as we have spoken. For it is indeed certain that hypocrites and the ungodly cannot be the body of Christ, but belong to the kingdom of the devil. All this is entirely open and so clear that no one may deny it" — so we hold, with these pronouncements repeated many times over in similar fashion in the Apology and elsewhere, the doctrine of the Church on the point here in question to be finally declared and decided by our Symbols as follows:

a) that according to our Symbols the Church, properly and according to its essence, is wholly and exclusively "the communion of believers"; and

b) that the opinion that the outward ecclesiastical societal realm belongs to the essence of the Church, or that the Church is according to its essence an outward institutional organism embracing both good and evil, so that these latter too belong in some sense to the true Church or to the members of the body of Christ, is a Roman error rejected once for all by our Symbols.

We name:

2) Huschke's doctrine of the origin and essence of church power. For since Huschke reckons the outward institutional side of the Church into its essence, there accordingly arises for him:

a) the doctrine of an organism of offices instituted by God, embracing not merely the preaching of the Gospel but equally essentially the whole outward institutional side of the Church;

b) it is not the congregation of believers, but this institutional side of the Church with its God-instituted organism of offices, that is for Huschke the ground